Government can’t make people love their children.
No matter how well the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services does its job, some children inevitably will die from abuse and neglect.
Toll-free hot lines and the state bureaucracy can help shield children from harm, but they cannot replace families, this much is clear. To ask a state agency to adequately serve as a surrogate parent to 37,000 children may be an impossible request.
Even so, DCFS routinely falls short in fulfilling its basic mission: Rescuing children who are abused or neglected and then quickly moving them out of state custody and into new lives, either by correcting problems in their own families or finding them new ones.
In the last three years, state spending on DCFS has nearly doubled, and its workforce has grown by 15 percent. Last week, Gov. Jim Edgar proposed a new budget for DCFS that, for the first time, will exceed $1 billion.
But more money and more workers haven’t solved its problems.
“At the field level, where investigators and caseworkers actually are making decisions about children and families, very little has changed,” said American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Ben Wolf, who sued the state in 1988 to win a series of reforms, many still unfulfilled.
The reform concepts remain solid: Keeping families together whenever possible, providing for children’s needs while they are in state care and deciding quickly whether they should return home or be put up for adoption.
Ultimately, DCFS never will get better unless it gets smaller. The agency itself admits this. But in the last five years, the number of children in the department’s custody has more than doubled.
This backlog will only worsen unless DCFS moves children out of the system faster than they come in.
The periodic furor over the agency’s errors often has obscured some of the simplest and most cost-effective ways to do this.
One way is to keep children safely at home while families get help. For this to happen, investigators and caseworkers need better training to help make the critical judgments necessary to identify a family’s problems and protect children.
The agency acknowledges that it must scrap its current training program because it focuses too much on how to fill out forms and not enough on preparing DCFS workers to deal with problems they encounter in the world each day. Lessons could also be learned from the experiences of other states’ child-welfare agencies.
New programs that emphasize family preservation offer some hope as well. These programs target families who are good candidates for repair and give them intensive, specialized assistance. This relieves DCFS caseworkers of some of their burden and increases the chances that those children won’t be added to the state’s growing list of wards.
DCFS is caught in an administrative gridlock that traps children in the system for years before decisions are made regarding their futures. Federal laws and the agency’s own policies require DCFS to act quickly to determine whether children can go home or must be put up for adoption, but this is not happening.
A large number of children in DCFS care are so difficult to place in foster homes or with adoptive parents that they are consigned to drift for years through the child-welfare maze. Some children have special problems that are not being diagnosed or treated properly.
For these children, a new interpretation of an old concept-the orphanage-could bring stability into their lives. Orphanages, perhaps in the form of clustered group homes, are receiving renewed interest from child welfare experts who believe they could help curtail the practice of shuttling children from one temporary shelter to another.
By themselves, none of the ideas will resolve the complex problems facing DCFS. They are some of the most difficult issues that any public agency has ever been asked to address. But they are steps that could make a difference.
Keeping kids at home and out of the system
The most practical solution to overcrowding in the state’s child-welfare system is to keep children out of it in the first place.
Family preservation, as it’s called, hasn’t always been done the right way or with the right families in Illinois. Still, it can work and it’s often the best answer for children, who can otherwise end up in a bureaucracy more harmful than their homes.
Family preservation takes many forms. It can be as basic as a caseworker checking once a month on children who have been left with their parents.
Or it can involve sending in workers to conduct “boot camp” for troubled families, giving them intensive help in the areas they need, whether it’s learning how to discipline their children or how to budget their money.
To succeed, though, family preservation can’t repeat the mistakes of the past.
Last year, Illinois spent $19.5 million trying to keep 8,000 children out of foster care through the 5-year-old Family First program.
In Family First, parents receive intensive supervision, counseling, housekeeping help, transportation and emergency money for food or furniture.
But one flaw in Family First became apparent: It often focused on the wrong families.
A 1993 University of Chicago study found children in Family First were as likely to end up in foster care as children who weren’t.
“We’re doing the opposite of the original meaning of triage,” said Richard Calica, executive director of the Juvenile Protective Association in Chicago and chairman of a task force on family preservation.
“In war, the question was, `Who’s the person most likely to live and fight again?’ We’re asking, `Who’s the person who’s bleeding the most and in the most danger of dying?’ That’s who we’re helping.”
The agencies that carried out Family First could not refuse families that DCFS referred, and some families posed problems too complex to solve quickly.
