<DOC>
[106th Congress House Hearings]
[From the U.S. Government Printing Office via GPO Access]
[DOCID: f:70581.wais]
FOR BETTER OR WORSE? AN EXAMINATION OF THE STATE OF THE DISTRICT OF
COLUMBIA'S CHILD AND FAMILY SERVICES RECEIVERSHIP
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
of the
COMMITTEE ON
GOVERNMENT REFORM
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SIXTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
MAY 5, 2000
__________
Serial No. 106-199
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Government Reform
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.gpo.gov/congress/house
http://www.house.gov/reform
__________
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
70-581 WASHINGTON : 2001
_______________________________________________________________________
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COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM
DAN BURTON, Indiana, Chairman
BENJAMIN A. GILMAN, New York HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
CONSTANCE A. MORELLA, Maryland TOM LANTOS, California
CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut ROBERT E. WISE, Jr., West Virginia
ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida MAJOR R. OWENS, New York
JOHN M. McHUGH, New York EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York
STEPHEN HORN, California PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania
JOHN L. MICA, Florida PATSY T. MINK, Hawaii
THOMAS M. DAVIS, Virginia CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York
DAVID M. McINTOSH, Indiana ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, Washington,
MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana DC
JOE SCARBOROUGH, Florida CHAKA FATTAH, Pennsylvania
STEVEN C. LaTOURETTE, Ohio ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland
MARSHALL ``MARK'' SANFORD, South DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio
Carolina ROD R. BLAGOJEVICH, Illinois
BOB BARR, Georgia DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois
DAN MILLER, Florida JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts
ASA HUTCHINSON, Arkansas JIM TURNER, Texas
LEE TERRY, Nebraska THOMAS H. ALLEN, Maine
JUDY BIGGERT, Illinois HAROLD E. FORD, Jr., Tennessee
GREG WALDEN, Oregon JANICE D. SCHAKOWSKY, Illinois
DOUG OSE, California ------
PAUL RYAN, Wisconsin BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont
HELEN CHENOWETH-HAGE, Idaho (Independent)
DAVID VITTER, Louisiana
Kevin Binger, Staff Director
Daniel R. Moll, Deputy Staff Director
David A. Kass, Deputy Counsel and Parliamentarian
Lisa Smith Arafune, Chief Clerk
Phil Schiliro, Minority Staff Director
------
Subcommittee on the District of Columbia
THOMAS M. DAVIS, Virginia, Chairman
CONSTANCE A. MORELLA, Maryland ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, Washington,
STEPHEN HORN, California DC
JOE SCARBOROUGH, Florida CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York
EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York
Ex Officio
DAN BURTON, Indiana HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
Melissa Wojciak, Staff Director
Victoria Proctor, Professional Staff Member
Hana Brilliant, Professional Staff Member
Jenny Mayer, Clerk
Jon Bouker, Minority Counsel
C O N T E N T S
----------
Page
Hearing held on May 5, 2000...................................... 1
Statement of:
DeLay, Hon. Tom, a Representative in Congress from the State
of Texas................................................... 18
Fagnoni, Cynthia M., Director, Education, Workforce, and
Income Security Issues, U.S. General Accounting Office;
Judith Meltzer, deputy director, the Center for the Study
of Social Policy; and Ernestine F. Jones, general receiver,
the District of Columbia Child and Family Services......... 30
Graham, Carolyn, deputy mayor for Children, Youth and
Families, District of Columbia; Grace Lopes, special
counsel, Receivership and Institutional Litigation; and
Kimberley A. Shellman, executive director, the District of
Columbia Children's Advocacy Center........................ 00
Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:
Davis, Hon. Thomas M., a Representative in Congress from the
State of Virginia, prepared statement of................... 5
DeLay, Hon. Tom, a Representative in Congress from the State
of Texas, prepared statement of............................ 21
Fagnoni, Cynthia M., Director, Education, Workforce, and
Income Security Issues, U.S. General Accounting Office:
Information concerning judges............................ 122
Prepared statement of.................................... 33
Graham, Carolyn, deputy mayor for Children, Youth and
Families, District of Columbia, prepared statement of...... 84
Jones, Ernestine F., general receiver, the District of
Columbia Child and Family Services, prepared statement of.. 65
Lopes, Grace, special counsel, Receivership and Institutional
Litigation, prepared statement of.......................... 95
Meltzer, Judith, deputy director, the Center for the Study of
Social Policy, prepared statement of....................... 53
Norton, Hon. Eleanor Holmes, a Representative in Congress
from the District of Columbia, prepared statement of....... 16
Shellman, Kimberley A., executive director, the District of
Columbia Children's Advocacy Center, prepared statement of. 104
FOR BETTER OR WORSE? AN EXAMINATION OF THE STATE OF THE DISTRICT OF
COLUMBIA'S CHILD AND FAMILY SERVICES RECEIVERSHIP
----------
FRIDAY, MAY 5, 2000
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on the District of Columbia,
Committee on Government Reform,
Washington, DC.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 2 p.m., in
room 2154 Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Thomas M. Davis
(chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
Present: Representatives Davis, Horn, and Norton.
Staff present: Victoria Proctor and Hana Brilliant,
professional staff members; David Marin, communications
director/counsel; Melissa Wojciak, staff director; Jenny Mayer,
clerk; Jean Gosa, minority clerk; and Jon Bouker, minority
counsel.
Mr. Davis. The meeting will come to order.
Good afternoon and welcome. Today's hearing is the first in
a series of hearings to examine the status of the District of
Columbia's agencies overseen by court-appointed receivers.
Across the Nation there have been five public agencies that
have at one time or another been placed under the supervision
of a court-appointed receiver. However, each of these
receiverships was short lived and quickly reformed and returned
as a functioning agency of the government.
There has never been a jurisdiction in the United States
with more than one agency in receivership except for the
District of Columbia. Presently there are three outstanding
agency receiverships in the District, the Child and Family
Services, the Commission on Mental Health Services, and the
Corrections Medical Receiver for the District of Columbia jail.
Each of these agencies has languished in receivership for a
substantial period of time and has continued to be plagued by
systemic problems in the delivery of services. Each agency's
inadequacies have been resistant toward the comprehensive
reforms needed for them to return to the District's
jurisdiction.
Now, the D.C. Housing Authority which is also under
receivership is an exception to the situation. The Housing
Authority has been faced with similar mismanagement problems;
however, the appointed receiver has been successful in
overhauling the District's public housing system. The Housing
Authority is currently the only agency on track to be
successfully returned to the District government.
These three troubled agencies have demonstrated extreme
deficiencies in the delivery of their expected services.
Children placed under the care of Child and Family Services are
often juggled from an abusive or neglectful home into an
equally dangerous foster home and are left forever emotionally
and psychologically scarred.
The Commission on Mental Health Services operations have
actually become worse since becoming a receivership. There are
currently more mentally ill, homeless people on the streets
than ever before. Group homes for the mentally ill are poorly
run and neglected and treatment is difficult to come by. The
lack of improvement in their services has recently led the
receiver to resign.
The D.C. jail medical services receivership's financial
management is in dire straits. For example, the receiver
recently issued a contract to a private entity which had the
D.C. contract as its only contract and had never before been in
business at a cost of three times the national average.
This year alone these three ailing agencies combined will
cost the District of Columbia taxpayers $352 million in court-
controlled spending. While these agencies are in the
jurisdictional hands of the court system, the District of
Columbia government is powerless to provide any direction in
their operations, yet is left to foot the bill. Therefore,
Delegate Norton and I have joined together to introduce H.R.
3995, the D.C. Receivership Accountability Act of 2000, to
induce substantial reforms within the receiverships. H.R. 3995
will provide management guidance to these receivers and make
them more accountable to the D.C. government. There is a strong
need for immediate legislative correction action to force
reforms, and we will be marking up this vital piece of
legislation at the conclusion of the hearing.
Our hearing today is focused on the Child and Family
Services Agency receivership, which was recently brought under
the glare of the public spotlight with the tragic death of
young Brianna Blackmond. While Brianna was the under the care
of the Child and Family Services Agency, her life was
tragically cut short at 23 months of age by a blunt force
trauma injury to the head. As the father of three children
myself, I can say that stories such as Brianna's stab you in
the heart and leaves you wondering in amazement how could this
have happened.
Unfortunately, Brianna's death is not a story of a one-time
case slipping through the cracks of an otherwise well-
functioning child welfare system. Brianna is just one example
of many heart-wrenching stories of children adversely affected
by the systemic problems of the District of Columbia's child
welfare system. The sordid history of the Child and Family
Services Agency, started over a decade ago with the LaShawn A.
v. Barry case, was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Plaintiff LaShawn A. was brought to the Child and Family
Services Agency by her homeless mother when she was nearly 2
years old. At the time of the lawsuit LaShawn A. was 7 and had
developed severe emotional problems likely to last into her
adulthood and may have suffered sexual abuse because of
inappropriate placement and poor followup by District
officials.
Another shocking story is of plaintiff Kevin, 11 at the
time of the case, who had spent his entire life in foster care.
At 8 he was so suicidal that he was admitted to a hospital
where he put himself in a trash can and asked to be discarded
because he was worthless.
In 1991, the U.S. District Court Judge, Tom Hogan, ruled
that the District's child welfare system failed to protect the
children from physical, psychological or emotional harm, and it
violated Federal law, District law and the constitutional
rights of children. Following the court's decision, the
District of Columbia and the plaintiffs developed a
comprehensive remedial order to correct the significant
management and service delivery problems in the city's child
protection, foster care and adoption services programs.
After 3 years, the Child and Family Services Agency failed
to comply with the court order and was placed under court-
supervised receivership. Five years later, under the leadership
of Mrs. Ernestine Jones since 1997, the Child and Family
Services Agency fails to meet the required reforms outlined by
the court order. This was alarmingly evident in the Brianna
case.
