Clark County Foster Care:

Crisis and Solutions

 

 

by Glenn Campbell

 

PO Box 30303

Las Vegas, NV 89173

 

 

www.ClarkCountyFosterCrisis.com

 

 

 

Version 1.08

May 31, 2005

 

 

 

 

NOTE: The Director of DFS has responded to this report (quite effectively). Here is a summary. Please don't read this report without also reading this summary. -- G.C.

Introduction

 

 

For years, Clark County has experienced a “foster care crisis.”  There are more abused and neglected children in state custody than foster families to house them.  Clark County’s interim care facility, Child Haven, is said to be overcrowded, as children wait for foster or adoptive placements that may never come.  At the same time, the quality of foster care in the county is being questioned.  The recent scalding death of an infant in foster care raises doubts about whether foster parents are being adequately screened and supervised.

 

The causes seem simple: inadequate funding and not enough foster parents.  Neither of these problems is likely to be solved anytime soon.  Nevada’s tax structure and gambling-oriented culture do not emphasize social conscience, while its traditional rootlessness and current methamphetamine epidemic assure a steady stream of children into the system.  This doesn’t mean that the foster crisis has no solutions, but they are subtle and structural and require a rethinking of what foster care is and what it is supposed to accomplish.

 

As a former foster parent, I have seen the system from the inside, and two observations stand out:

 

(1) When accepting new foster parents, the state makes no evaluation whatsoever of their parenting skills or appropriateness to the job.  To be sure, the application process is dauntingly complex, but it is focused only on collecting information and inspecting the physical home, with no judgments made about the parents themselves.

 

(2) Once foster parents are accepted and start taking children, they are given almost no supervision.  A caseworker visits the home only once a month at most, at a preannounced time, and in the meantime she can be difficult to reach and no other significant support system is available.

 

These two factors make the foster system highly vulnerable to abuse and catastrophe.  The occasional death or injury reported in the newspapers may be only the tip of the iceberg.  What does not appear in the news is unintentional emotional abuse by overwhelmed foster parents who have no qualifications for handling troubled children.  These children have already been abused and neglected by their birth parents.  Once the state takes control of them, it wants to turn them over to an under-supervised foster family where they may again be abused and neglected.  Of course, the system also has many caring and committed foster parents with the skills and experience to deal with troubled children, but the chance of a child getting one of them, under the current structure, is no better than a spin of the roulette wheel.

 

Clearly, the problems of foster care in Clark County are much deeper than they first appear.  In this report, I hope to describe the problems, based on my own experiences, and offer some workable solutions.  Recently, the management of child welfare has shifted from the state to the county.  This is a fresh opportunity to rethink the placement system and come up with solutions that are specifically adapted to Clark County and its unique circumstances.

 

 

 

Foster Parent Qualifications

 

 

Imagine a job that can pay over $3000 per month, tax free.  You have to apply for this position by filling out a lengthy application, but as long as the form is properly completed, you never have to go through a job interview, and no one is ever going to make a judgment about your abilities.  The only substantial requirement for employment is that you not have a serious criminal record.  Once you get the job, you can perform your duties any way you want, with almost no supervision. Your supervisor will visit you only once a month at most, and you will be given notice of these visits well in advance.  If you have a problem in the interim, you are expected to work it out as you see fit because your supervisor is too overwhelmed by other problems to be concerned with yours.

 

This sounds like an easy way to make money, and I suspect that many foster parents are motivated solely for this reason.  You take the money, store the product, pay out the minimum for maintenance and end up with a profit.  Unfortunately, the product is something fragile that does not respond well to static storage or minimum maintenance.  It becomes "difficult" and rebellious and demands more attention.  If the product is not cooperative, it is sent away, and a new product is brought in.  The only problems with this business model are the inconsistency of the product and its demand for self-esteem.

 

If you believe that most foster parents are more caring than this, you may be correct, but there is absolutely nothing in the application or management process to assure it.

