EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: KEY POINTS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
● Colorado’s Department of Human Services likes to brag about reducing the numbers of children county family police agencies (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agencies) take away each year. But Colorado still tears apart families at a rate 30% above the national average when rates of family poverty are factored in. And the national average itself is far too high, since there are systems that tear apart families at lower rates with no compromise of safety.
ENTRIES INTO FOSTER
CARE PER THOUSAND IMPOVERISHED CHILDREN
●
Colorado is one of 13 states in which local governments run family policing.
The statewide average figure hides even more disturbing data from some of those
counties. As our NCCPR Colorado Rate-of-Removal Index makes clear, Mesa and Douglas Counties – the child removal
capitals of Colorado - take away children at rates roughly 70% above the
national average, with El Paso and Jefferson Counties not far behind.
●
Colorado’s enormously influential residential treatment industry has ensured
that Colorado uses the worst form of substitute care – institutionalizing
children -- at a rate 33% above
the national average.
PERCENTAGE OF FOSTER CHILDREN IN GROUP HOMES AND
INSTITUTIONS
●
At the same time, Colorado uses the least harmful form of foster care,
kinship foster care, at a rate 30% below the national average.
PERCENTAGE OF FOSTER CHILDREN IN KINSHIP FOSTER CARE
●
While nationwide, Hispanic/Latino children are not disproportionately in foster
care – they are in Colorado; where they are trapped in foster care at a rate nearly
30% above their rate in the Colorado child population.
HISPANIC / LATINO CHILDREN IN COLORADO
●Native
American children are taken at a rate 50% above their rate in the general child
population.[1]
NATIVE AMERICAN CHILDREN IN COLORADO
●And
Black children are torn from their families in Colorado foster care at
nearly triple their rate in the child population – a worse rate of
disproportionality than the national average.
In
short, the name used for the state Department of Human Services data system is
sadly appropriate. When it comes to keeping children safely in the place that
is best for almost all of them – their own homes – Colorado trails.
There
are plenty of examples of how this extremism plays out:
●
Colorado is the state where child welfare workers and police -- with guns drawn
-- entered a Black woman’s home, hauled her out and hogtied her; her wrists
handcuffed behind her back and tied to her shackled legs. All
because her two-year-old wandered away during a family gathering.
●
Colorado is the state where daycare workers were
criminally charged after a 5-year-old boy pulled down his
classmates’ pants.
●
Colorado is the state where a caseworker tried to
claim what amounts to a constitutional right to lie. She lost; but, incredibly, one of three
appellate judges actually bought it.
●
Colorado is the state where it took blatant out-in-the-open racism before a
judge who presided over family policing cases finally was pressured to
resign. But there is no real
redress for most of the families she victimized.
●
And Colorado is the state where a caseworker who allegedly harassed someone
against whom she had a grudge with a false, anonymous child abuse report was
working on 30 active
cases at the time of her arrest (and who knows how many over the
course of her career). But an
“investigation” gave the county a clean bill of health.
Who is hurt?
The “child welfare” establishment
wants us to believe Colorado’s take-the-child-and-run approach is needed to
keep children safe. They want us to
believe that child safety and family preservation are opposites that need to be
balanced. None of that is true. On the contrary. The problem with Colorado’s approach is
not that it hurts parents (though, of course, it does). The problem is that it hurts children.
● It hurts children because
most cases are nothing like the horror stories.
More than 80% percent of the children forced into foster care in
Colorado are taken in cases where there is not even an
allegation of physical or sexual abuse. Far more common are allegations of “neglect.” In rare cases, neglect can be extremely serious. Far more often, poverty is confused with
neglect. Colorado’s definition of
neglect is so broad that there is hardly an impoverished child in the state who
couldn’t be deemed “neglected” at some point during their childhood.
● It hurts children by
consigning them needlessly to the chaos of foster care. Because most cases are nothing like the
horror stories, study after
study finds that, in typical cases, children left in their own homes
typically fare better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster
care. The motivation is different, but a
child torn from the arms of her or his mother in Colorado suffers the same
trauma as a child taken at the Mexican border.
Even when a child is not taken away, children can be severely
traumatized by the investigation.
● It hurts children because removal
to foster care can put children at higher risk of abuse. Multiple
studies find abuse in one-quarter to one-third of family foster homes
and the rate of abuse in group homes and institutions is even worse.
●
It hurts children because all the time, money and effort wasted
on false allegations, trivial cases and poverty cases is, in effect, stolen
from finding the relatively few children in real danger. That overload almost always is the real
reason for the horror stories that, rightly, make headlines.
All this is why Colorado’s take-the-child-and-run approach makes
all children less safe. You can’t have child safety without family
preservation. The recommendations in this report
are a blueprint for child safety.
The tapeworm in the
system
Colorado’s
children are especially burdened by a powerful residential treatment
industry. It takes a special kind of
chutzpah to admit that there is rampant abuse in residential treatment but
claim the solution is to give the industry even more money than the $250 to $600 per-day per-child they’re getting
now. And it takes a special
kind of chutzpah to smear young children with fearmongering about demon homicidal
six-year-olds who supposedly have to be institutionalized.