Brianna and her seven siblings were placed under the care
of the Child and Family Services Agency on May 5, 1998, when a
neglect report was filed by neighbors who had seen the children
digging through trash dumpsters scrounging for a morsel of food
and dressed in soiled clothing. Four times during the
children's stay in the legal and physical custody of the Child
and Family Services Agency from May 1998 to December 23, 1999,
their mother, Charrisise Blackmond, petitioned for custody of
her children. Each time the court denied that Mrs. Blackmond
was able to meet the needs of her children and was only allowed
supervised visitation with them. But in November 1999,
homeless, Mrs. Blackmond moved in with a friend, Angela
O'Brien, as an illegal tenant in a subsidized housing unit.
Angela O'Brien herself was no stranger to the child welfare
system. In 1998, her four children were removed from her care
because of allegations of abuse. The O'Brien children were
later returned because of a lack of proof that O'Brien was the
abuser.
On December 1, 1999, there was yet another custody hearing
planned for Brianna. By law, every social worker is to file a
status report to the presiding judge before a hearing is
scheduled to take place. As in Brianna's case, this practice is
rarely followed. The day before the hearing was to take place
Superior Court Judge Evelyn E.C. Queen canceled the hearing and
rescheduled it had for mid-January 2000.
However, when Mrs. Blackmond's attorney filed an emergency
motion to return Brianna to her mother in time for Christmas,
Judge Queen ruled to return Brianna and another sibling to her
mother. Judge Queen made this ruling without holding a custody
hearing, without seeing or speaking to Brianna's social worker
and without consulting the city's corporation counsel.
On December 23, 1999, Brianna and her siblings were taken
by a new social worker, not familiar with their case, to their
mother and dropped off in front of the O'Brien house. She never
took the time to examine the living conditions in the home or
to even determine whether this was truly Mrs. Blackmond's legal
residence.
For 2 weeks no one from the Child and Family Services
Agency paid a followup visit to the family. No one from the
Child and Family Services Agency investigated Brianna's welfare
on January 3, 2000, when her mother called a neighborhood
health clinic to report that her daughter was ``shaking
uncontrollably.'' Mrs. Blackmond brought her to the clinic, but
never removed her from the car and canceled her scheduled
appointment. No one paid attention to Brianna's well-being when
her mother failed to bring her to the clinic the next day for
her rescheduled appointment. A social worker finally visited
the O'Brien home a day later and called the police. But it was
too late. Brianna was taken to Children's Hospital barely
breathing and unconscious from a blunt force trauma injury to
the head. She died shortly thereafter.
Brianna's homicide is currently under investigation by the
Metropolitan Police Department and is under a confidentiality
ruling by Judge Queen. Therefore, many of the facts surrounding
this case aren't known. Fingers are being pointed in every
direction by every agency involved to place blame for this
tragic death.
Seven agencies shared the responsibility of protecting
Brianna Blackmond from harm, and yet seven agencies failed to
help her. This case clearly reveals a breakdown not only within
Child and Family Services Agency, but with the intergovernment
agency relationships governing children who are innocent
victims of abuse and neglect.
Today we will be taking an in-depth view into impediments
to reforming the Child and Family Services Agency receivership.
After 5 years dwindling as an agency separate from the District
of Columbia's government, decisive action needs to be taken to
enact progressive reform. Children in the District of Columbia
need a functioning Child and Family Services Agency to look out
for their well-being when their home environment is not safe. I
look forward to hearing from the our testifying witnesses to
determine what immediate actions need to be taken to prevent
further tragedies from occurring.
I yield to Mrs. Norton for her statement. Then we are going
to hear from our distinguished whip, who has taken a personal
interest in this case.
Tom, we appreciate your being here today.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Thomas M. Davis follows:]
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Ms. Norton. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I also want
to welcome Mr. DeLay to these hearings.
I appreciate the quick action and serious attention of
Chairman Tom Davis to problems in receiverships that control
three important D.C. functions. When the Chair learned of these
problems, he asked me to join him in initiating a GAO study of
the District's receiverships, beginning with the receivership
for the Child and Family Services Agency. We began there
because of the tragic and clearly preventable death of the
infant, Brianna Blackmond. The confusion and uncertainty in
assessing responsibility for the child's death. And because the
evidence of disarray that the tragedy brought to public view
made it clear that other children under the care of the
receivership may not be safe.
We also will hold hearings and have requested GAO reports
on the DC Jail Medical Receivership, where there has been
evidence of excessive costs and irregular procurement
practices; and the Mental Health Receivership, whose problems
are so severe that that a receiver was recently asked to
resign.
The Public Housing Receivership will end later this year
and the agency will be returned to District control. That
receiver, David Gilmore, who stands out for the success of his
tenure, took a very complicated agency with the longest history
of failure and dysfunction and reformed all of its functions--
operations, social services, physical infrastructure, and
public safety. Hearings and action by the Congress on these
receiverships are necessary because the courts, and not the
District government, have authority over these functions.
Courts, necessarily, depend upon the receivers and the
monitors of the receivers that the courts appoint. The evidence
is already clear that receivers in the District often function
as independent operators outside of the laws applicable to DC
elected and appointed officials and personnel, without
guidelines concerning appropriate operational management and
procurement standards, and with little of the accountability of
other managers in the District.
We are all aware that, tragically, foster care services
almost everywhere in the country look much like the District's.
Nevertheless, the senseless death of a helpless infant, and the
continuing responsibility for thousands of other children under
the care of the CFSA receivership, raises the most serious
questions about the progress of this receivership and
eliminating the problems that necessitated its creation in the
first place.
As an analytical and policy matter, neither Chairman Davis
nor I would judge a receivership by one tragedy, even one as
indisputably unnecessary as the death of the infant Brianna. At
the same time, the failure of literally every adult and every
institution responsible for Brianna has provoked understandable
outrage from everyone who has heard the tragedy of avoidable
errors that led in a straight line to this child's death.
Nothing that we have learned since has relieved our fear that a
similar tragedy could not occur again. Therefore, even before
the final GAO reports are in, we feel compelled by what we
already know to move legislation.
Chairman Davis has joined me in sponsoring H.R. 3995, the
D.C. Receivership Accountability Act of 2000, which we will
mark up today. It compels receivers to meet the same standards
the public has a right to expect from any official charged with
the care of children, and other residents, and of any other
official privileged to allocate taxpayer funds.
My concern with the record of these receiverships is
increased because the agencies were taken from the District by
the courts because of systemic failure by the city. Yet the
receivership agencies apparently have not themselves, always
been closely and effectively supervised by the receivers and
the monitors, and improvements have been torturously slow. The
CFSA receivership is on its second receiver after the first one
brought too little improvement. The continuing failures
culminating in Brianna's death are particularly troubling
considering that the receiver has been given by the court,
``all necessary authority to ensure full compliance.''
Unlike the receivers, the D.C. government is installing the
most rigorous set of management and accountability systems. I
applaud Mayor Williams for his initiative in appointing his own
special counsel to coordinate matters between the receivers and
the District and to work on a transition of these functions to
the District.
Years ago, the city failed the children and other residents
these functions were designed to serve. Today, we hear whether
one receivership has done any better. At the end of these
hearings on all the receiverships, we will know whether the
right question is would the District do better or could the
city do any worse.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Norton follows:]
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Mr. Davis. Thank you very much.
Mr. Horn.
Mr. Horn. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I simply want to commend
you for rapid action on this and Ms. Norton for her proposal
before us.
I'm delighted to see the Majority Whip here. He knows more
about adoption than most people in this country. And I think
you've got an issue that is very important that we resolve. So
thank you for your efforts.
Mr. Davis. Thank you very much. We will move to our first
witness.
We're honored to have here today our Majority Whip,
Congressman Tom DeLay from Texas. He's not only taken a
personal interest in the Child and Family Services Agency
because of his strong concerns and advocacy for child issues,
but Mr. DeLay not only talks the talk, he walks the walk. He's
been very active and this is a part of his life. And his
personal interest in this has been very empowering to this
subcommittee.
Tom, I can't tell you how thankful we are to have you today
and for your activity in this.
STATEMENT OF HON. TOM DeLAY, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM
THE STATE OF TEXAS
Mr. DeLay. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Ms. Norton. I really
appreciate you holding this hearing. It's a vitally important
issue not only for the children here in Washington, DC, but
across the Nation, because I see an opportunity here to
actually do something that the Nation can look at and use as a
model, and I hope we don't--and I know this committee won't--
miss this opportunity.
I really applaud the efforts of the subcommittee and the
efforts of the individuals that we will hear from on the panels
today for their hard work thus far in addressing the challenges
faced by the District's child welfare system.
I met with Mayor Williams a few months ago and I was very
impressed with the Mayor. I was not only impressed with the
kind of person he is, but his understanding of the needs of
abused and neglected children in Washington, DC, having been a
former foster child himself before he was adopted. It was clear
to me at the time that concern with the efficacy of our systems
of intervention and treatment on behalf of abused children at
the Federal, State and local levels supersedes all politics and
demographics and turf battles and the like. Mayor Williams'
commitment to meeting the needs of the District's children at
risk for and suffering from abuse and neglect is very clear,
and I'm certain that they will benefit under his
administration.
My wife, Christine, and I have been foster parents to
several adolescents over the past few years, and Christine and
my daughter serve as court-appointed special advocates [CASAs],
under the auspices of child advocates of Ft. Bend County in my
home State of Texas. We have become very well acquainted with
the child welfare system through our experiences with our
foster children and through our involvement with CASA; and I
want to share with you some of the ways our county sought to
help abused kids and our overburdened social work and legal
system.
Let me say, however, before I begin, as we look at reform
in the District and, if I have my way, reform all over the
country, let's remember that the means--the system, with all
its divisions and standards and social workers and judges and
attorneys and public officials--leads to an end. And that is
the protection of innocent children who have been or are being
hurt by their parents or caregivers.