 

From my own experience, the foster application process is a grueling ordeal. The application form is massive and intrudes into nearly every aspect of your life.  For political reasons, the form does not require your ethnicity, political affiliation, religion or sexual orientation, but virtually every other part of your personal and financial life must be thoroughly revealed and documented.  My wife and I had to provide a credit report, recent tax returns, shot records for our pets, fingerprints for every adult member of the household and countless other documents, disclosures and certifications that took us months to assemble. We were told that any deliberate deceptions or omissions on the form could result in criminal prosecution.

 

The focus of this process was “information collection,” primarily mandated by federal guidelines, but there was no indication that this information was actually used for anything or that anyone was making a judgment based upon it.  Most notably absent from the application process was an interview.  The home inspector sat down with us briefly at the end of the process while inspecting our residence, but her primary concern was the home itself and that certain physical requirements were met, like the presence of a certified fire extinguisher on every floor.  I seriously doubt that she had ever rejected anyone based on a judgment of their fitness as a parent.

 

The application process seemed to be a purely bureaucratic exercise, with no one making a responsible judgment about our parenting style, psychological profile or motivations for becoming foster parents.  There were a number of firm Federal requirements that could have excluded us.  Convicted child molesters could not be licensed (provided, of course, that they listed it on their form), but it appeared to me that just about everyone else who fulfilled the documentation requirements was accepted. Even the criminal background check was something of a joke:  We were asked to visit a police substation, where our fingerprints were placed on a card for an FBI search, but at the time the prints were taken, no one asked us for any form of ID.  We then took the card home and mailed the prints ourselves to the foster licensing office for processing.  Anyone could have given those fingerprints!

 

We had to attend a certain number of hours of required training, in which we sat in a classroom and listened to some presentations. The sessions were interesting and informative, but we were never tested on anything we learned.  There was no “failing” this class; for the purposes of the application, we just had to sit there, and the trainers signed a form at the end of each session to prove we had attended.

 

In the course of the training, we met an assortment of other prospective foster and adoptive parents, each of whom said a few words about themselves during the first session.  Some of the reasons people gave for seeking a foster license seemed naïve or strange.  One Hispanic woman said she was there because her four-year-old son had told her he wanted an older Black brother.  This struck me as bizarre: This adult was taking orders from a four-year-old in a blatantly racial request, probably based on something he saw on television.  Other people seemed personally lost and were apparently seeking foster care or adoption to try to give their lives meaning.  A few couples, I sensed, were trying to find a way to save their failing marriages.  Most people seemed to think they could handle a lot of foster children — not just one or two but maybe five or six — and some appeared to have no parenting experience whatsoever.  There was never any one-on-one counseling when a sensitive worker could ask them, “Is this really what you want to do?”

 

In short, people were becoming foster parents for the same sort of naïve, misguided and self-serving reasons that biological parents often give for having kids.  In America, no one has to obtain a license or explain their intentions to be able to have children.  The only required skill is the rudimentary one of uniting sperm with egg.  The Nevada foster system seems to adhere to the same libertarian philosophy: If someone fills out an application and sits through some classes, they are assumed to have adequate skills for parenting troubled children.

 

I believe that this philosophy is deeply flawed.  These children are in state custody because the state has forcibly removed them from their birth parents, usually because of some form of significant abuse.  When the government becomes the parent, explicitly usurping the rights of the natural ones, I believe that it is obligated to a higher standard of care than the original parents provided.  These children are also, by definition, already injured and are probably difficult to handle.  Every child in the system is “Special Needs,” and dealing with them requires, if not special training, then at least certain innate parenting skills that should be evaluated by a professional who understands these needs.

 

Looking at the people we met at foster training, I can imagine many of them getting in over their heads.  What starts out as a noble-sounding endeavor can get ground down quickly by the realities of real foster children and their needs.  A stay-at-home mom may see foster care as a way to make some money while being able to remain at home with her own kids.  The monthly stipend seems to be a lot at first, but it is quickly absorbed by the needs of the child with very little left as “profit.”  The mother, having committed herself to this career path, may then think that she needs to take in still more children to make ends meet.  Nearly every foster child has been grievously betrayed by adults in the past and probably requires much more attention and vigilance than the mother’s own children.  Some foster children are time bombs waiting to go off. For all but the most talented foster parents, each new child added to the household increases the tension level among all the members, perhaps creating a volatile mix that may destroy marriages or lead the parents to overlook their own standards of childcare and safety.  Press reports from Nevada and elsewhere are filled with archetypal accounts where a foster mother took on more troubled children than she could reasonably handle, with the approval and encouragement of the state, and ended up neglecting both her own children and the new ones.

