Suffer the Children
Governor Napolitano made CPS
reform a top priority. But it's been a tough four years
By
Sarah Fenske
October 26, 2006
Emily Mays was dead before her
second birthday. "Blunt force trauma to the head," said the medical
examiner. Murder, said the police.
There were bruises on Emily's body,
and scrapes and bruises on her head. Emily's caregivers, a Tucson
couple, were charged with felony child abuse.
It sounds like any one of the
horrific cases that made headlines in 2002. At the time, crisis was
in the air: Thirty-six children died that year because of
maltreatment a new state record. Caseworkers at Child Protective
Services were overworked and underpaid, to the point that they
simply couldn't do the work necessary to keep kids safe. The
Arizona Republic spent months chronicling the sad stories and
calling for systemic change.
Janet Napolitano, elected governor
that fall, made the newspaper's mission her own. Fixing CPS, she
announced, would be one of her top priorities. Children needed to be
protected.
The new governor wasn't messing
around. Under her tenure, CPS has seen big changes: more money, more
training for caseworkers, more new programs to reach at-risk
families.
You'd think that kids now must be a
lot safer than they were in 2002.
But Emily Mays didn't die in 2002.
She died three years into
Napolitano's tenure, in the summer of 2005 after the reforms,
after massive budget increases, after Napolitano's vow that kids
need to be kept safe above all else.
And Emily's wasn't an isolated
case. You don't read about it in the papers, but the latest
statistics show even more children in Arizona dying from
maltreatment than before Napolitano took office.
In 2004, it was 40 kids and CPS
had prior involvement with 18 of them. Eight of the cases were
actually open at the time of the child's death.
Part of the problem is that real
reform takes time. It's not fair to expect progress overnight.
But it's also true that, for all
her good intentions and the excellent work done by her commission,
some critics believe Napolitano made a serious misstep early in her
tenure.
By equating child safety with
removing children from their parents, Napolitano triggered a huge
increase in removals removals that came before the agency had the
infrastructure in place to handle them.
There were only about 6,200
children in foster care when she took office; by June 2006, there
were a staggering 10,166.
And though Napolitano fought for a
$35 million raise for the agency in the fall of 2003, the
Legislature didn't agree until that December. And that was for $17
million, less than half of what she requested.
Naturally, it took months after
that to hire additional workers and months after that to train
them. (And by the time they were trained, enough workers had quit
that the agency was still running on empty.)
And so the influx of foster kids
meant even more work for a staff that was already grossly
overburdened. And it meant more kids living with strangers, or,
worse, left for months on end in group homes and shelters.
One of the kids in foster care was
Emily Mays. Her foster parents now face felony child abuse charges
in Pima County.
Napolitano vowed that children
needed to be taken from their homes to keep them safe. But as Mays'
short life illustrates all too well, it's never that easy.
On Napolitano's fourth day as
governor, she spoke at a child abuse conference in Mesa. There, she
told CPS workers that they no longer needed to make "reasonable
efforts" to keep a family together if a child's safety was at
risk, they needed to get the kid out of there.
It sounds uncontroversial; what's
more important, after all, than keeping a child safe? But to anyone
familiar with debates over CPS policy, or the Republic's
coverage of maltreatment deaths, the language was loaded.
CPS workers had long been
instructed to make "reasonable efforts" to keep families together.
But the Republic griped that the policy left workers with
competing mandates: family togetherness, or safety? Napolitano's
words in Mesa, and the changes that were subsequently codified in
the agency's mission statement, were a public directive to err on
the side of safety.
No one disputes that many kids,
unfortunately, need to be taken from their homes, and taken quickly.
But to some critics, Napolitano's message was this: Don't worry
about making a rush to judgment. Better to overreact.
By the time of her first State of
the State speech, Napolitano had already created an advisory
commission to recommend major changes for the agency.
In the four years since, many of
the commission's recommendations have become law. Salaries for
caseworkers have increased dramatically; so has training. Funding
for the Division of Children, Youth, and Families, which includes
CPS, is way up: Even with a resistant Legislature, Napolitano was
able to increase the agency's budget significantly from 2004 to
2006.
But for better or worse, her
January 2003 decree more than the subsequent common-sense reforms
has defined CPS during her tenure.
