Orphan Trains

by Stephen O'Connor

  The recognition that children cannot be treated as an identical mass whose problems can be solved by identical treatments was one of the factors leading to the founding of the Rauhe Haus in 1832, and that inspired even the largest American orphanages to claim in their publicity circulars that they provided their inmates with a level of attention equivalent to what they would find in families. And of course, it was the recognition that no institution, even those on the “cottage” system, could provide true individual attention that led Charles Loring Brace to institute his Emigration Plan. But as was recognized by Brace’s critics and substantiated and elaborated by psychologists and child welfare experts throughout the twentieth century, simply dumping children into families does not, all on its own, constitute individualized treatment. In modern foster care, an effort is supposed to be made not only to ensure the basic competence and decency of the foster families but to make sure that their capacities, interests, and other traits match those of the children placed with them. Unfortunately, 99 percent of foster care placements are made in such a hurry that a true match between child and parent is impossible.

  In a typical situation, a caseworker goes into a home and decides to remove a child right away. The child, of course, is distraught, not only on account of the removal but often because of the issues that led to the removal. Nobody wants such a child to have to spend the night in an institution or—as often happens to teenagers, who are particularly hard to place—in the offices of the child welfare agency itself, so placement workers contact potential foster parents immediately, sometimes before the child has even been brought to the agency, and generally without any more knowledge than the child’s sex, age, and race. As a result, children with severe psychological or medical needs are often placed with parents who are utterly incapable of handling them. At the same time, parents who might have the strength, training, and desire to handle such children end up being given children with only a normal array of problems and idiosyncrasies. Mismatches on this order are part of the reason that 54 percent of New York foster children undergo the trauma of switching places at least once during their tenure in the system, and 7 percent of children switch placements five times or more.21

  Given the hurry in which foster children must be placed, matching children to homes can never be perfect, but it can be made worse—sometimes disastrously so—by budget cuts, as New York City’s history illustrates. After averaging 21,000 for most of the 1960s, the number of children in foster care in New York began to rise in the early 1970s, peaking at 29,000 in 1975.22 The city responded by placing a new emphasis on keeping families together rather than removing children. This policy change no doubt seemed progressive and humane during that decidedly liberal era, but it also considerably reduced the amount of money the city spent on foster care boarding fees—a more than welcome side effect given that in 1975 the city was also experiencing the worst financial crisis of its history.

  Whatever its true inspiration, the new policy of family preservation encouraged a steady decline in New York’s foster care population, which reached a low of 16,230 in 1984.23 Then came the crack epidemic and the crisis in homelessness, which drove the foster care population to an all-time high of nearly 50,000 in 1991,24 the beginning of yet another budget crisis. The city responded to the situation by redoubling the emphasis on family preservation. With the best of intentions, but little foresight, Mayor David Dinkins also hired hundreds of new caseworkers in 1990, only to fire most of them in the 1992 budget crunch. During this same period the Child Welfare Administration tried to compensate for its chronic cash shortage by submitting $37 million worth of false casework reports in order to make it look as if the city were substantially in compliance with federal regulations, and thus eligible for incentive payments.25 With all of this confusion and corruption, the city muddled on, and gradually the crisis lessened. The number of children in foster care began to taper off, and more important, the number of possible placements reached a rough balance with the number of children who needed them.

  All of this changed in 1995, the year of the “block grants.” The first item of business for the new, decidedly conservative Congress elected in 1994 had been budget cuts, with the bulk of those cuts falling on social service programs. The spoonful of sugar by which this Congress got the states to swallow the bitter pill of reduced funding was the institution of the concept of “block grants.” The idea was that while states would be given less money, there would also be fewer restrictions on how they could spend that money. In theory, they could fund their most effective and important programs more generously while cutting supposed “fat”—those programs that were ineffective or insignificant. But in the final analysis, all New York State’s “Family and Children’s Services Block Grant” really amounted to was a cut of $151 million in the funds available for these services. In response, the city not only made steep child welfare staff cuts but also reduced the boarding fees paid foster parents; the latter cut, in turn, caused a steep decline in the number of families willing to take foster children. This situation only became worse the following year, when a second tier of federal and state budget cuts reduced child welfare funds by an additional $176 million.26

  The decline in the number of available placements for foster children might never have reached crisis proportions had it not been for the death of six-year-old Elisa Izquierdo. It is hard to imagine a case that could more graphically illustrate the tragic shortcomings of New York’s system for protecting children. Elisa’s teachers, doctors, and neighbors had reported their suspicion that she was being abused by her parents to the Child Welfare Administration (CWA) on numerous occasions. A cursory investigation was made into her case, but ultimately, and despite new reports of abuse—some of which simply seem to have gotten lost—Elisa was allowed to remain with parents who, over a period of months, beat her, sexually assaulted her, forced her to drink ammonia and eat her own excrement, and finally bludgeoned her to death in November 1995.27 When the crime was uncovered, the media were filled with pictures of the big-eyed waif and the shocking testimony of the teachers and doctors who had tried to get help for her. Newspaper editorialists conducted a thoroughly justified excoriation of the CWA for its failure to do its job.