 

 

 

Supervision

 

 

Child welfare, throughout America, has always been a government service that is notoriously underfunded and overstressed.  Nevada, with its volatile tax base and high itinerant population, is especially vulnerable.  Each caseworker at DFS (Department of Family Services) must handle far too many cases and cannot give each the attention it deserves.  The part of the system that is most likely to be shortchanged is the relationship between the caseworker and the foster parents.  With new cases, crises and court demands monopolizing a caseworker’s time, their inevitable tendency is to ignore the existing foster placements and assume that everything is “fine” if there are no direct complaints.  “We had no reports of any problems in the household,” is the typical response when a foster family makes the news.  What is rarely stated is the frequency of the caseworker’s visits or how active she was in the supervision of the placement.

 

In the five-and-a-half years that my wife and I were involved in foster care, we dealt with good and bad caseworkers.  The good ones juggled their caseloads with grace and creativity, always returned phone calls, and had smart, pragmatic advice for us whenever there was a crisis.  The bad ones simply didn’t care.  They didn’t return phone calls; we rarely saw them, and the cases they handled hardly seemed to move.  The only trouble with the good caseworkers is that they didn't  last.  They were either promoted and stopped handling cases, or they got frustrated and quit.  The bad caseworkers, however, seemed to hang around forever, both because they were entrenched in their jobs and were unlikely to be promoted and because they were so slow on the routine paperwork that cases never seemed to leave their possession.

 

To be fair, the demands on DFS caseworkers are enormous.  Apart from the crushing caseload and poor pay is the numbing stream of human tragedy that passes before their eyes.  If you truly care about each child, then it is impossible not to cry for some of them.  Often caseworkers have to send a child back to a birth parent who they know is not good for them.  Anyone who has been on the job for a few years can watch the painful evolution of good kids into drug abusers and career felons whose own children then start entering the system.  There are many victories where an abused child finds a happy home, but there are also many defeats where a case is closed but nothing really changes.  True empathy is a painful skill in an environment like this, and I sense that not many caseworkers can maintain it.  Many of them “burn out” and leave, while others burn out and don’t leave.

 

I have had the misfortune of dealing with too many child welfare workers whose emotions were totally detached from those of the children and families they were responsible for.  They dealt with each case with no more personal interest than car registrations or payroll records.  Their decisions were made for their own convenience or ego, with nothing but lip service given to the needs of the child, who they didn't really see.

 

In the conventional wisdom, government workers are different than those in private enterprise.  In business, employees are expected to prove themselves every day and will be fired if they don’t live up to their employer’s sometimes capricious expectations. Government workers, it is said, can never be fired:  The burden is on the supervisors to prove that the employee did something seriously wrong before they can be let go.  Cirque de Soleil would never tolerate mediocre acrobats, but the state and county government will.  This is frustrating enough when you are dealing with the DMV or Department of Taxation, but it becomes devastating and deadly when the lives of children are at stake.

 

The perennial underfunding of child welfare not only increases the density of the caseload; it also discourages the removal of underperforming workers.  If we get rid of a worker, the reasoning goes, who will take their place?  The Department should be thankful that anyone at all is willing to do the job under these difficult circumstances.  My own experience suggests that this is a shortsighted philosophy.  Underperforming workers move cases through the system at a snail’s pace and make poor placement and procedural decisions that can further delay the process.  Children under their supervision spend years in the system rather than months, and this ultimately costs the Department more money, apart from the unnecessary trauma to the child.