“We got a lot of cases where substance abuse was the primary issue, and you can’t deal with those cases in 90 days,” said Pamela Goodson, chairman of the Coalition of Cook County Family Preservation Services.
For some families, though, Family First offered hope. Tiffany Wallace, a 23-year-old Chicago mother of three, credits the program with helping her learn how to become a better parent after DCFS determined she had neglected her children.
“At first, I felt like everybody was coming down on me, telling me what to do,” said Wallace, who has been out of the program since November.
“But then I realized I was making mistakes as a parent. Now, I feel independent. It feels good to be in control.”
Family First’s weaknesses, though, led some to dismiss all family preservation efforts as ineffective or even dangerous, particularly when 3-year-old Joseph Wallace was hanged last April after being returned to his mother’s custody. She has been charged with his murder.
Joseph’s family wasn’t in Family First, but the boy’s death prompted a backlash against DCFS efforts to keep families together. (The family is not related to Tiffany Wallace.)
Legislators tried to make DCFS get a judge’s permission before attempting family preservation, which would have created even more backlog. It didn’t work, but DCFS also gave up on Family First-at least in Cook County.
It has been replaced by Intensive Family Preservation Services, which is based on another program called Homebuilders. Though limited in scope now, it may eventually take over for Family First statewide.
The Homebuilders model focuses more on changing people’s attitudes than providing “concrete” services, like driving them to the currency exchange or sweeping their floors.
Caseworkers generally work with only two families at a time, spending as much as three or four days a week in their homes and staying on call around the clock by beeper. It’s more intensive than Family First but shorter: Four to six weeks, compared with three months.
Usually, more can be accomplished in this shorter time frame because two caseworkers are assigned to each family, but DCFS has told the private agencies hired to do the work to just use one.
But the agencies can now decline to take certain families for the program, which they say greatly improves their chances to make it work.
In the program’s first three weeks, only half the 22 families referred for help were accepted. In all, the new program is expected to reach 324 families this year.
Still, family preservation faces some formidable opposition, including lingering public misperception and a heavy federal funding bias toward foster care.
“We want to rescue the child, save the child,” said Betsy Rosenbaum, with the American Public Welfare Association. “But many of the people on the front lines see that rescue may not always be the ultimate answer. Because the state is not a terrific parent.”
Orphanages may give measure of stability
Ten Prairie-style homes line the curving streets of what used to be a farm in Lockport, about 35 miles southwest of the Loop.
It looks like a prosperous middle-class subdivision, but this $5.8 million development is what people used to call an orphanage.
The SOS Children’s Village is an innovative attempt to deal with the state’s most pressing child-welfare problem: What to do with the ever-increasing number of children who are unlikely to be adopted or returned to their parents?
Within the next two years, 60 children-the majority of whom are expected to be DCFS wards-will move here. Six will live in each two-story home, cared for by a paid “parent” until they become adults.
What makes Children’s Village different from institutions that house DCFS wards or even traditional long-term foster homes is that it provides a permanent “family” for children who all too often drift for years without any stability in their lives.
“We are, in a sense, creating families artificially,” said Dirk Lohan, president of the SOS Children’s Village Illinois board of directors.
“We’re creating the home and providing the parent and the community. But it’s as close to the natural setup of life as you can be.”
To be accepted, children must be 10 or younger, although older brothers and sisters can join them. Siblings will be raised together. Children will attend local schools and churches, and they will be encouraged to view the village as their “home” even after they leave.
“We want them to come home for Christmas when they’re adults, to come home for Thanksgiving,” said Nanci Priest-Grochowski, the village’s clinical social worker. “This will be their family forever.”
The Lockport facility is the second SOS village in the United States. The first, in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., has been in operation for a little more than a year, and a third is planned for the Milwaukee area. The non-profit organization, however, has a long history of successful operations, dating back to 1949, when the first village was built in Austria. There are now more than 300 worldwide.
In the United States, the concept of orphanages fell out of favor in the 1960s with the rise of the social-work philosophy that said children should be with families.
But the idea is undergoing a revival out of necessity. Last month, Gov. Jim Edgar suggested orphanages as a possible answer to DCFS overcrowding, and other child-welfare leaders, including Cook County Public Guardian Patrick Murphy, have repeatedly called for a re-examination of the concept.