  All of this occurred during a decidedly different political environment than had prevailed in New York for the previous decades. The city had a new Republican mayor, Rudolph Giuliani. Newt Gingrich was in Washington, blaming welfare mothers for their own poverty and saying that the best thing for poor children was to take them away from their intractably immoral families and put them into orphanages. In this climate Elisa Izquierdo’s death resulted in a radical reversal of child welfare strategy. City caseworkers were encouraged to remove children if there was even the slightest suspicion that they were in danger, and “family preservation”—villainized as “naive,” “liberal,” and “cruel”—became a decidedly less important goal.

  Unfortunately, this policy shift caused a huge surge in the number of children needing foster care just at the point when there were fewer foster parents to take them. Many more children had to spend the night sleeping on pushed-together chairs and on the floor of the newly renamed Administration for Children’s Services offices on Laight Street, and residential psychiatric services became crowded with children who didn’t particularly need psychological counseling but had no place else to go. The policy shift’s most serious consequence, however, was that child welfare agencies rushed a whole new crop of foster parents into service without subjecting them to adequate screening or giving them adequate training. The result was a rise in the number of children abused and killed while in foster care—among them Caprice Reid.

  Caprice’s story begins in 1983 when Betty Coker, a foster parent affiliated with the Children’s Aid Society, adopted a boy and a girl who had been her foster children. Two years later she reversed the adoption and put the children back in foster care. The boy told a city caseworker that Coker had physically and emotionally abused hi
m, but no one ever investigated his complaint. By this time, Coker was no longer working with the CAS.

  Eleven years later, in February 1996, a caseworker with Little Flower Children’s Services discovered that a group of brothers being cared for by Betty Coker and her daughter, Patricia Coker, had not been washed in weeks, and that the boys’ sisters were dressed in stained underpants and shirts smeared with food. Little Flower banned the two women from serving as foster parents with their agency. But only a few months later the Cokers applied to be foster parents with another agency, Louise Wise Services. When this new agency requested evaluations from the Cokers’ previous agencies, Little Flower apparently responded with only a tepid rendition of the events that had led them to ban the Cokers from their roster of foster parents. And the Children’s Aid Society, not knowing of Betty Coker’s adopted son’s complaint to a city caseworker, gave her a strong enough recommendation that Louise Wise decided to take the two women on.

  On July 22, 1996, three-year-old Caprice Reid and her three brothers were placed with the Cokers. In March 1997 Betty Coker threatened to attack Caprice’s biological mother in the Brooklyn Family Court, but this outbreak prompted no investigation of the Cokers’ home. The children were left where they were. Nothing at all was done.

  Then in June 1997 the Cokers tied Caprice to a chair, refused to feed her for four days, and beat her with a stick until she had bruises all over her body, could not walk, and finally died.28

  Although the worst of the placement shortage has passed, New York still has many fewer foster care “beds” than it has children to put in them. Michael Wagner, who is in charge of coordinating placements at the Children’s Aid Society, said that during any given week he gets an average of fifteen requests for foster care placements from the ACS but has only five openings to offer, and these are generally unsuitable for the calls that come in: mostly for hard-to-place cases, large groups of siblings, sick infants, or suicidal teenagers.29

  Despite such difficulties, most frontline child welfare workers feel more comfortable with the new child protection directive—epitomized by the slogan “When in doubt, pull ’em out.” Rightly or wrongly, caseworkers believe that they have more control when they have removed a child from her parents and placed her in the care of paid employees of the state, and that this control translates into greater safety for the child and, not incidentally, for the caseworkers themselves. But despite this general sympathy with the latest directive, almost every frontline worker I spoke to voiced resentment at the constant shifting of city policies. When debating the pros and cons of child protection versus family preservation, most of these workers share the opinion of Nicholas Scoppetta, whom Mayor Giuliani chose to lead the Administration for Children’s Services and enforce his new policy. “[T]his debate is a phony issue and a specious one,” Scoppetta said. “It’s not whether you err on the side of protecting families or protecting children but whether you accurately assess the needs of the child and the family.”30