 

Exacerbating the problems of worker competence and foster parent supervision is DFS's pervasive culture of secrecy. Even in the case of a death in custody, the Department is reluctant to release the most basic information about its operations.  Government secrecy always starts for noble reasons — like "national security" or "to protect the children" — but inevitably it ends up being used to hide the mistakes of the people keeping the secrets and shield them from public oversight.

 

In the course of preparing this report, I called the main number at DFS with a simple request: I wanted to confirm the name of the cottage at Child Haven where infants are housed (Howard?).  I had been to this cottage myself several times but wasn't sure of the name on the building, which is usually that of the benefactor who funded it.  "We don't give out that information," I was told on the phone.  Furthermore, I was told that there was no Public Information Officer or anyone else I could contact to discuss this simple request.

 

Between the time that parental rights are terminated and an adoption is completed, the state is the legal parent of the child, and its statutory rights are absolute.  What is often forgotten is that the state is "us," the citizens who have hired the government to act on our behalf.  We have a right to know if the Department is adequately performing its duties.  We don't need to know the names of individual children or any other information that might reasonably place them in jeopardy, but we do have a right to understand the structures and processes by which these children are handled and be aware of mistakes and inadequacies.  Without reliable information, trusting DFS to do the best for our children is an exercise in blind faith.

 

 

 

Solutions

 

 

It is futile for me to suggest that the Department needs more money.  Of course it does.  The political realities of Nevada will always assure that child welfare never gets the attention of, say, the opening of the latest megaresort or the widening of a roadway.  It is also unrealistic to assume that recruiting efforts are going to yield substantial new numbers of high-quality foster parents.  It is difficult to overcome Las Vegas’ natural self-centered culture, so the Department has to work with what it has.

 

If there are too many children in Child Haven and not enough foster families to take them in, what is the logical response?  You expand Child Haven.

 

I have been to Child Haven many times and have always been impressed. Kids who are old enough to walk and talk are very well cared for.  The children are given a comfortable, highly structured environment managed by an attentive staff that truly cares about each child.  If you believe that a child will be scarred by this experience, think of this: Well-to-do parents often send their children to summer camp, where they are essentially raised by counselors for several months.  That is what Child Haven feels like, except that camp lasts all year.  Children are organized by sex and age group into separate “cottages,” house-like buildings where they are attended by a small, stable group of professional caregivers.  The caregivers are totally focused on their children, as much or more than any parent, and while they are on-duty, they are not distracted by anything like television or their own needs.  They know what their kids’ favorite toys are and what each kid is worried about.  They are there because they enjoy the job, and they were extensively evaluated before they got it.  There is continuous interaction between supervisors and caregivers and rarely any accidents or calamities.

 

A century ago, a facility like this was called an “orphanage,” and it might have been run by nuns wielding rulers, enforcing the philosophy of “spare the rod and spoil the child.”  Orphanages have received a lot of bad press in the past, much of it justified.  In the middle of the 20th Century, there was an “enlightened” movement to shut down the orphanages and shift the housing of neglected children to foster families, ordinary households in the community where they would presumably enjoy better care.  Families were good, the new philosophy said; institutions were bad.

 

The only trouble with the new foster system was that the state lost almost all “quality control.” The institutions were at least regulated and supervised, while the foster families were not.  Instead of nuns wielding rulers in one known location, you had foster parents wielding rulers and more insidious psychological weapons in places and ways that were completely invisible to the state.  The foster care system was another exercise in blind faith:  You turned a child over to a random family and trusted in God that he would receive good care.  This inevitably lead to horror stories where a child was removed from abusive birth parents only to be placed with even more abusive foster parents.

 

The abuses of the past have been dealt with at the federal level by increasing the documentation requirements for foster parents.  The application process has thus become more onerous, discouraging many good recruits while not addressing the underlying flaws of foster care.  No one seems to challenge the simplistic assumption of “families good, institutions bad.”  If Child Haven is a guide, then institutions have greatly improved.  There is now a reliable consensus in the psychological community about what makes a good caregiver and how to handle troubled children, but little of this knowledge filters down to the foster families, who are left to regulate themselves.  The caregivers in institutions are in essence professional parents who have a chance to hone their skills over time under the guidance of other professionals.  No one uses rulers anymore and even “time out” has evolved into a more subtle response.