CPS statistics are released on a
semi-annual basis that doesn't correspond with the calendar or
political changes. But the first full year of data under Napolitano
shows a record number of kids being removed from their homes: It's
actually a 32 percent increase from the last full year of data under
Napolitano's predecessor, Jane Hull.
That happened before the agency
could hire many new workers.
And the numbers continued to rise
steadily, with a 48 percent increase over the baseline in
Napolitano's second year. The six-month period ending this past
March was the first without an increase since Napolitano took office
but CPS still removed 3,753 kids, 41 percent more than in the last
period under Hull.
"You had a caseworker fury in
removing kids," says Representative Laura Knaperek, R-Mesa, a
longtime critic of Napolitano's CPS policies. "Even if they didn't
think they should remove the child, they did it anyway because
they were afraid not to."
The goal was admirable. The
results, not so much so:
Despite the increased number of
kids coming into foster care, adoptions out of the system stayed
flat. And so the number of kids in out-of-home care swelled from
just over 6,000 in 2003 to more than 10,000 today a 62 percent
increase.
New foster homes didn't keep pace
with the demand, so many children ended up in shelters. In 2003,
2,754 kids were stuck at shelters or group homes for more than 21
days. Some kids stayed for more than a year.
The law requires CPS workers to
visit kids in foster care once a month. Under Napolitano, the
percentage of kids getting the mandated visits has actually dropped
to an embarrassing 64 percent 5 percent below the last two years
of Hull's administration.
Despite salary increases for
caseworkers, turnover hovered near 20 percent until recently.
Inexperienced workers are still forced to make life-changing
decisions on tight deadlines.
While the Legislature allotted
money for new positions, CPS can't fill them fast enough to make up
for people who quit. There are currently 53 caseworker vacancies. A
six-week training session for new hires means that another 186 are
in class rather than on the job, leaving co-workers to cover for
them.
As a result, caseloads are far
too high: Investigators average 15 cases a month instead of 10, per
CPS standards. Workers handling ongoing cases are in even worse
shape typically exceeding CPS standards by more than 10 cases a
month.
CPS staffers say that, just like
before Napolitano took office, they're too busy to do their job
properly. The agency's computer system, they say, is still a
redundant, confusing mess that saps far too much of their time.
And now they have more kids than
ever to monitor.
Napolitano vigorously defends her
record. Although she didn't have time for an interview, her deputy
chief of staff, Mike Haener, said in a written statement that the
governor is especially proud of statistics that show increases in
the number of children returned to their parents from 2003 to 2006,
as well as an increase in the number of foster homes available.
"Piecemeal changes had been tried
in the past with few results," Haener wrote. "A complete overhaul
was necessary. It was difficult; we all know that change can be hard
and it takes time. But in the long run, the sustainable changes we
have made and are continuing to make will lead to better outcomes
for children and families for years to come."
Indeed, CPS's top brass cite a
number of promising programs and point to statistics that seem to be
improving. They boast great progress, to the point of sounding
almost giddy.
But by any statistical measure, and
for any worker on the ground floor, the past four years have been
difficult.
"I don't think you can ever say
that making sure children are safe is a bad thing," says Alissa
Scott, a CPS supervisor who left in 2004. "But I can't say the
agency was ready for the increased workload. We lost a lot of good
people.
"The expectations are reasonable
for the safety of the children," she adds. "But they were
unreasonable for the workers."
As any caseworker can tell you,
there's no such thing as a completely innocent victim. CPS
caseworkers don't just show up in the middle of the night and take
happy, healthy babies from perfect homes.
There is always something
complicating the situation: a drug-addicted boyfriend, a child who's
acting out sexually, a toddler roaming the street.
Robin Scoins admits that her case,
too, had its complications. She knows it was ridiculous not to
realize she was pregnant until just weeks before giving birth.
But what happened after that wasn't
just ridiculous, it was a nightmare: a classic example of how faulty
evidence pushed by a caseworker without the time to do her
homework can trump the facts.
It started after the birth of
Scoins' third child, a boy. Then 35, Scoins was seriously depressed.
She had good reason: Her then-boyfriend was an alcoholic, she says,
and had been abusive in the past. The relationship was on its last
legs. And Scoins' oldest son, then 14, had been diagnosed with a
host of mental-health problems.
The doctor at Southwest Behavioral
Health Services put Scoins on heavy-duty antidepressants, according
to records provided to New Times by Scoins' lawyer, Scott
Ambrose.
