After eight years, countless court hearings and thousands of pages of testimony, lawyers behind an ambitious effort to fix Illinois’ troubled child-welfare agency have come to this conclusion:
They have largely failed.
Lawyers for the state and the American Civil Liberties Union admit that their first attempt at mammoth reform of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services has not substantially improved the lives of abused and neglected children.
Now they are proposing a new plan that tries to make sure children taken into the state’s care are safe and healthy and aren’t simply bounced through the DCFS system of foster homes for years.
The plan leaves it up to DCFS and a new research center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to decide how to fulfill that mission within six years.
The two sides plan to submit their proposal next week to U.S. District Judge John F. Grady. He has overseen reform efforts at DCFS since 1988, when the ACLU filed a class-action lawsuit against the agency on behalf of abused and neglected children who allegedly were getting little or no help.
But critics say the new plan gives DCFS too much leeway in determining whether it is improving. Also, the new U. of I. research center that would help determine how DCFS is performing would be headed by an appointee who already is generating controversy–Susan Wells, the stepsister of the No. 2 official at DCFS, Executive Deputy Director Joe Loftus.
Wells, who studies child-welfare issues in North Carolina, was chosen after a nationwide search by a U. of I. faculty search committee.
But Cook County Public Guardian Patrick Murphy, whose office represents state wards in Juvenile Court, said: “You cannot have the fox monitoring the chicken coop. All they have to do is please Joe Loftus’ stepsister.”
Murphy also accuses the ACLU of largely abandoning ship after discovering that turning around DCFS could not be accomplished overnight–a charge that the ACLU vehemently denies. Murphy says ACLU lawyers are trying to back out of the picture with the new plan, leaving the determination of whether DCFS is succeeding or failing to the U. of I. and DCFS itself.
“This is the biggest cop-out,” said Murphy, who has objected to the ACLU’s plans to fix DCFS from the start. “The ACLU calls themselves advocates; I call them jellyfish.”
The new reform plan does acknowledge what officials within the agency and even some of its critics have said for years: While it’s easy to criticize DCFS, it’s much more difficult to come up with a plan to actually fix the department. DCFS has one of the most difficult jobs in state government–investigating reports of child abuse and neglect, removing children from dangerous homes and then either reuniting these children with their parents or finding adoptive homes.
The latest reform plan contrasts sharply with its predecessor, a 1991 court settlement chock full of specific marching orders for DCFS. That plan called for DCFS to lessen the workloads of swamped agency caseworkers and to pay foster parents more–all within three years.
DCFS has met some of the goals and missed others. (Lawyers for the state and the ACLU now acknowledge that the 3-year period was unrealistic.) In some cases, the two sides could not agree on whether goals had been achieved.
But in the end, even when both sides could agree that reforms had been met, they couldn’t say that the lives of children in DCFS care were necessarily better.
What they did know was that more than 50,000 Illinois children are in DCFS custody now–more than three times the number in 1988, when the ACLU sued to try to turn around the department.
The new plan, if approved by the federal judge, would recast in much broader terms what the department must do to fix itself. But far from backing down, lawyers for the state and the ACLU say they want to get DCFS on its feet and free of federal court oversight, not play a game of “gotcha” every time DCFS fails to meet another reform deadline or goal.
“We can go round and round in circles, with us saying, `You’re not complying,’ and them saying, `Well, we’ll try,’ ” said Michael Brody, a Chicago lawyer working with the ACLU on the case.
“That’s not getting us anywhere. What we can say is, `Stop looking at the trees, and look at the forest instead.’ “
DCFS Director Jess McDonald said the new plan seeks to answer the bottom-line question about his agency.
“Are kids better off? Are they safer?” McDonald said. “Why not measure that and answer it directly? It isn’t just having more caseworkers.”
But others are not as hopeful that the new plan will be any more successful than the first.
The most troubling problem for DCFS remains the growing number of children in the department’s care. In 1988, when the ACLU filed its suit, there were approximately 15,000 youths in DCFS custody. By the 1991 settlement, the figure had grown to 25,000. Today it’s more than 50,000.
The increase has been partly the result of a poor job by DCFS and Cook County Juvenile Court of moving abused and neglected children out of foster homes and back to their biological parents or to adoptive families.
Some observers say that without extra court workers, counselors and services needed to do that job, DCFS never will be substantially better.
“Whatever comes out of the latest (court) filing, the issue will still be the same–there is a real lack of resources,” said Ron Moorman, executive director of the Child Care Association of Illinois, which represents most private child-welfare agencies that help DCFS care for children.
The General Assembly has harshly criticized the 1991 reform settlement, which has cost taxpayers $900 million and put the power to direct DCFS largely in the hands of the federal court–not legislators or Gov. Jim Edgar’s administration.
That so angered lawmakers that they approved a bill, still sitting on Edgar’s desk, requiring lawmakers to be notified before any state agency agrees to court-ordered reforms costing $10 million or more.
The new reform plan doesn’t come with a price tag. But expectations in Springfield already are that the plan will be costly.
Already, lawmakers have approved spending $650,000 next year for the new U. of I. research center.
Some DCFS officials worry that the proposed hiring of Loftus’ stepsister to head the research center could sink the reform plan.
Though Loftus’ stepsister would oversee development of the new reform standards for DCFS, the agency’s performance would be monitored by John Poertner, associate dean of social work at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
