Glenn Campbell at the Health and Human Services Committee
hearing. He was actually talking to a television monitor on
the floor in front of him. (The hearing was held in Carson
City but teleconferenced to Las Vegas,
where Campbell
appeared.)
On March 12,
2007,
child welfare activist Glenn Campbell
testified,
or attempted to testify,
at a public hearing
before the Health and Human Services Committee of the Nevada
Assembly. He was the only person opposing a bill
(AB147)
that would
make it illegal for the Clark County Department of Family
Services to keep children under the age of six at its
emergency shelter. He only got two minutes
into his testimony when the Chairwoman Sheila
Leslie cut him off. A heated exchange between the two then
followed.
You can hear Campbell's 4½-minute
testimony—including his conflict with Leslie—in
the audio that plays in the background of this page. (Turn
on your speakers! The audio may take a minute or more to start,
depending on your connection speed. If you hear nothing,
you
can try playing the WindowsMedia file here.)
The testimony is routine for 2 minutes,
then the fireworks begin. PLEASE NOTE: In Campbell's speech,
he gets mixed up in a couple
of places between what he is opposing and supporting, saying
the opposite of what he means.
Given that this was the only opposition offered to
the bill, shouldn't Campbell have been allowed to speak? The
chairwoman seems not to grasp the purpose of public hearings
and apparently doesn't believe that reasoned opposition
should be expressed at them. She gave Campbell "two minutes"
to state his entire opposition. (A summary of what Campbell
WOULD HAVE SAID,
had he been given the chance,
is found below.)
The Bill
The bill in question is AB147,
which would make it illegal for a child welfare worker to
place children under 6 in group care — primarily Child
Haven,
Clark County's emergency shelter for abused and
neglected children. Here is the text
of the bill.
An array of witnesses spoke in favor of the bill,
including the Governor of Nevada and
the director of Clark County Family services,
as well as representatives of the ACLU,
the Youth Law Center
and the union representing county
employees. Given all of the voices in support of this bill,
Leslie apparently felt that an opposing viewpoint would be
disruptive.
The hearing itself was reported in a Mar.
13 article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal,
which
at least acknowledged that opposition existed....
The bills were opposed by one public speaker. Glenn
Campbell,
who runs a Web site that spotlights Clark County
Family Court,
said they would weaken local control of
services and take away decision-making authority from
workers closest to the problems.
[Audio testimony by DFS director Tom Morton in support of
the bill is found
below.]
Campbell's Opposition
Here are the main points of Campbell's opposition,
HAD HE
BEEN ALLOWED TO EXPRESS IT:
The law would unnecessarily limit the discretion
of local counties to make the best placement for each child in
imperfect circumstances.
No one seems to have given any consideration to what the negative
affects of this bill might be.
The conditions at Child Haven have already improved,
so
the crisis that prompted the bill has abated.
The Director of DFS, Tom Morton, supports this bill
(see below),
so why is a law even
necessary? Judging by his testimony, Morton is going to try to
keep kids under 6 out of Child Haven regardless of whether
the law is passed. Isn't it wise to give him a chance to
work out a local solution before the legislature imposes
its own solution from the outside?
Not all congregate (group) care is bad. Well-run group
care is better than poor foster care. In Clark County,
there are a wide range of options, and the simple formula of
"group = bad, foster = good" doesn't always hold for every
child and placement. There
is no way for the Legislature to predict what the best
solution is going to be for every child in every possible
circumstance.
Clark County currently has a crisis in foster care.
There aren't enough good foster parents to serve the need;
training is limited and supervision is weak. This bill would
dump more burdens on the foster care system that it may not
be prepared to handle. This could result in continued
quality-control and monitoring problems in foster
care—and perhaps an actual drop in the overall quality of
care.
Most of the children who have died or disappeared lately
have been in foster care, not group care. When children die
in group care, it is usually for understandable medical
reasons, never direct abuse.
Under edict to keep young children out of Child Haven,
caseworkers may feel pressured to place these children in
inappropriate foster homes where care is worse that Child
Haven would be.
No law that the Legislature can pass will magically
generate high-quality foster parents that are implicitly
required by this law.
The foster care system, at present, is unselective in
recruiting families. Nearly everyone who applies for a
foster license and completes the rudimentary training
program gets approved, regardless of their parenting skills
or philosophy. If you went to a foster care recruiting fair
in Las Vegas, you would meet many scary-looking candidates
who seem deeply deluded about what foster parenting is; yet,
nearly all of those who complete the licensing process and
background check are accepted. As long as the need for
foster parents is acute—as the new law will
guarantee—then DFS cannot afford to be more selective.