For the seven months that Scoins
saw counselors at Southwest, her doctors reported that she was
anxious, worried about her older boy, and depressed about her
relationship ending, records show.
But they never once suggested that
she was a bad parent. And they never noted a suspicion of drug use.
Then Scoins found out she was
pregnant again. Very, very pregnant.
She'd gained weight with her
previous pregnancy, so she was already heavier than usual. She
complained to her doctors about nausea, and irregular periods, but
records show that she assumed it was a side effect from the meds.
So in early September 2003, Scoins
found out she was pregnant, and on September 27 her little boy was
born two months early, weighing only three and a half pounds.
And that's when Scoins, who insists
she'd never used illegal drugs, tested positive for amphetamines.
Even the hospital's own test
results warn that antidepressants, like the ones Scoins was using,
can create a "false positive" for amphetamines. So can cold
medicine, which she'd also been on.
Not only did the baby test negative
for everything, but Scoins subsequently passed two more drug tests.
No matter. When Scoins' boy (called
C.Q. in court papers to protect his privacy) was big enough to leave
the hospital in November, Scoins didn't get a call to pick him up.
Instead, a CPS worker left her a note.
CPS had taken the baby.
The reason: According to the
caseworker, Scoins had "tested positive for methamphetamines."
Amphetamines are present in any
number of drugs, not just crystal meth. But while CPS caseworkers
deal with thousands of meth-related cases in the course of a year,
the staffer on Scoins' case didn't seem to realize that. Nor did she
acknowledge that Scoins' amphetamine "positive" was in dispute.
Instead, CPS's report claimed that
Scoins was a drug addict. The caseworker wrote that she'd "abused
substances for a long period of time" an absurd claim for which
the worker offered no supporting documentation. The report also
claimed that Scoins had been homeless and living in a car. Again,
completely false.
Even worse, in the same report, the
caseworker claimed that Scoins' baby had yet to be tested for drugs.
That wasn't true. C.Q.'s tests were
complete within days of his birth, two months before. He was
negative for all drugs.
Taking C.Q. amounted to a rush to
judgment that may have been triggered by good intentions but
doesn't hold up to scrutiny today.
Scoins was devastated at losing her
baby.
"I was just a mess," Scoins says.
"I kept thinking, there's some mistake. I've never used drugs; they
must have me confused with someone else. When they find out, this
will all be over. But that never happened."
Instead, CPS only let Scoins see
C.Q. during supervised visits. And Scoins' caseworker filed
paperwork to take away her other three children, too.
Ultimately, the agency dropped its
threat; when C.Q. was nine months old, CPS finally returned him to
his mother. But that was only thanks to an attorney friend who
handled Scoins' case for free.
"I probably would not have my son
back today without that," she says.
Throughout a three-hour interview
with New Times at the public library in Surprise, Scoins' two
youngest boys interrupt frequently to show their mother books,
pester for her library card, and ask for help with the computer.
They have a warm rapport; Scoins is affectionate with them, and they
clearly adore her in return.
Since her battle for C.Q., Scoins
founded the Arizona Family Rights Advocacy Institute and devotes
much of her time to helping families across the state fighting CPS.
She doesn't get paid, yet she estimates she easily spends more than
60 hours a week taking their calls, helping them with paperwork,
even showing up in court to offer an assist.
She knows the dark side of
Napolitano's push for safety first. She's lived it.
"This wasn't even a case where they
took the kid and asked questions later," says her attorney, Ambrose,
disgusted. "In this case, they didn't even ask questions."
As a matter of policy, CPS
officials cannot discuss individual cases, except in cases of child
death. But its administrator, Janice Mickens, says the agency had no
choice but to increase removals at the beginning of Napolitano's
tenure.
Prior to that, CPS used to farm out
less-serious complaints to a network of community and volunteer
agencies about 6,000 calls a year.
Napolitano decreed that CPS would
investigate every complaint it received. And Mickens says the
increased investigations account for the rise in removals.
But while even critics of the
agency applaud the "every complaint" policy, they question why so
many kids had to be moved into foster care rather than monitored
in-home.
That was clearly Napolitano's wish;
she gave a speech in April 2003 where she stated plainly, "We cannot
both assure the child's safety and guarantee to keep the family
home. We must choose."