  The debate is phony and the policy initiatives promoting either side in the debate are, at best, of limited effectiveness because they do not touch on the most essential element of child welfare work: treating the child as an individual. What matters is not whether the mass of children tend to fare better under a policy of removal or family preservation, but assessing whether any individual child would be better off in a foster home or left with his parents. And then what matters is providing this child and his birth or foster family with the services that will enable them—not the mass of children or families—to achieve their best possible outcome. When politicians, in front of TV cameras, proclaim major child welfare policy initiatives, they may earn a few percentage points in popularity polls and a favorable editorial or two, but all they get from frontline child welfare workers, even those who agree with their position, is a dismissive grunt or a cynical shrug of the shoulders. These workers know that almost nothing politicians do makes helping their clients any easier, and that those few improvements that do come along tend to be undone by the next administration, or the next budget crisis. They know that all most changes mean is more pointless forms to fill out.

  What these workers need to do the job our society ostensibly wants them to do are lower caseloads, better training, adequate support services (including reliable computerized data banks), and massive cuts in paperwork and inefficient midlevel management. To be fair, Nicholas Scoppetta has made a terrific effort against formidable odds to meet some of these needs. But even with his reductions, New York’s caseloads remain at least 50 percent higher than the Child Welfare League’s ideal.31 The extra training Scoppetta now requires of caseworkers (forty-eight as opposed to twenty days in the classroom, and nine months of instructional supervision)32 is no substitute for a master’s degree in social work and still leaves frontline caseworkers largely uninformed about such topics as domestic violence, substance abuse, crisis management, the needs of adolescents, and even the services available to help families in crisis.33 And while Scoppetta has raised the average pay of caseworkers, it still remains well below that of sanitation workers. Finally, despite much talk about bringing the ACS’s computer system into the twentieth century, thus far the city’s child welfare records are kept on twenty-six separate systems that cannot talk to one another.

  As for providing children and their families with the support services they need to get on their feet (addiction therapy, psychological counseling, and so on), Scoppetta’s latest initiative, neighborhood-based foster care, seems a step in the right direction and has considerable sympathy among child welfare professionals. But it is hard to understand how he will be able to disperse the city’s relatively centralized foster care and related social services throughout every neighborhood and keep his promise that the initiative will not cost the taxpayer an extra penny. What he is proposing is essentially a massive reduplication of effort. Instead of several big centralized service providers, there will be many smaller ones scattered throughout the city. At the very least this is going to require a considerable rise in real estate expenditures. And likewise, there is going to have to be a substantial escalation of personnel and equipment costs if these scattered centers—and the neighborhood-based foster care initiative itself—are going to be something more than hollow facades.

  For more than a century we have known that we should monitor placements well and take care to ensure that foster children—or orphan train riders—are placed in decent homes. For more than a century we have known that every child’s needs are different and that, therefore, every child needs a different sort of treatment—and also that every child needs to feel that we care about her for who she is, and not as one of many. At least since the dawn of wage labor we have known that if you need someone to do a difficult and important job, you should pay that person accordingly and only hire the most highly qualified and educated people. We know that we should do all of these things, and we can do them—some of them better now than ever before—but we don’t do them. At least, we don’t do them anywhere nearly as well as we could.

  This is a choice. It is a choice based primarily on money. Yes, money will not solve all of the problems of the child welfare system. It would be simple fantasy to assume that even an ideal system could benefit every child who came into contact with it—or even save the life of every child who was in mortal danger. And certainly there is a lot that can be done to root out inefficiency and corruption in our present system. But to imply that by making a system completely efficient and legitimate—if even that were possible—we would free up enough cash to handle all the current problems of child welfare is no less of a fantasy.

  The simple truth is that if we are going to have a child welfare system that does everything we know it can do, and that ostensibly we want it to do, we are going to have to spend more money. There is no way that reducing corruption and inefficiency is going to save more than the cost of the higher salaries necessary to attract a greater number of better-qualified caseworkers, th
erapists, lawyers, administrators, and other professionals to child welfare work. Nor will it offset the cost of funding family services well enough to do the jobs they are designed for or, finally, the cost of instituting and continually upgrading an integrated computer system that would allow all workers involved with a particular child access to all of the information available and necessary to adequately assess that child’s needs and to act on that assessment.

  We may believe that the sacredness of children and families is a fundamental American value. We may shake our heads and even shed a tear every time we hear of a child murdered by parents or foster parents whose true danger child welfare agencies failed to assess or act upon. And we may murmur over the newspaper at breakfast, or in front of the television at night, “This is appalling. This shouldn’t happen. Something ought to be done.” But when it comes time to open up our wallets, we say no. And when we go to the ballot box, we say no.