America must face this problem. What adults are doing to
children in this country is abominable. We have to face it and
we have to deal with it. We owe these children our firm
commitment that the systemic problems we know exist will be
addressed and corrected and that we will expeditiously seek new
and creative ways to make the best interest of the child--the
best interest of the child--of paramount concern in each and
every child abuse investigation, intervention and
rehabilitation.
One of the most effective helps to the overburdened public
sector can be the private sector, and it's vitally important.
You must have the community involved or it does not work; you
must have that personal contact of people that care, that come
from the community. And the involvement of the community
assures vital and necessary community buy-in. The community
buy-in means increasing awareness as to how child abuse affects
and, in many cases, precipitates other social problems like
substance abuse, crime and delinquency.
One way to involve the community and to address the
systemic problems resulting from heavy case loads and the
consequent incomplete and/or late reports to the courts is the
utilization of trained, specialized volunteers like Court-
Appointed Special Advocates to supplement the investigative
work of social services.
CASAs are citizen volunteers appointed by the courts in
cases of abuse or neglect. Those volunteers go through 30 hours
of intensive training with child welfare professionals and are
an independent voice in the process. Their whole focus is the
best interest of the child. They focus exclusively on what's
best for the child. Many social workers have upwards of 50 open
cases at a time and are overwhelmed with court dates and
paperwork deadlines. CASAs, though, handle just one or two
cases at a time so that they can give each child sustained
personal attention.
There are nearly 900 CASA programs throughout this country,
including one here in the District of Columbia. Any principal
in a case can refer the case to CASA--a social worker, an
attorney, a judge, a therapist, and others. At this time,
however, only approximately 10 percent of substantiated abuse
cases have been assigned to a CASA in DC, and I think that's a
major part of the problems that we have seen in this city.
Another way to bring in the private sector and assist
social services is to support and utilize child advocacy
centers like Safe Shores here in DC. I am pleased, very
pleased, to see Kim Shellman here today. She was kind enough to
give some Members of Congress a tour of her facility last year,
and I was very impressed with her and her staff, although her
building is too small and she needs to move. She needs help
from the community in that regard.
Child Advocates of Ft. Bend in my District is a not-for-
profit organization that works on behalf of child victims of
abuse from birth to age 18 through various advocacy programs,
providing services to these children and their families through
specially trained community volunteers and staff.
Each program was specifically designed to supplement the
overburdened child welfare and legal systems.
Under the umbrella of Child Advocates of Ft. Bend is the
Children's Advocacy Center, a collaborative effort by local law
enforcement agencies; Ft. Bend Child Protective Services; and
the District Attorney's office. The goal of the Center is to
make the investigation, treatment and prosecution of child
sexual assault and severe physical abuse more child-focused and
timely by centralizing assessment and treatment services while
coordinating professional efforts.
Also operating out of the Child Advocacy Center is our
local Court-Appointed Special Advocates program. Referrals to
the Center come from law enforcement and CPS, referrals for the
CASA program come from family court and CPS. Having one
centralized agency providing services to abused children and
their families and working in tandem with social services law
enforcement and the courts enables programs to combine their
strengths and lessens competition for funding, volunteers,
community awareness, etc.
I know that the needs and the character of Ft. Bend County
are different from the needs and character of the District, and
I am a firm believer that one size does not fit all when it
comes to the needs of communities. I do believe, however, that
many of the issues you are looking at today are not unique to
any locale.
In urban cities and in suburbia you will find overworked
and underpaid social workers, lack of systemic coordination and
collaboration, and difficulty in meeting deadlines. You will
find children languishing in foster care when they should be
released for adoption. You will find a system that is well-
intentioned, but ill-equipped to care for the increasing number
of children who need protection and permanency.
My challenge to you today as you examine the efficacy of
the reforms undertaken by the District of Columbia is to
remember that this is about the child who has died and will die
again when deadlines come and go and reports are not completed.
This is about children who depend upon us to intervene when the
family can't or won't keep them safe from harm.
I encourage to you draw from the resources in your
community. I urge you to look for new ways of addressing old
problems. Look outside the box. See what Safe Shores, your
Child Advocacy Center can do to improve collaboration and
coordination among your child welfare professionals. Give CASA
and other volunteers a chance to help your hard-working social
workers and invest in their community at the same time.
Again, I commend you, Mr. Chairman, for holding this
hearing today, and I really thank you for the opportunity to be
here.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Tom DeLay follows:]
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Mr. Davis. Mr. DeLay, thank you very much. Let me just ask
a couple of questions.
How long have you been involved with CASA, and going back
to Ft. Bend, how did this get started and do you have more
volunteers than you need, or how does it work?
Mr. DeLay. Well, Fairfax County lost a great person and
that was my wife when we moved away and went back to Texas
about 6 years ago. And she got involved in----
Mr. Davis. We lost a great teacher, too.
Mr. DeLay. That's right at Langley High School.
At that time, she was looking for something to do and the
CASA program in Ft. Bend was struggling and she got involved
with it at that time 6 years ago and has been a CASA ever
since. We've been foster parents for almost 4 years.
Mr. Davis. Does CASA fund through a block grant? Does it
have small local contributions? So it's a very cost-effective
program, because most of the people are volunteers?
Mr. DeLay. Well, CASA--at least in Ft. Bend County it is
different for every chapter of CASA; they're pretty well
independent around the Nation. But Ft. Bend County--I'm glad
you asked this question. When I got involved with CASA in Ft.
Bend County, I insisted that they receive no government funds,
that if they did I was out of there; because I truly believe
that you have to have that personal connection of the
community, through fundraising activities and volunteerism, to
be able to provide that personal touch to these children.
The Ft. Bend County CASA and the Ft. Bend Child Advocacy
Center receive grants from foundations, but most of the money
is raised right there in Ft. Bend County; and through the
efforts of the community, it's one of the best charities in the
county. So it is vitally important.
Yes, government has their role to play in this, and we all
understand that, but to have accountability and to have that
personal commitment, you must have it involved in the--the
community funding, the CASA programs and the child advocacy
centers.
Now, some people behind me may disagree with that.
Mr. Davis. Is the training done by the government or does
the program pay for its own training?
Mr. DeLay. The program pays for its own training, sets up
its own training. It's advised and supervised by the Child
Protective Services of Texas, and they work together. And
sometimes they work in an adversary role; sometimes CASA gets
onto Child Protective Services for not following up and doing
what they think is right and in the best interest of the child.
Mr. Davis. It sounds like, from your testimony, that the
city is not utilizing this the way it ought to if only 10
percent of the cases are going there.
We also have a CASA program. In fact of one our State
legislators, Vivian Watts, is executive director in Fairfax and
it has worked wonders. You know, you change the world a kid at
a time, and that's what these programs emphasize.
Mr. DeLay. I might say, Mr. Chairman, that it is vitally
important that the court system drives it all. If the courts
are not focused on the best interest of the child and use
CASAs--most of the time, I don't even know; I can't answer the
question if it's law in Texas to use a CASA. But it's usually
the judges. The judges appoint a CASA because they want someone
that is totally focused on the best interest of the child in
that process. So it's also really important to have a court
system set up in the family court examples that we see around
the country.
Mr. Davis. Do you have separate family courts in Texas, or
would this just be a general part of the court system?
Mr. DeLay. Actually, we don't have separate family courts
by statute, but we do have separate family courts by setup. You
just sort of--these are all the--at least in my county.
Now, in Harris County they do have a separate family court
system. So it really depends on each county.
Mr. Davis. Thank you. I can't thank you enough for your
involvement in this, what it means to the committee, and giving
us the impetus hopefully to move forward on this and not just
hold hearings to hear what is going on.
So thank you very much.
Ms. Norton.
Ms. Norton. Well, I don't have any questions for the
Majority Whip. I will say to him that I will be interested to
inquire of the witnesses who come forward, given your
testimony, why only 10 percent of the CASA abuse cases have
been assigned to volunteers.
I do want to say to you, Mr. DeLay, that I very much
appreciate the life you and your wife have lived in personal
dedication to these children. Talk is real cheap on this, and
you've been on the line for these kids. Your presence here, I
appreciate as well, because it signals to the receiverships and
it signals to the city the importance of this issue to the
Congress and the importance of these children to the Congress.
And finally, Mr. DeLay, I have heard that you and Mrs.
Clinton will soon receive awards from the Orphan Foundation.
Mr. DeLay. Yes. I'll help you sell tickets to that one.
Ms. Norton. See what his job is in the Congress.
In any case, very seriously, Mr. DeLay, I believe that on
both sides of the aisle, where your work for children is well
known, there will be agreement that such an award is well
deserved.
Mr. DeLay. Thank you. I'm really looking forward to
appearing with the First Lady because she does deserve
recognition for her work in adoption and she's--and child
abuse. So she's very deserving.
Ms. Norton. I think you've been appropriately paired.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Davis. The gentleman from California. Any questions?
Mr. Horn. No thanks.
Mr. Davis. Tom, thank you again for taking the time.
I would like now to call our second panel of witnesses to
testify: Ms. Cynthia Fagnoni, the Director of Education,
Workforce, and Income Security Issues for the U.S. General
Accounting Office; Ms. Judith Meltzer, the deputy director for
the Center for the Study of Social Policy; and Mrs. Ernestine
F. Jones, the general receiver of the District of Columbia
Child and Family Services, who will address the current state
of affairs in the Child and Family Services Agency.
As you know, it is the policy of this committee that all
witnesses be sworn before they testify. So I ask you to stand
with me and raise your right hands.
[Witnesses sworn.]
Mr. Davis. We've read the testimony, so to afford
sufficient time for questions, I would like you to limit your
opening remarks to 5 minutes. You can highlight what you want
to highlight and all written statements will be made part of
the permanent record.
I would like to start with Mrs. Fagnoni and then follow it
with Ms. Meltzer and Ms. Jones.