The problem with that logic? Well,
when it comes to children and safety, there's rarely 100 percent
assurance for anything.
Many homes aren't safe. But every
year, kids die in foster care, too. And sometimes, a home that seems
perfectly safe is the one that proves deadly.
Wayne Holder is the
Albuquerque-based director of ACTION for Child Protection, which
offers technical assistance to child welfare agencies. He believes
that thinking like Napolitano's is old-fashioned. People used to
think "safety" and "family" were contrary goals, he says. Not
anymore.
"The nature of this business is to
have an either/or dichotomy, but we've been making efforts to think
a bit more dynamically," Holder says. "There is now a growing
recognition that even removing children from their homes doesn't
necessarily mean they're safe."
Carole Shauffer, executive director
of the San Francisco-based Youth Law Center, agrees. Her agency is a
public-interest, nonprofit law firm that litigates on behalf of kids
in juvenile detention or bad foster care situations.
"Any time you get a lot of child
deaths, you see a state do 'safety first, let's remove every single
kid,'" she says.
But that doesn't mean it's the
right thing to do, Shauffer says. "Many, many children can be kept
safe at home. Safety first should not mean removal first."
After all, most parents caught up
in the CPS system aren't the sort of abusers who end up on the
evening news, carted to jail after systematically torturing their
kids for months.
The majority of cases involve
neglect, not abuse and it's not only the politically correct who
are concerned by the gross overrepresentation of poor and minority
kids in foster care across the country. Statistics show that
alcoholics in Paradise Valley typically don't attract CPS attention.
Single moms living in west Phoenix do.
And foster care, as it turns out,
is hardly a panacea.
A study published in Development
and Psychopathology earlier this year by researchers at the
University of Minnesota suggests, surprisingly, that foster care may
actually be worse for kids than abusive homes.
The professors surveyed records
from 189 high-risk children in Minneapolis, from birth to their 16th
birthdays.
Researchers split the children into
three groups: The first spent time in foster care. The second group
suffered similar maltreatment but weren't removed from their
homes. And the third was a control group: children from poor
families, but without abuse or neglect.
Naturally, the control group
performed the best; practically from the beginning, they scored
better developmentally than the mistreated kids.
Initially, there was no such
difference between the kids who ended up in foster care and those
stuck in abusive homes. But once the kids were sent to foster care,
they began to perform demonstrably worse than their
stay-in-home counterparts.
Even after their release from care,
the foster kids had more problems.
"[T]he results support a general
view that foster care may lead to an increase in behavior problems
that continues after exiting the system," the researchers concluded.
The results, they wrote, "raise cautious concern regarding the
impact of child care on development."
That's almost certainly not the
fault of foster parents, much less the kids themselves. Few
researchers blame the quality of foster homes; instead, they believe
the problem comes from children being wrenched from their parents.
And that may be why CPS executives
no longer present removals as an unqualified positive. Instead, they
talk about keeping families together, monitoring children in their
homes, and new initiatives to get support services to needy
families.
Indeed, ask CPS administrator
Janice Mickens what she's most excited about, and she'll cite a
program called Family to Family, developed by the respected
Baltimore-based Annie E. Casey Foundation. In place now in Maricopa
County and Tucson, CPS hopes to roll it out statewide in five years.
Its goal is to work with families
to reduce kids' time in foster care and to increase placements with
family members or trusted friends.
"We're saying child safety is
paramount," Mickens says, "but that children belong in families. The
focus is on safety and trying to help them within their families
whether that's their family of origin or relatives."
Another sign of the agency's
movement since Napolitano's original mandate: The second program
Mickens singles out for praise is CPS's in-home services unit, which
monitors at-risk kids, but doesn't remove them.
CPS actually applied for, and got,
a waiver from the feds. The waiver lets the agency use federal funds
typically earmarked for kids in foster care on programs to support
families, connecting them with services like drug counseling or even
food stamps.
"It allows us to work with families
at a much earlier stage and prevent them coming back into the
system," Mickens says. "In the past, with cases like this, there was
no one to send them. We'd say, 'Okay, well, I'll keep this case
open.' But then we'd get another report because they just weren't
getting services."
Richard Wexler is the director of
the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, a group that
believes far too many children are placed in foster care. He was a
critic of Napolitano's early speeches on child safety. By "throwing
gas on the fire" and focusing on maltreatment deaths, he says, she
sparked a panic.