“It’s not just a good idea, it’s essential,” said Maria Ramirez, 23, one of the village parents. “We’ll give the kids some of what they want and everything they need just like a regular family.”
Fast family diagnosis would eliminate drift
One way to stop children from drifting for years in DCFS is as simple as talking with their families for an hour.
Within 45 days of being taken into state custody, children are supposed to meet with their parents and caseworker to plan their futures.
Does the child have a good chance of returning home? Or is the abuse or neglect so severe that the parents’ rights should be terminated and the children put up for adoption?
Although DCFS promised 20 months ago to hold quick meetings for all children, its records are so bad that caseworkers often don’t know they’re responsible for a child until 45 days have passed.
In Cook County, where 75 percent of the state’s wards live, only 28 percent have received these initial meetings, called “administrative case reviews,” the agency said in December. Statewide, the rate is 66 percent.
Yet, the meeting “is really the linchpin of DCFS reform,” said Marlene Stern, who heads a Cook County Juvenile Court watchdog group.
“What needs to happen within those first 45 days is a very comprehensive diagnosis of the child and the family. Then you decide whether the family is going to take the therapy, whether there’s enough to make the family whole again.”
DCFS officials acknowledge that their failure to hold the meetings is a key reason why children languish in the system.
Children now get moved an average of five times in their first year in custody, according to one task force report. The backup keeps foster homes full and costs taxpayers more.
DCFS says it’s upgrading its computer system and hiring more clerical workers to quickly pass along cases to caseworkers so they can meet the 45-day deadline.
Meeting that deadline would help DCFS and Juvenile Court meet another one: the court hearing to formally determine a child’s future, which federal law says must take place within 18 months. It’s a deadline the state and county have missed for years for thousands of children.
“You have a road map of where the family should go,” said Stern.
A long road ahead: Making reforms work
Illinois is slogging through the nation’s largest overhaul of a child-welfare agency.
It could learn some lessons from one of the smallest.
Of the more than 20 states undergoing court-ordered reforms of their child welfare departments, Alabama has emerged as a leader. DCFS, on the other hand, is widely considered to be among those in the worst shape.
“I think it’s fair to say that there’s no large industrial state that has an adequate child-welfare and child-protection system,” ACLU lawyer Wolf said. “But even among those very troubled states, DCFS lags behind.”
While most states are staggering under the weight of rising numbers of children coming into custody, Alabama is among the few actually reducing caseloads.
In the last two years, the number of children in state care there dropped 18 percent, largely because of an increased emphasis on family preservation. At the same time, DCFS experienced a jump of almost 40 percent.
While the two states are radically different-DCFS is responsible for 10 times more children, for example-Illinois reformers already are looking to Alabama for help. Last month, Wolf and a top DCFS official traveled there to see what ideas they could borrow.
Retraining workers is one.
Since Illinois began its reforms in 1991, only new employees have received training. And even that was called “severely inadequate” by a state task force because it focused almost entirely “on housekeeping items, forms, timelines, organizational issues and so forth.”
In Alabama, every worker’s training includes extensive exercises in which they play the roles of children and their families to learn how to handle real-life problems.
“Instead of trying to put out the fire, you try to see what caused the person to strike the match,” said Bonnie Kyles, a caseworker from Monroeville, Ala.
“In the past, it was always, `These are bad people, and these children don’t need to be here.’ Now we look at strengths and try to build on those strengths.”
DCFS Director Sterling “Mac” Ryder says his agency is revising training and may bring in experts to counsel DCFS workers.
DCFS also has struggled with an impossibly tight deadline.
While Alabama gave itself eight years to overhaul its department, DCFS was supposed to hire more than 500 workers, develop an elaborate medical screening system and reinvent what Ryder calls “a disaster” of a recordkeeping system within 2 1/2 years-by July 1.
In February, a court-appointed watchdog concluded that DCFS was so far behind it couldn’t possibly meet the deadline. DCFS and ACLU lawyers are expected soon to discuss giving the reforms more time to work.
Despite large investments of time and money, many states are realizing they can’t repair their agencies as quickly and as well as they had hoped.
“You can win these suits in many, many places,” said Judith Meltzer, senior associate at the Center for the Study of Social Policy in Washington, D.C., which is overseeing the 5-year-old reform of the child-welfare system there.
“But the difficulty for all of these states is making the changes, and making the changes so they last. It’s going to take a long time, and it will be difficult.”