(As indicated by recent deaths and disappearances,
marginal foster parents are a much bigger nightmare to the
agency—and cause far more injuries and
deaths—than congregate care.)
Unlike Child Haven, foster families are invisible and
don't make the news unless a child dies. Because we can't
see them, we in the public tends to have a misty view of these
families as perfect households. In fact, foster families are sometimes
as messed up as the households that the kids are being taken
away from.
In most foster placements, caseworkers are not required
to visit the home more than once a month. In the interim,
the caseworkers have no idea how the foster parents are
caring for the kids.
Las Vegas is different than other cities in the country.
For one thing its level of civic involvement is much lower,
which impacts the foster care pool. It is unwise to equate
Las Vegas to other big cities and claim that their solutions
are best for us. To do the best for its children in the
ongoing child welfare crisis, Las Vegas needs the
flexibility to craft its own solutions from an imperfect mix
of foster and group care.
Simply the fact that a place like Child Haven (or
similar shelters in other cities) has been emptied out does
not prove that the children are being better cared for. It
only means that they are "out of sight, out of mind" in
places where the agency can't monitor them very well.
Group care is relatively well-regulated and is
supervised on a daily basis. At least the agency knows
where the kids are and how they are being treated. As a
practical matter, it is also much easier for caseworkers to
visit children in one central facility rather than scattered
around the city. A central location means that caseworkers
spend less time travelling and more time attending to the
needs of their children.
The presentation at the hearing by the Youth Law Center
(which is not to be confused with the National Center for
Youth Law, now suing the county) appears to be deeply flawed
in both science and logic. The research they were citing
about long-term damage to children does not properly apply
to short-term stays in group care. The Youth Law Center
represents a partisan view and is not the same as a
qualified psychologist or sociologist. Their presentation,
with its dramatic photos, tugged at the heartstrings, but it
was based on dubious reasoning.
The scientific research is unequivocal that LONG stays
in congregate care are bad for children. However, there is
NO SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE that short stays are any more
damaging than short stays in foster care.
At the hearing, no qualified psychologist testified as
to the actual damage to children in short term congregate care.
For a SHORT term stay of a couple of nights, which is
going to more traumatic to a child from a troubled family:
Staying in a daycare-like setting with other children or
moving in with a whole new family much better than theirs,
bonding with them, then being forced to leave?
Much attention was given at the hearing to importance
of a child bonding to one caregiver. This is certainly true
in the long term, but is it really what we want for short
stay? For a visit of only a couple of days, it doesn't seem
beneficial for a child to bond with one person only to have
that bond to be instantly and irreparably broken. Isn't
that just going to be another failed relationship in the
child's life? Ultimately, we want most of these children to
bond with the parents they are going back to, not their
intermediate caregivers.
This bill appears to have arisen from the recent Child
Death Review, but there is NOTHING in this bill that
addresses child deaths or injuries. It could even ENCOURAGE
deaths or injuries by pushing more children into
inappropriate and ill supervised foster care.
It is ironic that many legislators support both this
bill and the all-day kindergarten proposal also being
considered this session. ISN'T KINDERGARTEN A FORM OF GROUP
CARE FOR CHILDREN UNDER 6? The only substantial difference
between kindergarten and well-run group care is that
children in group care get to spend the night.
Several years ago, the legislature transferred foster
care control from the state to the county, on the theory
that the counties were closer to their own problems and
were better equipped to deal with them. This bill is
reversing that trend, effectively taking discretion AWAY
from the counties and putting it in the hands of the
legislature,
which meets only every two years and can't respond to local
needs.
This bill constitutes "micromanagement" of local child
welfare by the Legislature. Assembly members, upset by the
overcrowding and child-death scandals of last year (now
largely abated), feel that they must do something. This is
one of several SCAPEGOAT BILLS that make legislators feel
they have taken positive action when in fact they are only
making matters worse.
NOTE: When we talk about "foster care" above and in the
newsletter, we
are referring collectively to both long-term foster care and
short term home placements (which are called "shelter homes"
by the agency). Although these programs are administered
separately, we see them as drawing on the
same set of available homes. Any increased demand for
shelter homes is going to impact the quantity and quality
of available long-term homes.
You can hear Campbell's 4½-minute
testimony—including his conflict with Leslie—in
the audio that plays in the background of this page. (Turn
on your speakers! The audio may take a minute or more to start,
depending on your connection speed. If you hear nothing,
you
can try playing the WindowsMedia file here.)