But Wexler says he's noticed a real
change in Arizona. He's convinced that Napolitano has consciously
backed away from her previous strategy.
"Essentially, everybody involved in
fomenting the panic now realizes it was a terrible mistake," he
claims.
(Napolitano's deputy, Haener, says
the governor has not had a change of heart. "Safety is and must be
the top priority at CPS," he says. The increase in kids, he says,
was absolutely necessary, and due to "real reforms that helped us to
better identify risk factors for children.")
And Wexler's not willing to let
Napolitano off the hook that easily anyway. After all, he notes,
there are still more than 10,000 kids in foster care. And CPS
defends its actions in 2003, even if the agency's now changing
course.
"Until people are ready to say out
loud, 'What we did in 2003 was flat wrong, and we have to reverse
course,'" he says, "this isn't going to get any better."
Wexler may be too harsh. But it's
clear that keeping kids safe is much more complicated than
Napolitano initially suggested.
Some foster parents may need as
much intervention and monitoring as some birth parents. And under
Napolitano, that's actually happened less frequently than under Hull
occasionally, with disastrous results.
Patrick Traufler Jr. was born just
nine months before Robin Scoins' son C.Q. Like C.Q., he was taken
from the hospital and immediately placed into foster care.
But Patrick really did have drugs
in his system, court records show. And rather than ultimately
finding an adoptive family, he died before he was a year old.
CPS had placed Patrick with Angela
Monroy, a young Phoenix mother. Monroy wasn't just raising two kids
of her own, she also had another foster child another boy who'd
been born to a drug-addicted mother, says Brad Astrowsky, who
handled the case as a Maricopa County prosecutor. (The case is still
pending, but Astrowsky has left the office for private practice.)
Monroy's husband worked the night
shift, Astrowsky says. And that left Angela Monroy as virtually the
sole caregiver for four very young children.
"It wasn't as if Ms. Monroy was an
evil person who set out to kill the child," Astrowsky says. "She was
a young mother in over her head, who started out with good
intentions, but was allowed to be in over her head by the state."
After Patrick died, investigators
found that her other foster child, too, had suffered abuse.
Prosecutors charged Angela Monroy with shaking and smothering
Patrick to death and also with fracturing his foster brother's
forearm.
It was a horrible ending, made even
worse by the fact that no one could argue that Patrick Traufler Jr.
should have stayed with his biological parents. His mother couldn't
even manage to successfully sue the county. (She filed suit, but it
was thrown out after her lawyers failed to hit their deadlines,
records show.) Court records also reveal that the baby's presumed
father, Patrick Traufler Sr., proved not to be the biological dad.
It would be tempting to conclude
that these cases are tough, and leave it at that. But Astrowsky
believes it exemplifies a more systemic problem.
He believes the agency must remove
children when they're in danger; he doesn't fall into the camp of
those who would always support birth parents.
But by not paying better attention
to Patrick's situation in foster care, he says, CPS messed up.
The timing may have been a factor.
After all, little Patrick's death came six weeks into Napolitano's
term as governor. He was placed in the Monroys' house in the midst
of the frenzy of removals, driven by the command to remove kids
first and ask questions later.
During the six-month period that
includes Napolitano's first three months in office and Patrick's
placement with the Monroys, the number of children removed from
their homes grew almost 12 percent from the six months before.
The state didn't have enough foster
parents, much less caseworkers to supervise them. And the number of
caseworkers, naturally, didn't grow 12 percent in this period. Not
even close.
And so the caseworker who visited
Monroy's home wasn't just young, Astrowsky says. She was an intern.
Even worse, she was an intern who
already personally knew the family, Astrowsky says. (Her fiancι was
a cousin of Monroy's husband.) That may have given her reason not to
question the family's placement, no matter how much stress Angela
Monroy was under.
The intern disclosed the conflict
to her supervisor, Astrowsky says. But the supervisor decided it
wasn't a problem.
And two months after he was born,
Patrick Traufler Jr. was dead.
In its response to the lawsuit from
Patrick's mother, CPS defended its actions as appropriate. Monroy's
criminal case is still pending.
But even today, despite a few
hundred new positions added to CPS's roster, workers who monitor
kids like Patrick hardly have time to do their jobs.