STATEMENTS OF CYNTHIA M. FAGNONI, DIRECTOR, EDUCATION,
WORKFORCE, AND INCOME SECURITY ISSUES, U.S. GENERAL ACCOUNTING
OFFICE; JUDITH MELTZER, DEPUTY DIRECTOR, THE CENTER FOR THE
STUDY OF SOCIAL POLICY; AND ERNESTINE F. JONES, GENERAL
RECEIVER, THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CHILD AND FAMILY SERVICES
Ms. Fagnoni. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman and members of
the subcommittee. I am pleased to be here this afternoon to
discuss the status of the court-appointed receivership for the
District of Columbia's child welfare system.
Today, I will discuss our preliminary observations on the
progress the receivership has made to comply with the
requirements of the court order and key elements that are
essential for additional reform to occur. My remarks are based
on our ongoing work for the subcommittee.
Regarding the changes the receiver has made to date,
improvements have focused on several important areas. To
address the lack of leadership and accountability, the receiver
restructured the organization and developed a mission
statement, agency goals and a comprehensive strategic plan. The
receiver's actions to identify specific milestones, completion
dates and expected outcomes represent the initial steps in
establishing the requisite managerial and planning frameworks
for improving the child welfare system. Of critical importance
in supporting these frameworks is the development and
implementation in October 1999 of the FACES information system.
However, to ensure that this system provides the necessary data
for workers to assess family situations over time, historical
information on children still needs to be added.
Some changes instituted by the receiver address the
District Court's concerns about staff shortages and the quality
of social work performed. To address these concerns, the
receiver obtained authority from the Mayor's office to directly
process incoming personnel and anticipates being fully staffed
by June 2000. In addition, the training project initiated in
January 1999, and operated for the agency by Virginia
Commonwealth University, trained 734 staff as of September
1999. Training has covered a variety of topics such as special
needs adoption, coping with grief and loss, and family
violence.
Many court-ordered requirements relate to improving
services for children. The receiver has taken several steps to
address these deficiencies. These include establishing a
central 24-hour hotline for reporting suspected child abuse and
neglect and launching DC Kids, a health management system and
provider network. DC Kids is designed to provide foster
children with more timely medical screening and comprehensive
medical and psychological assessments, among other things.
In addition, to develop the required community-based
services to prevent the placement of children in foster care,
the receiver has continued to work with the eight Healthy
Families/Thriving Communities Collaboratives to develop and
provide the necessary services. The receiver recently reported
that these preventive services appear to have been effective
because fewer children entered out-of-home care in fiscal year
1999 than in previous years.
To address the shortage of appropriate placements for
children who must be removed from their homes, the receiver is
working with the Casey Family Program and the Annie E. Casey
Foundation to recruit additional placement resources and foster
homes.
Despite this progress, there is considerable improvement
that still needs to be made. Further movement toward meeting
the court-ordered requirements will depend on the District's
ability to create an environment in which additional reforms
can occur.
In order to function effectively, child welfare agencies
need a rich array of services to meet children's needs. Rarely
does a single agency have control over acquiring all the needed
services. Therefore, strong collaboration among all
stakeholders who play a role in helping children and their
families is essential to obtaining the necessary services.
These stakeholders include private provider agencies, the
police department, substance abuse and mental health agencies,
agency legal counsel and local government leaders.
Although stakeholders in the District have taken initial
steps to work together in limited areas, District officials
have told us that cooperative working relationships still do
not fully exist. The lack of these relationships impedes the
agency's ability to conduct its work effectively. The effects
of inadequate collaboration include delays in the Health
Department issuing foster home licenses and difficulties in the
ongoing transfer of resources, such as Temporary Assistance for
Needy Families assistance and child care that would benefit the
agency's operations.
Our previous work on child welfare issues shows that
collaborative approaches help to enable key child welfare
system participants to develop joint solutions to crosscutting
problems and more effectively make decisions on individual
child welfare cases. For example, jurisdictions in five States
we visited convened multidisciplinary advisory committees to
work on resolving turf battles and to develop and implement
reforms. Committees were typically composed of representatives
from key groups such as child welfare agencies, attorneys,
judges and other advocates.
Other jurisdictions built collaboration by pooling or
blending resources and funding to obtain the needed services.
For example, Boulder County, CO, pooled its child welfare
allocation from the State with funding from the mental health
agency and the youth corrections agency to provide joint
programming and placement decisionmaking for adolescents in
need of out-of-home care in group or residential settings.
Some collaborative efforts intervene at key points on
individual cases to gather and share comprehensive information
among participants. For example, Day One Conferences in North
Carolina's District 20 include the parents, child welfare
caseworkers, guardians ad litem, public and mental health
liaisons, attorneys, public education liaisons, child support
liaisons and law enforcement officers. These meetings provide a
forum to arrange services for the family immediately and
provide an opportunity to reach agreement on many aspects of
the case outside the courtroom.
Because the receivership is intended to be a temporary
vehicle for correcting specific problems in the agency, the
court and the District will at some point need to determine
when the receivership should end and governance of the child
welfare agency should transfer back to local government.
However, unless collaboration among key stakeholders is
imbedded in each organization's day-to-day operations, the
long-standing cycle of organizational divisiveness will
continue and it will threaten attempts to successfully reform
the child welfare system and hinder the ability of the District
to keep its children safe.
This concludes my oral statement. I would be happy to
answer any questions you or other Members may have. Thank you.
Mr. Davis. Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Fagnoni follows:]
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Mr. Davis. Ms. Meltzer.
Ms. Meltzer. Good afternoon, Chairman Davis, Representative
Norton and other distinguished members of the committee. Thank
you for this opportunity to testify today.
I am Judith Meltzer, deputy director of the Center for the
Study of Social Policy. Our center serves as the court-
appointed monitor of the child welfare system under the LaShawn
A. v. Williams lawsuit. We've been involved as the court
appointed monitor since 1992, with a brief hiatus when the
agency was first placed in receivership between 1995 and 1997.
The LaShawn remedial order provides a blueprint for
necessary reforms to the District's child welfare system. Its
requirements are designed to assure the children who are abused
and neglected are protected from harm and that children and
families are provided appropriate services and supports to
ensure children's safety, promote their positive development
and assure them loving, stable and permanent homes.
As monitor, the Center is responsible for reviewing the
agency's progress in meeting the requirements and expectations
of the order. The Center reviews and compiles data provided by
the agency monthly, reviews compliance with law, policy and
procedures, tracks the progress of individual children's cases
and categories of children, including child fatalities, and
conducts a variety of independent studies of the system's
progress and the quality of case practice.
During 1999, for example, the Center conducted a case
review of over 800 case records, randomly selected to represent
all areas of practice from investigations to adoption. We also
prepare public reports. Both of those last two reports have
been attached to my written testimony and were provided to the
committee.
The District's child welfare system has received a lot of
negative attention in the past few months, attention which has
highlighted the significant problems that must be rectified.
While many of those who work in and with the child welfare
system are impatient, outraged and frequently distressed about
the continued noncompliance with the standards incorporated
into the LaShawn order, the truth is that the system today,
while far from fixed, is indeed substantially improved from the
way it operated prior to the time that the lawsuit was heard by
the Federal District Court in 1991. This is not to say that
practice is acceptable, but merely to acknowledge that some
progress has occurred.
I want to spend most of my time commenting on what remains
to be done and offer some recommendations for moving forward.
However, it is important to understand today's problems in the
context of where the system began.
The written testimony describes in greater detail some of
the areas that have in fact improved: increased staffing, staff
training, foster home licensing and training, management
information systems, improved adoption planning, and increased
Federal revenue maximization. More children and families have
access to help through the Healthy Families/Thriving
Communities Collaboratives. Training and social work support,
although not enough, are now available to relatives who step in
and care for their kin when parents cannot do so. There is a
new health care system for children in foster care called DC
KIDS; a unitary hotline is now finally in place so that the
District accepts all calls of abuse and neglect through one
telephone number.
There were a record number of adoptions of children in
foster care in 1999. In fact, the number of finalized adoptions
grew by almost 200 percent since 1995. I think it's important
to recognize these accomplishments while at the same time
insisting that things must continue to improve and must improve
more quickly.
Clearly, while the agency is on the road to more acceptable
practice, it has not yet achieved compliance with the standards
of the remedial order. And I won't go into all of the
problems--you've heard them today--but too many children still
linger in foster care for too long. Too many children and
families are split from their siblings. Too many teenagers live
in group homes. There aren't enough placement resources. There
is a shortage of social workers. There remains a really
untenable split between responsibility for abuse and neglect in
this system. There are critical resource shortages,
particularly substance abuse services, mental health services
and housing services.
The next year must be one in which demonstrable progress is
made in improving outcomes for children. From the monitor's
perspective, there are five critical recommendations that I
wish to make. The first is the Child Welfare Agency must
recruit and maintain an adequate number of trained social
workers, supervisors and social work aides. Once hired, the
agency must take steps to address the communication,
supervision, training and other morale problems that contribute
to staff leaving too soon.
Second, the agency needs to increase the numbers and types
of placement resources available for children with an emphasis
on more family foster homes, therapeutic foster homes and
adoptive homes. More placements need to be developed in the
Districts--in the neighborhoods where children and families now
live.
Third, funding must be made available to implement the
resource development provisions of the remedial order with
particular emphasis on mental health services, substance abuse
services, day care services and funding for a range of
community-based services and support.
I want to talk a little bit more about the budget issues. A
lot of attention of this receiver has been diverted and devoted
to fighting a battle to gain the resources necessary to keep
the agency afloat. Approved budgets for fiscal 1999 and 2000
have been insufficient to operate the agency properly, and have
stymied headway on many of the reforms required under the
remedial order. The receiver's fiscal 2001 budget request
includes funding for those requirements of the remedial order
which need additional resources.
