DFS Director Responds to Report

I was impressed with how quickly the Director had responded. She received my report on Monday, called me on Tuesday and we met on Thursday. This is not what I would have expected from the old DCFS!

This was our first meeting. I found Ms. Klein-Rothschild to be pleasant, earnest and well-informed. We sat at a table in her office. She had my report in front of her as well as a couple of pages of handwritten notes concerning it. We spoke for about 45 minutes, which was enough time for each of us to give a general overview of our concerns, but not time to go into much detail. Below are my minutes of the meeting. My later comments are in italics.

The Director said that my report made some good points and that it may be an accurate "historical" report on the situation a year or two ago (when the state was in charge of foster care). She said, however, that many of the issues I raised were being addressed by recent changes.

My report said that there was no meaningful assessment of foster parents during the application process. She replied that the application process had been recently revamped. One new component was an assessment called "SAFE," which she said was a "psychosocial evaluation" of the prospective foster family. SAFE is a standardized protocol developed in California by the Consortium for Children. This is partly a written evaluation and partly an assessment by an interviewer. Prospective foster parents are interviewed twice: In one meeting, the couple is interviewed together (if it is a couple), and in the other, they are interviewed separately. SAFE has been in use in Clark County for about a year.

I would like to know more about the SAFE evaluation and how it works. Could this be considered a personality assessment? Can it detect mental illness, latent pedophilia, marriage problems or other factors that might interfere with parenting?


Website: "A major factor that sets (SAFE) apart from a traditional home study is that it not only provides factual and descriptive family information, but also contains a multifactor psychosocial evaluation that considers relevant clinical issues, systematically rules out factors that would render a family unsuitable, identifies and addresses issues of concern and illuminates family strengths and resources."

This would be an interesting statistic. If nearly everyone who took the SAFE evaluation passed it, then it might not be meaningful. How are the results from SAFE expressed? (A set of numerical scores?) Are there national standards for what constitutes an "acceptable" foster parent under SAFE? If there is foster parent shortage, are the standards lowered to bring in more of them?

Any improvement in training is certainly desirable, but I am less concerned about it than I am about the evaluation and active selection of candidates. A few hours of training may improve good parents, but it is not going to help deficient ones, who will probably go back to their previous patterns of behavior when the training ends.

(1) I asked her why a state like Vermont can move an average case to termination in 7-8 months while Nevada takes 24 months. She said that this is a valid issue that she is concerned about. However, she said that some of the delay is due to the backlog in the court system. As an example, she cited a recent high-profile termination case (presumably the Mesquite case): The case was ready to go to trial in August but could not be scheduled until May.

(2) She said that supervision of foster homes can always be improved. She mentioned various staffing changes she was making to address this (the details of which I do not recall). She said that regular foster homes should be visited on a monthly basis, while shelter homes (specialized short-term foster homes) would soon be visited on a weekly basis.

(3) In my report, I had said that government workers could not be fired. The Director replied that this was simply not true for her department. Recently, she had released some employees. (I did not ask for the circumstances or the timeframe.) The Director made it clear that she would get rid of problem workers. I asked her how many employees the Department had in total, and she said that it was now about 400.

The fact that some workers are being fired may not mean much. The more important question is what they are being fired for. It is easy to fire a worker for "cause" but not for underperformance, "not caring," or a simple lack of synergy with the rest of the organization. (The standards for caseworkers, I believe, should be very high, like those of air traffic controllers.)

(4) The "culture of secrecy" is also something that the Director said needed improvement. She had no explanation for why I wasn't given the name of the infant cottage when I asked for it on the phone. She said that she herself was freely available to the press and that she was willing to talk about anything except where barred by law.

A reading of recent newspaper articles suggests that she is correct: She has been very open to the press. She does not have a public relations officer, as many other public agencies do, but answers all media inquiries herself.

Other tidbits gleaned from this meeting....

• The Family Court will soon be adding a new Hearing Master. This should improve the backlog in the court system.
  
  
• The Director herself joined the county in Jan. 2002, which was 6 months before the Department actually came into existence. She is a career social worker and administrator whose previous experience was in various positions in Colorado.
  
  
• There are 7 cottages at Child Haven, plus an additional building used for overflow due to the current overcrowding.
  
  
• The infant cottage that I had visited, Howard, was now closed. The Director said that their intention was to move infants quickly into foster homes. Any overflow of infants was going into Agassi, the cottage for medically sensitive children (donated by the tennis star). We both agreed that infants did not belong in an institutional setting.
  
  
  It is hard to say whether the closing of Howard is an improvement or just a rearrangement of the status quo. On the whole, are more infants being quickly placed in foster homes than were in the past? I know that having too many infants at Child Haven was a major concern of the National Center for Youth Law, which had threatened a lawsuit. Some sort of accommodation must have been worked out to prevent a lawsuit, and I wonder what it was.
  
  
• I asked her the purpose of the St. Jude's children's home in Boulder City (a private organization). She said that it was chiefly for children with developmental difficulties, and she confirmed that DFS did place children there.
  
  
• A new electronic system has been implemented for handling fingerprints. Fingerprints are now taken by a machine in the DFS office and are conveyed directly to the FBI. (Processing still takes a couple of months, but that is the FBI's problem, not DFS's.) This effectively addresses my criticism of the earlier system.

• To address the support needs of foster parents, the Director said that she is establishing support groups at each of the four neighborhood centers. (I don't recall the timeframe.)
  
  
  While support groups may be useful to some foster parents, I don't think that most would participate in regular meetings. The most important kind of support is regular contact with the caseworker. Apart from this, I think that a simple peer system would be more helpful. It might work like this: As soon as someone becomes a foster parent, they receive the names and phone numbers of two or three present or former foster parents (or "mentors") who have agreed to answer questions.
  
  

We briefly discussed the institutional option for housing older children (My report wanted to expand Child Haven.), but there wasn't much for either of us to say. The Director said she was pursuing all options to address the current foster crisis, and the solution would be a spectrum of responses.

The Director was concerned with statistics (as she should be in her position). She said that when she took over duties from the state, she did not even know how many children there were in foster care. Now, after an audit, she has a better picture of what she is managing. She showed me a printout of the PowerPoint presentation she had recently given for the County Commissioners, giving a statistical snapshot of the children in her system. (I didn't have time to look at this for as long as I wanted.) She also showed me statistics indicating the explosion of cases entering the child protective system, which has outpaced the growth of the local population. I asked her if this was a result of the meth epidemic, and she thought that it was.

Here is a document that the Director gave me listing the 2004 Accomplishments of her department, which addresses some of the concerns in my report.

I described very briefly what my own goals were. I said that my first goal was to collect information on the child welfare system and put it on my website, www.ClarkCountyFosterCrisis.com. I said that as I collected data, the direction of my own efforts would become more clear. I said that my primary interest was philosophical. I said that we are surrounded by a world of tragedy, largely hidden from us, and DFS was a small window into that world. I said that I was trying to figure out, morally and ethically, how to deal with infinite tragedy.

I pointed out what I thought was the central fear of prospective foster parents, which I hoped to deal with on my website: Foster parents are afraid that they will bond with a child and the child will be doing well, and then the system pulls the child away and puts him back into the original destructive household. The Director seemed to appreciate this dilemma.

Glenn Campbell
6/10/05, 6/13/05

Las Vegas, Nevada foster care