The agency codified its caseload
standards in 2005: Investigators, who make the initial determination
whether children need to be in foster care, should take no more than
10 new cases a month. "Out of home" case managers, like those
supervising Patrick Traufler Jr., are supposed to handle no more
than 16.
Even those numbers seem high, but
the reality is much, much higher. In June 2006, the most recent
month available, the average "out of home" manager handled 25 cases.
And that's actually lower than many
months in the recent past. In October 2005, for example, monthly
"out of home" caseloads averaged 32.5 cases double the agency's
standard.
"Unless you gave up most of your
personal life and worked continuously, you could not keep up," says
Alissa Scott, who left the agency after almost four years in 2004.
"I was a single parent, dropping my daughter off at a day care at
6:30 a.m., and they'd be waiting at the door when I showed up at
night because they were closing."
Workers, too, are plagued by the
stress of making life-altering decisions. They're damned in the
newspapers if they don't remove kids but reviled by parents when
they do.
"The job is a 24-hour-a-day job,
whether people want to acknowledge that or not," Scott says.
As a result of heavy workloads,
some foster homes get little scrutiny. The law requires caseworkers
to visit kids in foster care once a month. But throughout
Napolitano's tenure, that's happened, on average, for just 64
percent of foster kids.
That's 5 percent below the agency's
average in 2001 and 2002, according to records.
Foster parents like Angela Monroy
are an anomaly. According to statistics Arizona reports to the
federal government, fewer than 1 percent of kids in foster care here
have suffered abuse. And while death gets the headlines, it's not
what most CPS workers deal with on a daily basis.
But a far more systemic problem
dogged CPS during the Napolitano-era foster care boom: dumping kids
in shelters or group homes for months on end.
Marsha Porter, herself a former CPS
worker, is the longtime executive director of nonprofit Crisis
Nursery in central Phoenix. A slender woman with a stylish blond
shag, she's happy to give a tour of the Crisis Nursery campus on
Roosevelt Street, and it's easy to see why: It's like a college dorm
for kids, with bedrooms, common areas for play, and a sunny backyard
strewn with toys.
But the place wasn't initially
designed for foster care, as Porter readily attests. Crisis Nursery
began as a place where parents could voluntarily drop off kids if
they felt overwhelmed. As long as the parents didn't disappear,
Porter says, the agency didn't alert authorities, and mom got a
break.
Only later did the nursery, and
others like it, start accepting contracts to house kids while foster
homes could be found.
From that point, it became only too
easy for CPS to leave kids there for months on end. CPS workers
preoccupied with new, urgent cases didn't always have the time to
return to children they'd placed in shelters. After all, places like
Crisis Nursery are nothing if not safe and in the short term, that
can seem like enough.
But then the short term turned into
the long term. And suddenly kids were staying in shelters for
months, or even a year.
Bonnie Cohn is a former CPS worker
who started a five-bed shelter, Marcus House, in 1995. Like Porter,
she felt she was providing a valuable service to her young charges
but was sometimes surprised at how long kids stayed before CPS found
them placements.
"We had a sibling pair here for a
full year," she says. "Then they were moved to foster parents who
wouldn't take them so they came back for another two months. And
after that, CPS put them with a relative who hadn't seen them in six
months!"
The Youth Law Center in San
Francisco had long been critical of shelters, particularly when kids
are extremely young. In 2004, the Center turned its attention to
Arizona.
"It is not safe to put an infant in
a group home for a long period of time," says Carole Shauffer, the
director. "It may be physically safe, but it is not and I can say
with 100 percent certainty not psychologically safe or
developmentally safe."
The problem, Shauffer says, is that
kids in shelters are cared for by staffers who come and go, rather
than a single parent or couple they can count on. While there
haven't been extensive studies of the impact of shelter stays in
this country, Shauffer cites studies of kids coming out of
orphanages in Asia and Eastern Europe, who often show developmental
problems even after adoption.
That may be an exaggeration;
nothing about Crisis Nursery resembles a grim Romanian orphanage.
But it's also easy to see why homes are better than institutions, no
matter how cheerful.
And so Shauffer's group threatened
Arizona with a lawsuit over the shelter stays. Only then did CPS
commit to no longer using the shelters as a long-term placement for
kids. (CPS also agreed not to place kids younger than 3 in shelters,
unless special circumstances exist.)