Congress can be helpful in providing the needed resources
to implement the LaShawn order. The District government has
never provided the funding necessary to achieve the mandates of
the remedial order. Arguably, until recently, the agency did
not demonstrate the capacity to adequately spend additional
resources. But it is my view that they do now have that
capacity and must be given the resources that they have
requested.
Congress can readily provide some additional Federal
funding to the agency by allowing that the District's Title IV-
E reimbursement for foster care and adoption services be
established at the Medicaid reimbursement rate. In all other
States, the Title IV-E reimbursement rate for foster care
payments and adoption subsidies is set at the Medicaid matching
rate. However, in the District, although Congress raised the
Medicaid matching rate to 70 percent several years ago for
health care services, it stipulated in the legislative history
that this increase was only applicable to health care benefits.
This distinction could be altered by Congress. By my estimate,
allowing the District to claim Title IV-E reimbursement at the
Medicaid matching rate, as every other State is allowed, would
provide an addition of approximately $8 to $10 million in
Federal funds annually for child welfare services.
My fourth recommendation is the quality of social work
practice with children and families needs continued attention
and improvement. This means paying attention to what goes on in
those daily contacts between a social worker and a family.
Fifth, there must be accelerated efforts to improve the
working relationships between the receivership, the police, the
Superior Court, and the Office of Corporation Counsel, as well
as efforts to resolve problems with processing interstate
compact approvals for the placement of children in Maryland and
Virginia.
The receivership must be held accountable for improving
results for children and families, but we must recognize that
the child welfare system involves complex relationships between
the Child Welfare Agency, the police, the courts and the legal
system. The receivership must lead the way, but they cannot fix
the system by themselves.
The District Office of Corporation Counsel, for example,
must be given the resources to adequately provide legal
representation to CFSA and its clients. Similarly, the
unworkable separation of responsibility for responding to abuse
and neglect in the District must end.
Finally, the Mayor must help resolve the
interjurisdictional barriers to timely processing of interstate
compact approvals for placement of children across State lines
in Maryland and Virginia.
CFSA has been in receivership since 1995 and there is
justifiably widespread frustration that desired outcomes for
children and families have not been achieved. Doing so will
require new action by the receiver and her staff, additional
financial and human resources, strong leadership from within
District government and continued cooperative work between
CFSA, the Superior Court, the Office of Corporation Counsel and
the Metropolitan Police.
Work needs to begin now to plan the transition of CFSA back
to District government. But it cannot begin unless there is a
demonstrated commitment to adequately fund the legitimate needs
of abused and neglected children and their families in the
District, and to work cooperatively with the court-appointed
receiver to implement the LaShawn remedial order.
Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Meltzer follows:]
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Mr. Davis. Ms. Jones.
Ms. Jones. Chairman Davis, and members of the subcommittee,
thank you for this opportunity to provide you with information
regarding the reforms that are being made to improve services
to children and families in the District. I'm going to do a
shortened version of my testimony because the version submitted
provides a lot of the background and detail.
We are making progress in our efforts to achieve
compliance, but I would be the first to admit that this job is
much tougher than I expected. There were some big surprises
with respect to the work conditions and the level of
dysfunction in the day-to-day operations that make the
challenge a lot more difficult to overcome. However, I am
confident that we can achieve the goals that have been set.
In a prior statement I received, there were several issues
that the committee had asked that I consider addressing. So I
will try to make a brief comment on each of those areas.
The first area had to do with identifying risk--at-risk
children and families and making services and supports
available to them. The most effective way to make critical
services available to at-risk children and families is through
the development of a system of preventive and support services.
We have done this in the District through the development of
the Healthy Families/Thriving Community Collaboratives.
Services through the collaboratives are tailored to the unique
needs of each community and include case management, preventive
and support services, parent education, substance abuse
education and treatment, foster home recruitment, respite care,
father support groups, emergency and transitional housing, and
support services for teens.
To make it easier for the public to report instances of
suspected abuse and neglect, we have put in place a single
reporting hotline, 202-671-SAFE.
For many children, the most appropriate caregiver is a
relative. This is our fastest growing service. While this
program is not a requirement of the MFO, it is one that we will
have to address because of the need. As a result, we were
selected to meet a kinship care demonstrationsite by the
Department of Health and Human Services in supporting the
children with out-of-home care.
In this effort, we have increased support to children
requiring out-of-home care in the following ways: We've
increased our board rate by $4.40 per day, a 28 percent
increase. We've implemented a foster parents support unit to
improve foster parents' access to support services. We've
established the Teen Life Options program for youth in
independent living that includes educational and life skills
development.
We've implemented the comprehensive health care system for
children in out-of-home care, DC KIDS. This system is a time-
sensitive process to ensure that every child entering care is
given a full health screening and good followup care.
We have requested funding in the fiscal year 2001 budget to
develop a Kinship Care subsidy program for relatives who become
legal guardians.
We've implemented a system of regular staffing of cases to
ensure that permanency plans are developed for all children.
And we've established a special unit, which we call the
Abscondence Unit, to quickly locate children who have run away.
This unit also includes a mentoring program to reduce
recidivism.
We've implemented the Adoption and Safe Families Act. And
while the legislation was delayed in being implemented, we
proceeded to put in place the processes and regulations
necessary to begin to implement that goal.
We're attempting to meet the needs of--special physical and
emotional needs of children who need special attention. This is
an area where we have made the least amount of progress. Our
ability to make progress in this area is directly tied to the
ability to secure additional resources to either stimulate new
development or to expand the current capacity. This is our
highest priority in the budget for fiscal year 2001.
We are particularly short of services for parents and
children who require substance abuse and mental health
treatment. We are projecting that more than 1,700 families will
need treatment and services for substance abuse or mental
health. This is particularly true and particularly inadequate
for adolescents, pregnant women or women with young children
who have dual diagnosis, such as having mental health and
substance abuse problems collectively.
We are required by the MFO to assure that children and
their families receive mental health services to prevent
neglect and abuse and to avoid placement disruptions and to
provide for child safety. We believe that there is a need for
these kinds of services for at least 200 additional children,
especially victims of sexual abuse who require more intensive
therapy.
With respect to improving our services for improvement of
the quality of social work practice, this agency has in the
District one of the highest educated work forces in child
welfare in the Nation. All of our social workers are required
to have Masters level degrees. We provide an additional 80
hours of initial training to all new social workers before they
are assigned caseload responsibilities, as well as ongoing in-
service training to improve their skills and knowledge about
practice.
With the assistance of a professional consultant, we are
developing performance standards for all positions in the
agency. These standards will become the benchmarks for
performance evaluation.
We have a Quality Assurance office with staff that are
responsible for reviewing cases to determine the level of
compliance with Federal and local policies and procedures.
Caseload size is dictated by the requirements of the MFO
and it is a major factor in the quality of practice.
Unfortunately, because of the high turnover of the Masters
level social workers, we are not meeting this requirement at
this time.
I am pleased to report to you, however, that as of last
week we have interviewed, selected, made offers and sufficient
employees or--prospective employees have now accepted positions
which will enable us to fill all of our vacancies by the first
week in June, most of whom will begin work during the month of
May.
We have taken steps to improve the quality and to help
stabilize our work force by instituting a career ladder for our
social workers, making it possible for experienced social
workers to be compensated at a level commensurate with their
experience.
In the District of Columbia child abuse and neglect are not
under a single State agency, as is the case elsewhere. There is
a fine line that separates child abuse and neglect in many
situations with the distinction often resulting from the
special judgment that is made by a social worker or, as in the
District of Columbia, by a police officer. This situation is
further exacerbated by the fact that a CFSA social worker does
not have the authority to remove a child from an immediate
danger, only the law enforcement authority may take this
action.
Legislation is to be introduced in the City Council in the
near future to end this fragmentation of child protection
services, thereby allowing for greater uniformity in policies
and procedures.
With respect to the interstate compact, there are no
substantive issues regarding the interstate compact with the
State of Virginia. These placements are handled through a
private agency, Lutheran Social Services, that is licensed in
the State of Virginia. In the State of Maryland, we have
encountered some difficulties, primarily due to the large
number of children that are placed there, especially those that
are placed with the relatives. We are in the process of
attempting to develop a border agreement between the District
and the State of Maryland which will allow us to develop a more
workable process that can accommodate the volume of cases that
are located in Maryland.
We have submitted a budget this year that will become our
attempt to indeed fulfill meeting the remaining requirements or
at least initiating services to address the remaining
requirements in the modified final order. This budget request
includes funding required not only to implement the remaining
requirements, but also to meet the needs of the families and
children in the District of Columbia.
We have instituted a system for monitoring of the
performance of all of our contractors. We have children placed
both in State and out of State in group facilities.
All of our contracts are monitored by a monitoring unit.
They are reviewed and may be visited day or night, weekends or
at any point during a day. The intent is to allow us to ensure
that contractors are indeed performing.
While I cannot say to you today that we are in compliance
with all of the requirements of the MFO, I can say that we have
made substantial progress. I am confident that we now have the
infrastructure in place that will allow us to make steady
progress toward compliance. We have an administrative
organization that allows responsibility and accountability to
be maintained. We have a personnel system in place that ensures
that all jobs are clearly defined and roles and
responsibilities are clear. We are in the process of developing
performance standards.
We now have the capacity to provide initial and ongoing
training. We have a fully automated work environment that
tracks cases as well as fiscal operation. We have a new chief
financial officer who has made progress in shoring up all of
our fiscal operations. I am confident that we can manage the
funds and ensure accurate and prompt payments of bills for
services rendered.
Our working relationship with the other District government
agencies is improving as well as our work with the court. We
will continue our close coordination in working with the deputy
mayor.
It is my opinion that we will be able to make substantial
progress during the remainder of fiscal year 2000, and with
approval of the budget requests for fiscal year 2001, we can
make substantial progress toward meeting the remaining
requirements of the modified final order.