But
so far, they’ve gotten away with it.
Even
if there were no physical or sexual abuse in residential treatment centers (RTCs), they still would be a horrible option.
The evidence is overwhelming that the model itself is a failure – and
there is nothing residential treatment can do that can’t be done far better,
and at lower cost, with Wraparound services.
In this
short video, Wraparound pioneer explains how it’s done.
Compounding
the problem: RTCs are paid their enormous sums on a per-diem
basis. So the longer they
institutionalize the child and the worse they make the child’s behavior sound,
the more money they get.
Residential
treatment is the tapeworm in the system.
It consumes all the nutrients – in this case, the funds that could be used
to provide genuine help to children and families – leaving the host to
starve. Very little will improve until
the tapeworm is expelled.
Colorado can lead
Colorado
has trailed for decades. But it doesn’t
have to stay that way. There was a brief
time when one Colorado county was a national leader – admired by “child
welfare” professionals across the country.
There’s no reason that can’t happen in every Colorado county.
And
in recent years, there have been real strides:
●
Colorado passed a “reasonable childhood independence” law.
●
Though Colorado’s rate of removal is way too high, it has been declining in
recent years.
●
A model of high-quality family defense that has produced outstanding results,
reducing needless foster care with no compromise of child safety, is spreading
statewide.
●
New legislation curbs (though does not end) one of the most pernicious
practices discussed in this report, foster parents as “intervenors.” Even more significant, it bolsters the
preference for placing children in kinship foster care, giving Colorado a
chance to catch up to the nation.
But
there is so much more to be done.
RECOMMENDATIONS - A BLUEPRINT FOR CHILD SAFETY
If anyone at a “child
welfare” agency says “We already have” anything on this list, please check and
see if they have enough of it, and if they’re doing it right.
Services
● County “child welfare” agencies
need to be laser-focused on providing concrete help to ameliorate the worst
harms of poverty. That means childcare
to avoid “lack of supervision” charges and rent subsidies or basic home repairs
so children aren’t torn from their families for lack of housing. Multiple studies show that even small amounts
of aid significantly reduce what agencies call “neglect.”
● Where substance use really does impair
parenting to the point of endangering children, drug treatment should be
available on demand. And when inpatient
treatment is necessary, it should be in programs that allow parents and
children to live together while the parent gets treatment.
● In the most complex cases, Intensive Family Preservation
Services (IFPS) programs have an outstanding track record of safely
keeping families together when they rigorously follow the model of the first
such program, Homebuilders in Washington State. IFPS now is reimbursable under
the federal Family First Act.
● In cases that involve domestic
violence, efforts should focus on removing the abuser from the home instead of
blaming the survivor and tearing apart families because a child “witnessed
domestic violence.” Taking a child from
a victim of domestic violence actually is even more traumatic for the child
than taking a child under other circumstances.
● Phase out residential treatment. And immediately end per-diem
reimbursement. Instead, pay RTCs a set
amount per child. That reverses the
current incentive and creates an incentive to get children out of an RTC and
into a home or a foster home more quickly.
And no, that doesn’t create a risk that children will be sent home “too
soon” – because the RTC hasn’t been doing the child any good in the first
place.
But none of this will
happen without an enforcement mechanism.
Due
process
● Step one is ensuring that every family has high-quality
interdisciplinary representation. That
means a lawyer and a social worker who can propose alternatives to the
meaningless – or sometimes worse – cookie-cutter “service plans” agencies come
up with. Sometimes these defense teams also have parent advocates who have been
through the system themselves. The model
is spreading across the state but it’s still only avail-able to fewer than half
the families that need it.
● “Mandatory
reporting” should be abolished. That
does not mean abolishing reporting of child abuse. It means leaving professionals free to
exercise their professional judgment.
● Anonymous
reporting should be replaced with confidential reporting.
● The state should prohibit counties from using "predictive analytics" at any point in the family policing process.
● From the age at
which they can express a rational preference, children should have lawyers who
fight for what the child wants, not “guardians ad litem” who decide for
themselves what they think is best and may actually work against their own
client’s wishes. This does not mean children
should always get what they want – it means that all sides should have someone
fighting for them, so the judge has as much information as possible before
deciding what is “best.”
● Research shows
that the Court-Apponted Special Advocates Program (CASA), the most sacred cow
in child welfare, actually prolongs foster care and increases the chances that
children will “age out” of the system with no family at all. The role of CASAs should be limited to
mentoring foster youth.
● Foster parents
should not be allowed to be “intervenors” at any time.
A series of other
essential reforms are in NCCPR’s Due Process Agenda. Among the reforms highlighted there:
● Require the
equivalent of a “Miranda warning” when caseworkers knock on the door. Families have few rights when facing family
police. But they should be informed of
the rights they do have – because if you don’t know your rights, you don’t have
your rights. Texas passed such a law this year.
● Require an impartial hearing, with free legal
counsel for indigent families, before anyone is entered in Colorado’s
statewide central registry of alleged child abusers. Wrongly entering a parent in the registry
hurts their children by barring the parent from many jobs; that risks driving
families who usually are already poor deeper into poverty.