"Then we had so many foster homes
lined up for these kids and the children removed from Marcus House
so quickly, it made your head spin," Cohn recalls.
Porter says that Crisis Nursery is
trying to reposition itself now that there's no steady stream of
long-term CPS placements. But Marcus House ended up folding under
the new policy; it couldn't stay afloat without CPS's endless supply
of $110-a-day placements.
"Really, I don't know why they
didn't beef up the foster care system much sooner," Cohn says. "They
were obviously spending a lot of money on shelters, and that wasn't
cheap for them."
But with so many problems to
address in the short term, the big picture wasn't always in focus.
Kris Jacober, director of the
Arizona Association of Foster and Adoptive Parents, generally
praises Napolitano's efforts and the reform process. But she says
that she and other foster parents have pushed CPS to do more for
foster care recruitment.
"We sat on every committee, and so
we know reforms are coming," she says. "But where the rubber meets
the road, we're not seeing a lot of what's supposed to be
happening."
Foster parents wanted a statewide
campaign. As a woman who runs her own marketing and public relations
company, Jacober knows what that should look like.
It hasn't happened yet.
"I still don't see a billboard,"
she says, sighing.
The number of foster homes has
increased 16 percent since Napolitano took office, records show.
Mickens says the agency is now focused on targeted recruitment, in
hopes of keeping kids within their communities and even the same
school district.
And, recently, CPS has done a good
job of increasing the numbers of foster beds available which means
that more foster parents are willing to take multiple placements or
sibling groups.
Records show that the number of
kids in shelters has finally dropped.
After the Youth Law Center's
lawsuit threat, and with Crisis Nursery's blessing, CPS assigned a
caseworker to the nursery. The goal is to keep the kids there from
falling through the cracks and find them foster homes quickly,
rather than just dumping them.
The shelters are not yet empty.
According to the most recent statistics, for June 2006, 806 kids
have been living in shelters for 21 days or more. The average length
of stay is 87 days.
Mickens, CPS's administrator, says
those are mostly sibling groups and hard-to-place kids.
But Shauffer says the state is "not
hitting the marks" that it agreed to in order to avoid a suit.
Still, she feels confident that they can keep working together.
"I believe the governor is actually
committed to ending the use of group care, and understands the
problems with it," she says. "The question is how quickly they're
committed to moving and how much of a priority it is. That's
really the question."
On one subject, Napolitano has
earned raves from both top CPS staffers and the constituencies that
interact with the agency: her willingness to listen.
Christa Drake, an alumna of
Arizona's foster care system and director of a Tucson-based program
called In My Shoes, recalls attending a forum where Napolitano took
suggestions from the community on CPS reform.
"There were people who'd had their
children taken away, and they were just yelling at the governor,"
Drake recalls. "But we talked to her about what we were hoping to do
with In My Shoes, and she put our peer mentoring program into her
'Blueprint for Success' as a statewide model. She actually listened.
And I think she did a wonderful job."
Jacober, director of Arizona's
foster parent support group, agrees. When her group insisted on a
voice in the reform process, they found Napolitano was willing to
hear them out.
"She said, 'I will support you,'
and she has never wavered from that," Jacober says.
Among top staffers at CPS, the mood
is optimistic. Mickens, who's worked for the agency since 1985, says
she's never witnessed such excitement.
"It is a wonderful time to be
working at CPS," Mickens says, "the best four years I've had in the
whole time I've been at the agency."
The big question is whether that
excitement is going to translate into actual, statistical results
and whether it's shared by workers, whose job stress is enormous and
whose caseloads never seem to shrink.
In the past year, turnover among
caseworkers and their supervisors has finally shown dramatic
improvement. That could make a big change.
But in some ways, workers' voices
are quieter than ever before. Legislators critical of CPS, like
Representative Knaperek and Senator Karen Johnson, a conservative
Republican from Mesa, say that they used to get calls from CPS
workers all the time, seeking help or trying to expose problems
they'd witnessed.
Now they don't get such calls. They
believe the problems are still happening, but that caseworkers are
afraid to speak out.
One caseworker, who stepped forward
to testify before a legislative committee last year, says that
Mickens called the night before he was scheduled to testify. She
tried to talk him out of speaking for 45 minutes, he says.