Thank you again for the opportunity to address this
committee. We hope you will support our efforts to achieve
compliance.
Mr. Davis. Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Jones follows:]
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Mr. Davis. What I think I'm going to do, with the
permission of the committee, is have the next panel come up and
testify so we can have everyone up here together. If you want
to take a break for 15 minutes, you're welcome to do that and
come back, or you're welcome to sit there through everyone
else's testimony. But we have Carolyn Graham, Grace Lopes and
Kimberley Shellman, if they'd like to come up.
It's the tradition of the committee that we swear in our
witnesses. I just ask you to stand and raise your right hands
before you proceed.
Carolyn Graham is the deputy mayor for children, youth and
families. Grace Lopes is the special counsel for the
receivership and institutional litigation, and Kimberley
Shellman, as Tom DeLay noted earlier, the executive director of
the District of Columbia Children's Advocacy Center.
I understand you're going to address the areas of reform
that need to be enacted by the Child and Family Service Agency
in efforts to return the agency to the District. So raise your
right hands.
[Witnesses sworn.]
Mr. Davis. Ms. Graham, why don't you go first, followed by
Ms. Lopes and then Ms. Shellman. Like I said to the others,
feel free to stay, but if you want to get up--because we're
probably then going to have a series of questions for all six
of you at the conclusion of that, so if you want to get up
during their testimony, it should take about 15 minutes.
Try to stay to 5 minutes. We've read the testimony. We have
questions ready, I think, based on that, but highlight what you
would like to highlight. Thank you.
STATEMENTS OF CAROLYN GRAHAM, DEPUTY MAYOR FOR CHILDREN, YOUTH
AND FAMILIES, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA; GRACE LOPES, SPECIAL
COUNSEL, RECEIVERSHIP AND INSTITUTIONAL LITIGATION; AND
KIMBERLEY A. SHELLMAN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, THE DISTRICT OF
COLUMBIA CHILDREN'S ADVOCACY CENTER
Ms. Graham. Good afternoon, Congressman Davis,
Congresswoman Norton and other members of the subcommittee. I
am Carolyn Graham, deputy mayor for children, youth and
families, and on behalf of Mayor Anthony A. Williams, I welcome
this opportunity to come before you today as we begin in
earnest the dialog about the imminent return of the Child and
Family Service Agency back to the District of Columbia's
governing structure.
Mr. Davis, Ms. Norton and members of the committee, Mayor
Williams has asked me to convey to you today his willingness to
work with you and other members of this committee and Congress
to ensure a speedy and efficient return of these most crucial
services to the District of Columbia.
The Williams administration applauds the work that the
current receiver Ms. Ernestine Jones has sought to accomplish
over her 2\1/2\ year tenure, often in the face of extreme odds
ranging from the lack of appropriate levels of funding to meet
the basic court requirements, to agency isolation from other
significant governmental bodies simply because of the court-
imposed status of receivership.
The administration has closely examined this receivership
and became intentionally involved with it soon after assuming
office. Mayor Williams' general concern about children and
youth and his personal commitment to children in the child
welfare system, particularly foster care, led in October 1999
to the development of a white paper on the District of
Columbia's child welfare system. The white paper was the result
of a collaborative effort involving members of the Mayor's
immediate staff, members of the mayoral-appointed Advisory
Council on Permanent Homes for Children, the receiver, the
court-appointed LaShawn Monitor, the presiding judge of the
D.C. Superior Court Family Division and other child welfare
advocates from throughout the District of Columbia.
The District of Columbia in this paper found that the
Department of Health, for example, which is responsible for
approving foster care and adoption homes for children in the
District, had over 100 applications for foster care yet to be
processed by the licensure and regulatory division of the
Department of Health. Likewise, in the Department of Fire and
Emergency Medical Services, which provides fire inspections for
potential adoptive and foster homes, we found an additional 100
applications awaiting processing. In both instances, homes
could not be approved for the placement of children because of
the backlog in critical partner agencies and a lack of
coordination between these agencies and the Child and Family
Services Agency.
Given these and other mitigating circumstances outlined in
the report, it soon became evident to the administration why
well over 60 percent of the District's children in foster care
no doubt live in Maryland.
I might add here also that as you heard, child abuse and
neglect services are bifurcated here in the District of
Columbia. We're one of the few jurisdictions that have such a
system. The Metropolitan Police Department has responsibility
for investigative work associated with crimes against children.
The Child and Family Services Agency, on the other hand, has
responsibility for managing issues of neglect. These are not
coordinated services aimed at supporting the needs of children.
We recognize that we must bring these services back together.
We cannot do so as long as the Child and Family Services Agency
is under the management of the courts.
Based on the findings of the white paper, the Mayor
launched an ambitious and aggressive campaign to promote
permanency for children in the District and reinvigorated
efforts to improve coordination and cooperation between the
receiver and critical partner agencies within the District of
Columbia. Other important developments such as the Mayor's
support of the use of TANF funds for the agency's work in
strengthening families this fiscal year, and his support of
full funding for the fiscal year 2001 budget to allow the
agency for the first time, to fulfill the requirements of the
modified final order, an indication of the mayor's commitment
to supporting the child welfare agency as it prepares to return
to the District. The Mayor has also entered into a memorandum
of understanding, which is designed to help expedite efforts to
make permanency determinations for children in foster care.
A joint outreach and recruitment effort between the
administration and the receiver is in effect intended to
encourage District residents to consider becoming adoptive and
foster parents. On May 10 the Mayor's Safe Passage to
Permanency: Bring Our Children Home, initiative will be the
subject of the 10th annual Peirce Warwick symposium. The
symposium is being done in collaboration with the receiver and
one of our community partners, the Family and Child Services
Agency here in Washington.
For fiscal year 2001, we have proposed that tobacco funds
be used to create an intergenerational community, particularly
for large sibling groups, special needs children and teen
parents in foster care. Our vision is that this community will
be modeled after the SOS villages, which, by the way, is
conducting a feasibility study here in the District of
Columbia, which is funded by Freddie Mac Foundation. One of our
community-based partners also, the Law Project, has drafted
guardianship legislation that we will be advancing to the
council prior to its summer recess. We've also exempted social
work positions from any buyout or early out options and savings
opportunities designed to ensure budget compliance. This has
been done in order to ensure that the agency will not lose
essential personnel.
We are also working with the receiver on the interstate
compact issue that she currently has with Maryland, and are
developing legislation that is aimed at the consolidation of
the child abuse and neglect services here in the District.
As is apparent from our ongoing efforts, the District is
actively engaged in efforts to improve efficiency and
effectiveness within the receivership, as well as in efforts to
ensure a smooth transition of the agency back into the
governmental fold. This hearing is indeed a welcome opportunity
for discussions, debate and cooperation to ensure a successful
reintegration of these services.
Last, I might add here that I recently joined a group of
individuals on a trip to Texas to observe first-hand several
communities' work in effectively coordinating the child welfare
system's child abuse and neglect programs. I came away from
that experience, Mr. Davis and Ms. Norton and Mr. DeLay,
convinced that when the services are returned to the District
of Columbia, that the child assessment model must certainly be
done here so that we realize greater and better outcomes for
our children who are often victims of adult predators.
In conclusion, let me say I thank you for this opportunity
to speak to you as distinguished members of this committee
today on the D.C. Child and Family Services Agency receivership
and will be delighted to answer any questions that you might
have.
Mr. Davis. Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Graham follows:]
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Mr. Davis. Ms. Lopes.
Ms. Lopes. Good afternoon, Chairman Davis, Ms. Norton,
members of the committee, Mr. DeLay. My name is Grace Lopes,
and I am the Mayor's special counsel for institutional reform
litigation and receiverships. This is a position that was
created by Mayor Williams proactively in response to the
proliferation of litigation implicating the operation of D.C.
agencies.
My testimony today will focus on three areas. First, I will
describe the role of special counsel, what the function is, how
it works. Second, I'll describe the progress I have made in my
3 months, just about 3-month tenure on the job. And third, I'll
describe the scope of my responsibilities as those
responsibilities translate into the LaShawn A. litigation.
So, first, with respect to my role as special counsel, it
is a multidimensional role. I'm responsible for developing and
implementing the legal strategies or the legal architecture for
successfully resolving the institutional reform litigation in
the District, including the litigation related to the
receiverships and developing the transition plan for transition
back to District of Columbia control. I'm responsible for
coordinating legal strategies in all of the institutional
reform cases and to coordinate those strategies with policy
objectives and agency operations.
I'm also responsible for conducting ongoing risk
assessments with respect to all our institutional litigation,
so that we can act proactively where risks are identified in
order to avert further court intrusion into the operations of
our government in the future.
I'm responsible for monitoring and, if appropriate,
supporting the work of the receivers to facilitate their
compliance with the orders and ultimately accelerate the
transition back to District of Columbia control.
I'm also responsible for intervening as necessary with all
District of Columbia agencies and agency heads to ensure there
is an appropriate structure to support the compliance effort
and to resolve issues as they are identified.
And finally, I serve as the Mayor's liaison with the court
monitors, with the special masters, with the receivers,
plaintiff's counsel, judges and community members vis-a-vis the
court orders.
I thought it would be helpful to explain the current status
of these receiverships. There are five lawsuits in the District
of Columbia which culminated in courts imposing receiverships.
They've been imposed by the Federal court as well as our local
superior court, and they implicate the following agency
operations: the Commission on Mental Health Services, the Child
and Family Services Agency, the Department Of Public and
Assisted Housing, general and special education at the
District's juvenile detention facility at Oak Hill, and medical
and mental health services at the District of Columbia jail.
We anticipate that with respect to two of the
receiverships, they will be terminating this year: the
receivership regarding public and assisted housing and the
receivership at the D.C. Jail. Both of those receiverships will
terminate according to court-ordered schedules, which require
their termination this year upon certain findings. We
anticipate those findings will be made and those receiverships
will be timely resolved.
