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Rhode Island News
Litigation long overdue says head of
foster parents group
July 1, 2007
By Edward Fitzpatrick
PROVIDENCE — The state began to
fail “David T.” as soon as he entered foster care at age 2,
according to a federal civil-rights lawsuit filed by the state child
advocate last week.
Despite “clear indications” that
David had been sexually abused while in his mother’s care, the state
Department of Children, Youth and Families failed to ensure he
received a sexual-abuse evaluation or appropriate treatment, the
suit claims.
The state did find a foster mother
for David, and he grew extremely close to “Mommy Mary” over the next
two years. But when she was unable to continue caring for him, the
state sent David to a shelter at age 4.
After three months in the shelter,
David was sent to Michigan to live with an aunt who expressed
interest in adopting him. But the aunt ran into “housing problems
and other difficulties,” and the state ended up bringing David back
to the shelter.
“When he arrived there, he refused
to get out of the car and pleaded with the caseworker to bring him
back to ‘Mommy Mary,’ ” the suit states. “Shelter staff approached
the car and told 4-year-old David, ‘The rules here have not
changed.’ David silently got out of the care and walked into the
shelter.”
He would never live in a home
again.
David is one of 10 young plaintiffs
whose pseudonyms are on the U.S. District Court lawsuit that State
Child Advocate Jametta O. Alston filed against Governor Carcieri and
other state officials Thursday. Alston is pursing class-action
status on behalf of the 3,000 children now in state custody, and the
litigation is backed by a national watchdog group called Children’s
Rights.
Carcieri issued a news release
Friday, saying he was “extremely concerned” about the allegations
but that some of the information in the lawsuit “may be outdated and
fails to take into account the reforms that have been made under
Department of Children, Youth and Families Director Patricia
Martinez.” Carcieri said the state has given DCYF caseworkers
greater flexibility in work schedules and is in the process of
hiring 10 new caseworkers.
Martinez, who is named as a
defendant, said Friday that the state may pursue criminal charges
and other disciplinary action against any state workers, foster
parents and foster homes that failed to protect children from the
abuse alleged in the lawsuit.
The lawsuit says another aunt
expressed interest in caring for David, but DCYF failed to pursue
that option, and his “emotional state” kept declining. When he was
6, the state put David in a psychiatric hospital for five months and
then sent him to a residential treatment facility, where he was
sexually abused by a roommate and began to wet his bed almost every
night, the suit states.
In 2003, David was moved to another
institution, where he was restrained by staff members 105 times over
a three-month period. He stayed there three years, and, at age 10,
the state declared David “too damaged for placement.”
The state did allow adoption
recruitment staff to meet David in 2004, eight years after it
registered him for adoption, but officials decided adoption would be
inappropriate for him. In 2006, David moved to an out-of-state
treatment facility where he “engaged in sexual self-mutilation” and
gained more than 50 pounds.
Today, at age 13, David lives in an
institution in Massachusetts, where he has been diagnosed with
bipolar disorder, mild mental retardation and “environmental
influences, including his history of neglect and his multiple
placements,” the suit states.
“David entered care when he was
only 2 years old, and finding him a permanent, loving family was
completely feasible,” the lawsuit says. Instead, “As a direct result
of defendants’ actions and inactions, David has been and continues
to be irreparably harmed.”
LISA GUILLETTE, executive director
of the Rhode Island Foster Parents Association, said she cried while
reading about David and the other foster children in the lawsuit.
“The summaries of the named
plaintiffs and the types of failures they document are, to me,
indicative of a systemic breakdown,” she said. “While we don’t
usually see cases that horrible, we have seen a breakdown in
staffing and oversight that could lead to those conditions.”
The lawsuit begins by recounting
how a 3-year-old boy, Thomas “T.J.” Wright, was beaten to death in a
foster home in Woonsocket in 2004. Guillette said, “I don’t want to
see another T.J. Wright. I don’t want to see another child die, and
we are in danger of that.”
The litigation is “long overdue,”
Guillette said, praising Alston for being “courageous” enough to sue
the governor who appointed her.