The caseworker testified anyway,
detailing numerous problems with the in-home unit in his Kingman
district and the overwork that plagues CPS workers. After his
testimony, the caseworker says he was then repeatedly denied
promotions. Last week, he resigned. (Because he is seeking a job in
another state, he asked New Times not to use his name.)
For whatever reason, CPS is no
longer a subject that gets much media attention. The Republic
was up in arms when 36 kids died in 2002. But though state records
show that another 77 kids died in 2003 and 2004, they hardly rated a
mention. The reporter who once wrote in-depth reports on child death
now covers Nutcracker auditions and files stories helping
parents decode their teenagers' slang.
And it isn't just the Republic.
Although CPS reports are almost always confidential, the agency can
release summaries at the media's request in cases where children
die.
In 2004 and 2005, reporters asked
for summaries in only four cases, according to records CPS provided
to New Times.
There are less gory examples. CPS
began issuing a regular bulletin called "Reform Watch" to keep
outsiders posted on its progress; the bulletins petered out, then
finally stopped abruptly a year ago.
And then there's the departure of
David Berns. Berns, who had run a CPS-style agency in Colorado
Springs, was praised as a visionary with a national reputation when
Napolitano hired him to run CPS's umbrella agency in 2003. But while
his arrival came with great hoopla, his departure this summer, after
less than three years on the job, barely rated a mention.
Berns declined New Times'
requests for an interview.
Indeed, despite the good cheer at
the top, there's some indication that CPS continues to be plagued by
poor morale and caseworker burnout at the bottom.
Last week, Brenda Truesdell, a CPS
supervisor with the Kingman district for five years, resigned from
the agency. The next day, she came to Phoenix to testify in a closed
Senate hearing room in front of several legislators.
Truesdell described a scenario
where everyone is overworked except a top-heavy management team,
where training is ineffective, where even the most inexperienced
caseworkers must handle complex cases, just because there isn't
anyone else.
A tall, thin woman with military
crispness, Truesdell described a box of nearly 200 cases that's sat
in her office for months. She couldn't get overtime approved to
enter the information into the agency's archaic computer system.
If a new complaint comes in about
one of the cases stuck in the box, CPS would never know it,
Truesdell explains. The data from the earlier report, after all,
simply hasn't been logged into the computer.
"I'm no longer willing to work for
an organization that puts money above the safety of children," she
told the legislators. "I'm not going to do it."
Truesdell explained that
Napolitano's much-vaunted Core training program puts new caseworkers
in the classroom for a six-week course. But after taking the class
herself, she understood why new workers often seemed so
ill-prepared.
There was no test at the end of the
course to make sure workers "got" it. And since training is run by
the central office instead of district staff, supervisors like
Truesdell get no information on what the students have mastered and
where they still need more help.
"It costs $20,000 to $25,000 to
send them through [six] weeks of Core, when you add up hotels and
food and reimbursement for gas," Truesdell told Senator Karen
Johnson, whose mouth nearly hit the table. "When I think of the
staff I could have with the amount of money spent on Core . . ."
Throughout more than two hours of a
question-and-answer session, Truesdell painted a bleak picture of
some of the same programs that Mickens praised to New Times
the week before.
Take the in-home services division.
Truesdell says it's been so understaffed in Kingman that caseworkers
from other units have gotten calls from families asking why no one
ever followed up with them. Other cases, Truesdell says, were closed
in just a few weeks hardly enough time to monitor a family's
progress. Even worse, she named CPS offices in several cities that
have yet to set up an in-home unit.
(CPS spokeswoman Liz Barker Alvarez
denies this, saying that every office has in-home workers, if not a
full unit. But she admits that rural areas pose special challenges.)
Overall, Truesdell's testimony
painted a chilling contrast to the glowing reports from CPS
administrators and people outside the system.
Napolitano promised to reform the
agency to make children safe. Her deputy, Haener, says she's
convinced she's done that.
The foundation has been laid for
real progress, he writes, "and is starting to yield results. . . .
Building on those successes will take time, continued investment,
and steadfast commitment on the part of CPS and all our partners."
But after four years at CPS, the
statistics still reveal cause for concern. And Brenda Truesdell, for
one, isn't buying the governor's rosy picture.
Truesdell told the legislators that
she'd previously worked as a caseworker in Indiana.
"I didn't think a system could be
any worse than Indiana when I left Indiana," she told the
legislators. "Arizona is worse. Arizona is much worse."
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