June 30, 2008
Worth Reading
And worth sharing with your friends and family.
State senator Val Stevens believes that the state's
bureaucracy, the Child Protective
Services, has failed children again and again.
A sample from the column:
As ranking Republican on the Senate Human Services and Corrections Committee, I've heard heartbreaking
stories of mismanagement at the Department of Social and Health Services for years.
I suffered through the play-by-play details of how 4-year-old Sirita Sotelo was beaten to death by her
stepmother months after she was taken from a safe foster family and returned to her birth father.
She has more examples, all of them hard to read.
And she makes this point, which I found fascinating:
In an early attempt to force these agencies to improve, the 2001 Legislature mandated that the Children's
Administration seek national accreditation. Earlier this month the agency simply withdrew from the
accreditation process because it couldn't meet the Council of Accreditation's benchmarks for excellence.
When I discussed these problems a year or so ago, a commenter whose name I have forgotten (my apologies)
made a powerful point: When Florida's corresponding bureaucracy had similar problems, "mainstream"
reporters held then Governor Jeb Bush responsible. And he improved the agency. We don't have
to accept the failures at CPS.
(Oh, and kudos to Mark Trahant for publishing this op-ed.)
Posted by Jim Miller at June 30, 2008
05:21 PM | Email This
1. Yet Val Stevens lines up in lock step with the anti family feminists at every turn to block shared parenting.
Time for Val to go.
2. Here is the dirty little secret that nobody wishes to address... A foster child cannot be returned to the home of an abusive parent without a court order, that is an order from a Judge in the dependency court.
DSHS Social Workers nearly always wish to err on the side of caution. In the vast majority of cases that a child is returned to the home of an abusive parent, it is because a Judge has ordered the child to be returned to the abusive situation against the reccomendation of the assigned Social Worker!
I have no idea how the Judiciary has managed to duck the blame for so long, mostly a lazy press that are spoon fed their stories I suppose.
By the way, the dependency cases are held in open court, so you can sit in on these cases and see for yourself if you like.
3. OMG, CPS couldn't even pass the Council on Accreditation? COA wouldn't help with caring for kids anyway. They are all about financial accountability and record keeping on the child care side. It wouldn't help with the wacky policies and brain dead judges. Our society needs to make changes to help families be less toxic. That isn't CPS's job. CPS should be protecting the kids from the toxic families. The best way to do that is to place the kids for adoption. Drug addicts shouldn't be parents. Unfortunately CPS is set up to keep kids and families in services for as long as possible. Accreditation won't stop that perverted philosophy and financial structure.
What a joke. What a tragedy.
Hairy
4. So how is it on one hand that conservatives can be in favor of cutting social services, but on the other they can decry the performance of an underfunded agency?
5. Virtually all of the local offices were accredited by COA (the first step towards statewide accreditation) when somebody (I will presume the attorneys on the Braam case) informed COA about the department's supposed shortcomings related to Braam. COA did not want their name associated with all of the controversy surrounding Braam and raised the bar so high that there was no way the department could become accredited. This is why the department (DSHS) pulled out of accreditation.
6. 4.
Kid,
Isn't that always the case. We are incompetent, so give us more money so that we can be even more incompetent. Typical government bureaucratic cop out.
7. It may be that some legislators are finally beginning to see that the "village" raising children is not so realistic after all. There are many different dynamics possible for families, not all are perfect, the best one is children being raised by both caring parents. Val would be better off trying to foster that truth than trying to make a more suitable "village".
8. shaydo, over the years we have had a couple of dozen kids live with us. I can say that in ALL cases, the kids were better with us than their birth parents.
OTOH, my greatest regret was one 15 year old who had about 15 homes in four or five years. We were asked to take him. We liked him. He was a good kid. At the time, I was recovering from a double hernia and we had another major thing going on- one of my mom's major surgeries before she passed on a couple years later. We tried following his progress later with the thoughts of taking him in. The state had shipped him either out of state or to Eastern Washington. I still rue not being able to make room for him even with all the other stuff going on.
9. swatter, I don't mean to imply that foster housing is never necessary. Unfortunately, it is and I commend you for being willing to help. I was trying to say that the current system of family courts and CPS far too easily remove a child from one or both parents without regard family. This is probably much more the case in family court however. Val Stevens continually helps to block any legislation geared toward keeping families as intact as possible through shared parenting. There are countless stories about children being abused by step-parents and single parents that may not have been allowed to continue unchecked had both parents been more involved in their kid's lives. I feel the senator's efforts would more fruitful by trying to stop this abuse through supporting shared parenting efforts statewide. Two caring parents willing to make the necessary sacrifices will always be better at raising their children than either the state or one parent alone.
10. shaydo, there isn't one case where I thought the State didn't do what is right when the kids were removed.
There are situations, I am sure, when the drug and alcohol treatment, the anger management, the stealing, etc. were corrected and the kids went on to a healthy life after entering the system, but I haven't seen it.
And, I have no doubt you and Andy would make great shared parents, but you are in the greatest minority. I don't see why Val Stevens should be removed on this one issue when I happen to think she is right.
11. @6:
Isn't that always the case. We are incompetent, so give us more money so that we can be even more incompetent. Typical government bureaucratic cop out.
Or how about... we are burnt out, so pay us even less money so that we can leave that much faster and be replaced by someone with less experience.
@9: Pretty much what swatter said. Assuming that two parents are the ideal parenting situation is great... except when both are completely unfit to be parents, which is the case alarmingly often.
@10: swatter, I may not agree with your politics, but good on you for doing this.
12. It is a sad day when people do not think the majority of parents are fit to raise their kids. I feel sorry for both of you, swatter and demo kid, if you think the opposite is true. I pray you never get into a position of power over families where you carry forward that thinking.
13. I don't quite understand your switch from a universe of kids that get noticed by CPS, the State and other organizations to a universe populated by all kids. There is a 1000 to 1 difference. Your point was shared parenting for troubled parents, not those living their lives satisfactorily.
14. The problem is that parents may have been living their lives satisfactorily only to have one parent decide they no longer wish to be with the other and the state then steps in and 90% +- of the time one parent is effectively removed from the children. This should not happen. False allegations abound when one parent and their laywer knows that the state will assist in removing a child from one parent especially since there is no assumption of shared parenting. This is the norm even if there are no allegations as well. The state actually increases troubled situations with the status quo. As far as CPS goes, it happens there as well. Removing one or both parents in most of these situations should not be the state's go to method.