A third receivership involves a Superior Court order
imposing the receivership that was reversed by the D.C. Court
of Appeals on the District of Columbia's motion. The
receivership remains in effect only because the plaintiffs in
that case have pursued the appellate process, and the review
process hasn't been exhausted. In all likelihood, we believe
that the reversal will be affirmed and that education at the
Oak Hill facility will be returned to the operation of the
District of Columbia government in short order.
With respect to the remaining receiverships, and there are
two, they have been the two most problematic. There have been
multiple receivers and those receiverships are not scheduled to
terminate this calendar year.
The first is the Dixon case, which is the case that
implicates all operations of the Commission on Mental Health
Services. Shortly after I began working for the Mayor in
February, I conducted an assessment of all of the
receiverships. I made a decision to focus on the Dixon case as
a result of the assessment. I initiated negotiations with
plaintiffs, and with the existing receiver. I obtained their
agreement to transition out of the receivership. We presented
an order to the court and have a transition plan that has been
ordered by the court. Pursuant to that order, operations of the
Commission on Mental Health Services will be returned to the
control of the District of Columbia government by as early as
January 1, 2001, or as late as April 1, 2001, but no later.
That order is in effect, and we are currently supporting the
work of the transitional receiver and developing the
infrastructure to transition back to the D.C. Control Board as
seamlessly as possible.
With respect to the final receivership, that is the LaShawn
receiver and the subject matter, of course, of today's
proceedings. I am currently involved in evaluating the LaShawn
receivership, and on the basis of that evaluation, I will be
developing a strategy to transition that receivership back to
District of Columbia government control. I expect that
evaluation to be completed within 60 days, and at the
conclusion of that time period, I expect to initiate a
transition strategy and to attempt to do that as cooperatively
as possible with all stakeholders.
With respect to my other responsibilities beyond
receivership cases, I have and continue to intervene in the
nonreceivership institutional reform cases. I am currently
participating in negotiations to develop disengagement plans in
several nonreceivership cases, and we're beginning to work on
corrective action/compliance monitoring infrastructures that we
hope to embed in all of the District's agencies in order to
prevent further court involvement in the future.
The intrusion by the courts into the operation of local
government in the District represents the culmination of
decades of noncompliance with court orders. We hope that as we
demonstrate our ability to comply with the law and remedy many
long-standing deficits in management and resources, that we can
return the operation of these agencies to the District of
Columbia government. We expect to accomplish this productivity
in an appropriate and methodologically sound fashion.
I am delighted to testify before you today and look forward
to answering any of your questions or concerns.
Mr. Davis. Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Lopes follows:]
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Mr. Davis. Ms. Shellman, thanks.
Ms. Shellman. Good afternoon. I am Kimberly Shellman, and
I'm the executive director of the D.C. Children's Advocacy
Center, known as Safe Shores to the children we serve, and
obviously to Mr. DeLay as well. Thank you for your kind remarks
about our center. We are delighted that so many Congress
Members have come down and visited this center. We are still
working on some of our District officials, but the deputy
mayor's been really helpful with that.
I come here today, first of all, as a child advocate. So
I'm in a very different role than the other people here today.
So I hope to speak very frank and very forward and deal with
the consequences of what I'm going to say today when I go back
to the office.
I am here today with several board members in support of my
testimony, several staff members--I always have a lot of staff
support--as well as Nancy Chandler from the National Children's
Alliance, so--who is in support of our testimony. We are the
front-line people, and I'm going to talk to you briefly, and I
have shortened my remarks about what we see the problems are at
the front line at the lower level, which is the impact of the
children. So I won't be able to speak as much to the broader
overall issues of what I've heard today as I will be able to
speak to the actual impact on the children.
The Children's Advocacy Center, as many of you know, is a
nonprofit organization in private-public partnership with the
D.C. government and the Federal Government. The center
facilitates and coordinates the work of an interagency,
multidisciplinary team which investigates allegations of
physical and sexual abuse of children. When utilized, and not
always utilized in the District, the center is the Metropolitan
Police Department's primary resource for all investigations
involving child victims and child witnesses, including cases of
domestic violence and homicide.
The creation of our multidisciplinary team is one that's
done through the Children's Advocacy Center based on the
Children's National Alliance model. Many of you have those in
your jurisdiction, and I visited 5 in Texas, and I have visited
over 30 centers in my 5-year tenure at the center. In the
District of Colombia, the interagency team includes law
enforcement, social services, prosecution, mental health
workers, medical personnel and victim advocates.
Safe Shores was created in 1995 as the result of a mayoral
order and a lot of hard work and vision of a small group of
District residents and professionals who saw the crying need to
better serve child victims of abuse. We've been working very
hard over the 5 years to build this support, and with all of
the changes and turnovers within the government, it has been
quite a struggle.
The CAC is primarily responsible for coordinating initial
investigations of child sexual abuse allegations in the
District. This role has afforded us a very unique opportunity
to view this systemic response to our children from a close-up
perspective, a view that we are not often asked to share or
inquired about, and so we are very grateful that you have
considered our role as one which is worthy of giving you what
we see. The view that we have is not a pleasant one.
As a center and as a multidisciplinary team coordinator, we
can clearly identify six problems that negatively impact our
children's care and treatment, and they often result in further
victimization or sheer neglect by the system itself. I will
tell you that I have attached an exhibit A, which is what I
have tried to draw the system for you, and I think the main
thrust of what we like to say here today is I'm not sure how
much progress any of us can make within this system design, and
that is what needs to be looked at. The individual agencies
cannot function within the system. I have checked with
everybody on the details. Everybody says this is correct of
what I've drawn, but this is it, and it's pretty sad.
First, the current structure of the MPD for investigating
child sexual abuse and physical abuse cases, there is no
centralization of child abuse cases, and you will see how that
impacts when you look at that chart on the first page, but you
will see that in the case example that I have provided for you.
Second, the long-standing statutory bifurcation of social
services between Court Social Services and the Child and Family
Services Agency, it is very difficult for the Child and Family
Services Agency to do the monitoring of foster care on a case
that they did not start, that Court Social Services started,
and then once they decide that there's going to be a removal,
CFSA gets involved. It's very difficult for Court Social
Services to start a case and then have another worker in a
totally different agency with a different agency head deal with
responding and carrying into a followup, and often these two
social workers don't even speak to each other because they're
in separate agencies and have separate roles.
Third, the long-standing statutory--I'm sorry, third, the
current reporting system through the Child Abuse Hotline and
what we consider to be shameful practices for how these reports
are dispatched to the investigators. I am tired of seeing cases
being faxed over to the MPD and being thrown in boxes. We need
to make sure that we are treating our Child Abuse Hotline
dispatches as we are treating 911 calls that are coming in with
adult victims, and I cannot stress that enough.
Fourth, the disjointed leadership structure, and this is
something that I've made up. This is nothing official in the
way that I'm putting this forward to you, but I'm trying to
explain to you that we don't have a Governor that says, we're
going to do this, and gets the community and all the agencies
behind this. In the last 5 years, the leadership structure has
resulted in the Corporation Counsel supervised by the Mayor;
the MPD under the management of the Control Board; the D.C.
Courts, including Court Social Services, under Federal arm as
well as the United States attorneys that does the criminal
prosecution. The Child and Family Services Agency has obviously
been under a receiver.
All of this creates great conflict and great turf wars that
have hampered most of our attempts at multidisciplinary
approaches to child abuse cases, and what you do not realize at
the upper levels and you do on the front lines is that our
children and families are hearing this and seeing this and
getting caught in the middle of this on a day-to-day basis.
Fifth, we are greatly concerned about the severity of the
mental health problems of our children and youth in the
District of Colombia today and the access to quality and
available treatment for them. It is severe. We are working with
children who are walking through the door on a sexual abuse
allegation, and the therapist is saying that that is not the
biggest impact of trauma on them that they are experiencing. It
is a small piece of what is going on with our children. It is
very scary, and as a community we are going to have to be
prepared to recognize this, and I'm afraid that at this point
we all really don't want to really look at what is going on.
These children are young parents as well and they are raising
children, and they have these problems.
And finally, there is a lack of a--historical lack of a
citywide strategic funding plan for child victims of
maltreatment that has adversely impacted the prevention of
future and further abuse of our children. It causes too much
competition among the service providers. We are letting the
funders tell us what they want to fund rather than us telling
them what the needs of the children and families are, and
because we're trying to survive as service providers, we're
making up and creating trainings that we don't know that much
about in order to ensure that we get some type of funding so we
can survive, and there is something wrong with that.
To address these issues, we are working closely with
Carolyn Graham, the deputy mayor for children and youth, and we
have never had this type of leadership or this type of interest
or this level of understanding of these problems since Ms.
Graham came on board in--early on in the year. So we're really
excited about that.
We are working in recommending a Crimes Against Children
Unit within the Metropolitan Police Department, and I will be
very frank in saying that I received a call 30 minutes before
coming to this hearing from Assistant Chief Gainer that on
Sunday there will be the beginnings of a centralization of
child sex abuse and physical abuse cases within the
Metropolitan Police Department. And I would like to thank
everyone at this hearing for assisting in building up to this
this week, and also the efforts of Carolyn Graham in this as
well. She has been fighting with us. We have been advocating
for this for a year, and I'm just glad that it has come to
fruition, and we are looking for that follow-through by the
police department.
Second, we recommend that the bifurcation of social
services end. We recommend that the receivership of Child and
Family Services end, and that the agency be turned back over to
the Mayor.
I have heard a lot of conversation today. What we're seeing
on the front lines is a lot of good workers leaving. We are
seeing a lot of workers feeling that they're not supported, and
a lot of people in social services looking to the Children's
Advocacy Center for backup on cases, and we are not there to
back them up on cases. Their supervisors need to be backing
them up on cases.