 

Expanding Child Haven doesn’t require any major regulatory changes.  You just add more cottages.  The buildings themselves should be easy to fund.  Child Haven is a “golden" charity that everybody loves.  It would be difficult to get a casino or wealthy individual to fund invisible improvements to foster care, but a new cottage at Child Haven, with your name on it, is something immediately satisfying to a donor.

 

In a recent news article, the head of DFS claimed that the cost of foster care is $591 per child per month, compared to $3,750 to keep a child for a month at Child Haven.  I question the validity of both of these numbers — that the total cost of foster care is really that low, or that institutional costs are that high.  If the building itself is donated, then the major difference between the two ought to be labor, and with the staffing I saw at Child Haven, I can't imagine how the larger number could be reached.  In any case, there ought to be ways that the institutional costs can be brought down, by economy of scale if nothing else.

 

A long-term goal might be to open a second facility -- call it “Child Haven II.”  If the original Child Haven is intended for short placements of days or weeks, the new facility could be specifically designed for longer-term stays measured in months, while also aiming for lower operating costs.  The second facility could be less restrictive in its connections with the community, offer a more stable “family” with less turnover, and be more concerned about a child’s long-term well-being. I don't know whether this should be a public or private facility, but I would hope that the summer camp atmosphere could be preserved. No one would dare call this an “orphanage” or even suggest publicly that placement here could be permanent, but if certain children ended up living here for a very long time, the institution would be prepared to handle it.

 

In a centralized facility, caseworker visits are much less problematic: A worker can see several clients in a single visit without having to drive all over the vast Las Vegas Valley — which I assume is absorbing a lot of caseworker time right now.  While it is not a replacement for an adoptive home, a well-managed institution can provide a high level of consistent care that is probably better, on average, than random foster care.  An institution might also be able to actively prepare a child for adoption, perhaps by improving his social skills and addressing some of his psychological issues.

 

The one area where Child Haven falls short is the care of infants who are not yet walking.  In the infant cottage (name?), diapers are changed and babies are fed, but most infants don’t receive the kind of intensive cuddling and talking to that are required for healthy development.  While visiting Child Haven, I learned of a nascent program that invites volunteers into the cottage (after a background check, of course) to play with the infants as a mother would.  This is a very appealing activity — all the fun of playing with babies without having to change diapers — and I wonder why the program hasn’t been publicized.

 

 

 

The Role of Foster Care

 

 

In the current system, there are two kinds of foster placements: adoptive and temporary. For a child whose parents’ rights have been terminated, the mantra of Juvenile Court is “permanent placement.”  The system wants to find adoptive homes for these kids as quickly as possible, and foster licensing in this case is intended only as an interim step.  The placement may or may not work out, but the initial intention of the caseworkers and foster parents is that this will become an adoption if possible.  Some of the parents are relatives of the child and obviously know them very well, and in these cases, the foster licensing process is mainly an annoying formality.

 

The other kind of placement is not intended to be permanent.  The foster parents are primarily motivated by money and do not intend to adopt (which would make the payments go away).  My greatest discomfort is with these temporary placements. The whole concept, I feel, is a psychological minefield.  When taking the child in, the foster family is implicitly telling him, “We will let you stay here, but we don’t want to keep you.”  If some children in the family get to stay while others know they will have to leave, this automatically creates tensions and a “pecking order” among the children.  These placements also run the risk of becoming warehouse operations where the foster parents do not really care about the kids, only the money.  Foster care is "bargain basement" housing for less than $20 a day, and state often gets exactly what it pays for.

 

There are many conscientious and capable foster parents who provide only temporary care, but their skills should be actively proven, not just assumed.   If this is a form of employment for them, then they should be critically interviewed and intelligently evaluated before they get the job, and they should be actively supervised thereafter, like any other professional staff.  To make the relationship sustainable, they should also be paid better than the pre-adoption stipend.  If $3,750 is the alternative cost in Child Haven, then professional-quality home care ought to get more than $591.  In my mind, it is still more reliable to leave most temporary placements at Child Haven, where supervision and quality control are less of an issue.  Temporary foster placement can then be made only for special circumstances — for example, if a child is not doing well at Child Haven and the foster parent has a proven skill that might help.

