SOLUTIONS : A PLACE AT THE TABLE

How can a system that has improved in recent years, but still has a long way to go, truly help keep children safe and secure, meeting not only their need for physical safety but also their profound need for attachment to a loving adult?   A crucial step is to make parents a part of the decision-making process.

This kind of participation has been crucial to helping other disenfranchised populations.   For example, one of the reasons Project Head Start is almost universally hailed as a success is that, from the beginning, parents helped govern every Head Start program.

Nor are parents the only ones who need to be at the table who sometimes are excluded now.   Older foster children also need to be involved in the same way, at all levels.

But is child welfare different?  

Parents in a Head Start program have done nothing wrong.   In contrast, parents of children in the child welfare system sometimes are stereotyped as nothing more than “the problem.”

Sometimes, they are.   But as these papers make clear, the stereotype of the abusive parent – the cruel, calculating parent who enjoys harming his or her children – represents a tiny fraction of the ACS caseload.

A parent can lose a child to foster care because she left that child home alone to work to avoid becoming homeless and there was no Head Start program.   That parent may be just like the parent who is on the Head Start board of directors in another neighborhood where the program happened to have an opening for her child.   And the parent who finally succumbed to drug abuse, but is now in or through treatment may be exactly the right person to help design programs for the parent who may become addicted next year or the year after – or programs to stop the cycle of poverty and despair before it leads to addiction.

“We need their vision and their voice to complete the system,” says Prof. Terry Mizrahi of Hunter College, a member of the Child Welfare Organizing Project Board of Directors and an expert on community organizing.   Mizrahi adds that it's a mistake to assume that when parents help make the decisions, they'll go easy on their peers.   “Former addicts are not more lenient on addicts,” Mizrahi says.   But child welfare systems need to get away from the notion of “the parent as pariah.   The parents know what they could have done differently with the right help and support.”

Participation by parents needs to exist at three levels:

· The individual case level .   In theory, before a child is placed in foster care, or within 72 hours afterwards, a “family team meeting” is supposed to take place.   At that meeting, everyone who can help the family, including friends, extended family, neighbors and other helpers in the community are supposed to get together to work out a safety plan with the family.

In addition, meetings are supposed to take place periodically during a child's time in foster care. Participation by the parents themselves, is, of course, crucial.   But though this has been a centerpiece of the ACS reform effort, ACS has done a better job of adopting the form of these meetings than the substance.  

ACS data show that the agency has made improvements, but still falls short of its own goals for parent participation in these meetings.   Parents are not present for 17 percent of the 72-hour conferences, 40 percent of the 30-day meetings and 49 percent of the six-month meetings. [i]

ACS and private agencies need to reach out to parents to attend these meetings.   The parents need adequate notice, and possibly help with transportation.   And meetings need to be scheduled so they don't conflict with work, or other obligations in the “case plan” a parent must fulfill to get his or her children back.

Furthermore, even when the meetings meet the letter of agency requirements, they may fall short of the spirit.  

An independent advisory panel, which observed these meetings, found problems including:

                    · “Workers who facilitated or participated in the [meetings] …observed did not use the conferences as an opportunity to reassess the reason for the child's removal, consider whether the conditions that warranted placement had been ameliorated or reconsider whether the child could be returned home.”

                    · At the six-month meetings, “service plans appeared to have been developed before the conference giving the impression that parent attendance and participation was unnecessary and that parents had no role in service planning for themselves or their children.

“On the issue of permanency, the [meetings] observed were used to plan the next six months in care rather than in consideration of the circumstances that might warrant immediate return home … workers … used acronyms or jargon that was not clear to parents and referred to parents in the third person … Parents and children … were asked to sign off on the service plan before the [meeting] concluded.” [i]

· The private agency level .   When a caseworker from the agency that has just taken a child approaches the child's parent, the parent's reaction is likely to be one of fear and anger.   But if the caseworker is accompanied by a parent who once lost her own children to foster care and now has them back, the reaction can be very different.

That's what happened to Robin McCutheon.   She literally wouldn't open the door to the caseworker.   But when she met the agency's “parent advocate,” who had once been an addict – as she was – and who once had lost her own children to foster care – as she had – she opened the door, listened, and began the process that led to her own recovery and the return of her children.

“A caseworker understands the drug mentality logically, from reading from a book,” McCutheon told City Limits magazine.   “But the birth parent had been there.   I thought: ‘If she could do it, I could do it.'” [ii]

But birth parent advocates play another role as well; going to bat for parents when the agency isn't providing the help the parent needs, or when ACS is imposing unreasonable barriers to returning children.

Unfortunately, the program that helped pay for such advocates at many private agencies has been cut.   Not only should the funds be restored, but hiring of such advocates should be mandatory for any foster care agency that wants to do business with ACS.

· The public policy level .   Parents also need to be able to influence ACS policies.   Currently, when ACS formally listens to parents, the agency handpicks the parents and sets the agenda.   For parent participation to be meaningful, parents must be an independent voice, free to raise their own issues.

Therefore, the Parent Advocates hired by each private agency should form a citywide Advisory Council to ACS, legally empowered to review and comment on proposed ACS budgets, Requests for Proposals, changes in contract language, proposed legislation, draft bulletins, training curricula, and ways to evaluate contract agencies.

[i] Ibid

[ii] Rachel Blustain, “Mother's Helper,” City Limits , November, 2003, available online at: http://www.citylimits.org/content/articles/articleView.cfm?articlenumber=1047

[i] Citizens Committee for Children of New York, New York City Child Welfare Advisory Panel, Report on Family Engagement, August, 2003, available online at http://www.kfny.org/publications/nyccwap2003.pdf