Guillette said the system’s
problems have been developing over the course of successive
administrations, and the goal of the litigation is to find solutions
— not to point fingers. But, she said, the crisis has been mounting
for years and it seemed to grow worse during this year’s budget
crisis as the General Assembly cut funds and Carcieri talked about
laying off 1,000 state workers. “We are not moving in the direction
of solving problems,” she said.
“If people are outraged by this,”
Guillette said, “they bear some responsibility because these are all
our kids. We need people who are willing to serve as foster parents
or as mentors or as CASA [Court Appointed Special Advocate]
volunteers.”
Guillette’s association has a state
contract to support foster parents and help them navigate the DCYF
system. “We try to defend our work, but at some point the breakdowns
in our system are not defensible,” she said.
THE LAWSUIT CITES data collected
from states by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,
saying that in five of the six years between 2000 and 2005, Rhode
Island had “the single highest rate of substantiated child abuse or
neglect occurring to children in foster care among all states that
reported data.” And those rates “far exceeded benchmarks set by the
federal government.”
In the 2004 federal fiscal year,
1.32 percent of foster children in Rhode Island were maltreated,
which was twice the federal benchmark of 0.57 percent. In federal
fiscal year 2005, the rate of maltreatment in Rhode Island rose to
1.59 percent, the suit says, and since then the federal benchmark
has fallen to 0.32 percent.
Those numbers had apparently never
been widely reported before in Rhode Island, but state officials
certainly were aware of them because they provided the data to the
federal government, said Susan Lambiase, associate director of
Children’s Rights, a nonprofit legal organization based in New York
City.
Lambiase noted Rhode Island’s abuse
and neglect rates were so high that children in state foster care
were more likely to be maltreated than children in the general
population. “It’s outrageous,” she said. “They are getting removed
from their parents because the state is saying their parents are
unable to care for them, and then the state is even less able to
care for them and is damaging them worse.”
The suit attributes that abuse and
neglect to a variety of shortcomings in the child-welfare system.
For example, the suit says, “DCYF assigns such large caseloads to
its social workers that they are unable to make the regular
face-to-face visits to plaintiff children that are essential to
ensuring that these children are safe.”
Last year, Alston, the state child
advocate, issued a report saying DCYF had failed to make some of the
most important changes that a review panel called for after T.J.
Wright’s death. Most significantly, she said the state had failed to
hold caseloads to the recommended average of 14 families per
caseworker. At that time, caseloads stood as high as 20.04 families
per caseworker in the region of the state where T.J. died.
On Friday, Alston said the most
recent figures from a couple of weeks ago show caseloads are still
averaging 18 to 25 families, and she emphasized that families often
have more than one child.
The lawsuit cited other problems,
saying, “DCYF has so few foster homes that it places children in
homes without licenses, depriving them of basic protections of
foster parent background checks and training.” And, the suit says,
“Instead of appropriately investigating and addressing abuse or
neglect in foster placements, DCYF continues to rely on foster care
settings known to pose a risk of harm to children.”
Guillette said the state could help
retain and recruit foster parents by increasing payments for the
room and board of foster children. She said Rhode Island’s “foster
care board rates” are $14.39 per day for children from birth through
age 3; $13.64 per day for age 4 to 11; and $15.79 per day for age 12
and above. By comparison, the rates in Massachusetts are $17.10,
$17.96 and $18.59, and the rates in Connecticut are $24.85, $25.22
and $27.42, she said.
Each year, a bill is introduced to
raise the rates in Rhode Island, and each year the bill dies in
committee, Guillette said.
Guillette said those payments cover
just a portion of child-care expenses, so people don’t get into
foster care to “make a quick dime.” But increasing the rates would
be especially helpful in retaining foster parents related to the
children they care for, she said, citing the example of “a
grandmother who’s retired, on fixed income, and her daughter
develops a drug problem and she needs to step up to the plate to
care for her grandchild.”
Lambiase, of Children’s Rights,
said, “The bottom line is these are the most vulnerable,
underprivileged children in your state. They don’t vote. They don’t
have a strong, powerful lobby to protect their interests. They don’t
even have their parents. The state is their parents, and the state
is failing them.”
efitzpat@projo.com
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