 

For all foster applicants, there needs to be a meaningful evaluation of psychology and skills, not just a processing of documents.  Federal guidelines define the minimum requirements for licensing, but that doesn’t mean that the state or county can’t set higher standards.  In spite of the current shortage of foster parents, I believe that the minimum requirements should be strengthened, not loosened, most notably to include credible human judgment in the process. I believe, for example, that there should be a one-on-one interview before the application is filled out, in which a professional interviewer makes a meaningful judgment about whether the applicant is suitable for the program.  This preliminary step might eliminate some of the kooks, lost souls and other dubious applicants who are drawn to foster care for irrational or inconsistent reasons.  If Child Haven was capable of handling more children, then there would be less pressure to indiscriminately accept all foster candidates. 

 

 

 

Competence Testing

 

 

With more responsibilities now shifted from state to local control, there may be an opportunity for a more entrepreneurial spirit at DFS.  Caseworkers, like foster parents, should be required to prove their competence continuously. With an overwhelming workload, casework is a juggling act that is not suitable for everyone.  If a caseworker can’t handle all the balls at once, then they shouldn’t be juggling.  There are many objective ways to test acrobatic ability.  For example, if a caseworker consistently falls behind on routine paperwork or is repeatedly fined by the Court for delays, then they may not be suited to the position.  Unfortunately, there is no objective way to test for "caring."  The only people who can judge this are supervisors who themselves care about the children under their supervision.  They need to be empowered by management to make hiring and firing decisions based only on this human judgment.

 

Above all, there has to be guidance from the top.  If management decides that it is going to seek competence above all else and that it will ruthlessly purge inefficient and uncaring workers, then quality could improve very quickly.  If management does not have the courage to tame its own organization, than the organization will continue to rule itself according to the Peter Principle: “Every employee tends to rise to the level of his incompetence.”

 

Individual and organizational efficiency at DFS has a direct impact on overcrowding at Child Haven and in the foster system.  Nevada currently has one of the worst records among the states for moving cases through the system.  If, for example, it takes 24 months to terminate parental rights rather than 12 months, this effectively doubles the number of children who are trapped in the system before adoption is even possible and greatly increases the need for foster care.  DFS does not mention this factor when publicizing the shortage of foster families.

 

 

Conclusion

 

 

The apparent "foster care crisis" is not what it seems.  It isn’t a simple case of not having enough foster families.  Organizational inefficiency may be overburdening the system.  The various institutional options for placement have been neglected, while the recruiting of foster parents has been indiscriminate.  Poorly screened and undersupervised foster families may ultimately cost more, both in monetary terms and in damage to the children, than no foster parents at all.

 

If Clark County has had a shortage of foster families for years, then maybe it is time to face reality:  This is how it is going to be.  Maybe other states have an endless supply of high-quality foster care, but not us.  The solutions that work for the rest of the country, like emphasizing foster care above all else, aren't necessarily our solutions.

 

Although Nevada's laws and federal requirements are similar to those of other states, our culture is different.  Las Vegas has a unique demographic profile of both child abuse offender and child victim.  It has a certain community of potential volunteers — always smaller than the rest of the country’s — who are motivated by some appeals and not motivated by others. It also has a unique economy with a certain kind of philanthropic donor.  DFS has been treating Las Vegas as though it was "Anytown USA," and I think that this viewpoint, in part, is why it has a foster crisis year after year.

 

We have more than just files and paperwork at stake.  If the child welfare system is not working as efficiently as possible with the resources it has, then children will continue to be unnecessarily abused by the system that is supposed to protect them.

 

 

[End.]

 

 

Note: This document may be revised as new information becomes available.  The latest version can be found at: www.ClarkCountyFosterCrisis.com