Finally and perhaps what we are most importantly
recommending at this point is that the government of the
District of Columbia, the U.S. Attorney's Office jointly
collaborate with the Children's Advocacy Center and the
National Children's Alliance to create a citywide child victim
center that will house all of the interagency partners under
one roof. The National Children's Alliance has made an offer to
the District government and the Children's Advocacy Center that
I and the center believe--and all of our board of directors--
should not be ignored by the government. We need to follow
through on these private funds that have stepped forward to
assist us. It is a national organization that has stepped
forward, and that is very rare in the District that a national
organization would assist at the local level.
The new child victim center will house the National
Children's Alliance headquarters, the Children's Advocacy
Center, as well as the new Crimes Against Children Unit for the
MPF, Corporation Counsel prosecutors, U.S. Attorney's Office
prosecutors, U.S. Attorney's Office child advocate, the Child
Protection Services Intake Unit, whatever form that is going to
take between ending this bifurcation, and medical personnel
under one roof, as is being done all across the country, and
it's being done successfully.
The proposed site for the center is the Gales School,
located in less than five blocks from D.C. Superior Court. It
seems that every time we identify a building in this city, we
are told that that building is far more valuable than the
children we are trying to serve. We are told that that building
is too expensive to give to us. We are working closely with
Carolyn Graham to secure the Gales School. I cannot impress
enough that the less longer we hold off on getting this
building, the quicker we can go forward and get this center
built. It is a square brick building sitting on a corner that
has not been utilized as a school since the 1940's. We need to
move forward on that project.
In addition, the center is going to serve all child victims
and witnesses of physical abuse, sexual abuse, exploitation,
neglect, homicide, and we want to take on the youth-on-youth
violence as well. We want to have the identifying fact not be
where did the event occur, what is the relationship of the
perpetrator, but we want it to be it's a child victim, it goes
to the new victims' center. It goes to the trauma assessment
team. It goes to the Crimes Against Children Unit.
We want to have the Crimes Against Children Unit and CPS
located together and the hotline onsite so we do not have any
more faxing problems.
The center's going to house an expert forensic interview
program, trauma assessment and treatment center, supervised
visitation program that the courts have been crying for, and
the medical exam program, as well as a child victim training
center that we will share with the National Children's
Alliance.
In closing, I say that the ultimate goal of this center
will be to ensure that all child victims, not just those that
are chosen to come through the Children's Advocacy Center by a
line detective, but all child victims will receive an immediate
and appropriate response in order to facilitate the past that
they have to navigate through this system following a report,
whether that path is family and victim support, removal and
foster care, reunification with caretakers or therapeutic
treatment and healing. No matter what the path is, we will put
them on the right path with the right support.
As I stated before, I've provided with you a true case
summary that the CAC has tracked during the past 2 years. You
can imagine the impact that releasing this case is going to
have in the District. This truly points out the problems that
we are seeing, and it's absolutely obscene that track that
those three children in the X case have been through in the
system, and I encourage you to take time to read that. I've
taken all the identifying stuff out, even more than I think we
had to, but I still hope that it helps to show you what the
problems are. We think that this case factually supports our
concerns today.
We strongly urge this committee to support our
recommendations as well as the efforts of Carolyn Graham,
deputy mayor for children and youth. We have great confidence
in her efforts for our children.
Thank you for this opportunity.
Mr. Davis. Well, thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Shellman follows:]
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Mr. Davis. Now we have all six of you here, and we are
going to go through a line of questions. I'm going to start
with our whip Mr. DeLay. Tom, thank you for being here.
Mr. DeLay. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate your
consideration of my time. I do have to leave, and I appreciate
all your testimony, and there's so many questions, but I'm
going to center around a couple.
Ms. Meltzer, the thing that struck me about your testimony
was the fact that unlike Ms. Shellman's testimony, most of your
recommendation is more government, more funding, no changes.
Are you looking at outside the box?
Mr. Meltzer. Absolutely. I'm sorry if you come away with
that impression from my testimony. The child welfare system
will not be fixed unless the agency develops partnerships with
the community in very different kinds of ways, and that is why
as monitor, we have pushed so heavily for the development of
community-based services and the work with the collaboratives
in the neighborhoods. No matter how many social workers this
agency gets, unless they change what is really going on at the
level of interaction between children and families, it will not
get better.
I was trying in the recommendations to address things that
I thought Congress could have some impact on rather than my
feelings about what's necessary to change the system.
Mr. DeLay. I'm hoping this committee can have impact on
those other things through the dollar. It makes people listen.
Ms. Jones, I noticed in your testimony, too, that there was
very little--and I don't want to just focus on community--but
it is so vitally important to make the things work that there
was little mention of using community organizations, even
faith-based institutions. Have you used community organizations
other faith-based or any community help, and how have you?
Ms. Jones. Well, I was trying to keep my testimony as short
as possible, so I didn't go into a lot of detail. Yes. One of
the areas that I've concentrated probably more of my time on
that than anything else has been helping to develop the whole
system of neighborhood-based service. What's unique about those
services here in the District is those services are evolving
from the community. In each of those eight collaboratives, the
constituent groups that make up those collaboratives are
neighborhood organizations, private agencies there, churches,
other neighborhood-based groups. So that network, it's
different in different wards. Each one--they pretty much follow
the ward, but each one has its own organization.
We have a contractual relationship with those neighborhood
services to do a large part of our preventive services. One of
the things, in my belief, needed to help strengthen and build
the District child welfare is that you have to have a good
preventive service system that helps families before they reach
the point of needing us to intervene to remove children. That
did not exist here. There was not a place where a family could
get help until the situation resorted to neglect. Now, I'm sure
years ago there were, but over the years those programs didn't
continue. What we have done is rebuild that, and I'm very proud
of the fact that what we're seeing is the impact of how this is
beginning to help us stabilize the front door.
In the agency right now among our contractual agencies we
use a number of faith-based organizations, particularly with
the adoptions. One church/one child is one of the programs that
we have--that helps us with our adoptions. So yes, community
services is a major part of the reform that we've made.
Mr. DeLay. I appreciate that.
Mr. DeLay, I really appreciate the work that you're doing
and the Mayor's doing, but I want to ask you and Ms. Shellman
the same question. I noticed in neither one of your
recommendations did you address the courts in D.C. It has been
my experience that unless you have judges that understand this
and are professional and very well trained in child abuse and
neglect law and family law, none of this can work because
that's where it starts, it's with the judge when they take
these kids out of homes.
It also is the problem with Brianna was that--and I don't
want to criticize the judge, but the judge failed on behalf of
Brianna. Rotating judges don't work. You have to have a judge
that believes in the best interests of the child and makes sure
that all the other agencies, all the other services, everything
else is being provided in the best interest of the child.
What is being done in D.C. and how are--do you see changing
what's going on, both you and----
Ms. Graham. Thank you, Mr. DeLay. We certainly do agree
with you that the courts, are a major element in this whole
system reformation that must be made here. We're talking
massive system reform, which would also include the courts. I
think that Judge Hamilton, who has provided supreme leadership
to this court here in the District, however we begin to prepare
for his exit, we must begin to look at how we can begin to
influence the new structure of the new court that comes into
being.
There is great desire among members of the bench to, in
fact, to put in place a family court, and I think before long
we will begin to see some real active movement in that area.
Ms. Shellman. I will speak a little bit differently to that
from our experience. I guess it's almost as if we see the
courts as unable to change. We are unable to move them or
change them, and I think a lot of it stems from the fact that I
don't believe in your jurisdiction you have 59 judges that are
appointed for a 15-year term and are not elected or have any
accountability. Really, they get their 15 years, and as child
advocates in the community, we have talked about that and found
that as a concern. So we've also felt that there's not a lot we
can do about that.
Second, we had an open house after we opened the Children's
Advocacy Center that was specially scheduled for the judges,
and Chief Hamilton helped me put out the invitations and the e-
mails, and not one judge came. So I think that we have--you
know, that's just one example--in many ways tried to reach out.
I think that we as a community have also felt--when I say
people working in child abuse, and I'm not sure that the people
at CFSA and Corporation Counsel have felt this way--we have
tried to offer some training to judges, and they don't want it
unless it's by other judges, and then that's even difficult. So
I do think this is something that we need to look at very, very
closely because we do have a lot of concerns in that area. I
don't think I have the answer to that, but perhaps you do.
Mr. DeLay. Mr. Chairman, I have got one little answer, and
I'll finish with this. It does speak--I know a lot of judges
hate to be elected, but if you look at the history of child
advocacies centers, and most importantly CASA, and CASA's not
here, I don't think, unfortunately, but the chapters of CASAs
that were created were created because political pressure was
put on the judges, and the judges made them part of the court.
And if you have appointed judges, just as you have tenure in
teaching, and they have no accountability, they don't go and
learn, they don't want to have family, these are very, very
difficult cases, and it takes professionalism to handle them,
and that may be a suggestion that the Mayor should look at and
we ought to look at for D.C. in that regard.
And the opposite is also true. When you have a judge that's
shirking, there ain't nothing like child advocates putting
political pressure to force them to do their job.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate your courtesies.
Mr. Davis. Mr. Horn.
Mr. Horn. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I have enjoyed
reading all of your background here and your statements. Let me
followup on the judge situation. To whom in the court system of
the District of Columbia does the family court report?
Ms. Shellman. There is a presiding judge of the Family
Division which is under the chief judge.
Mr. Horn. Chief judge of the whole District court system?
Ms. Shellman. The chief judge of D.C. Superior Court, and
then under that is the presiding judge of Family Division where
judges are rotated in and out of that judge's division.
Mr. Horn. How many judges serve in family court and over
what period? Do they try to get out of that into some other
part? Is that considered worthwhile by judges?
Ms. Shellman. I can answer from my experience when I
clerked for the presiding judge of the Family Division in 1994,
but perhaps it has changed since then and someone else would
like to comment on that.
Ms. Meltzer. There is no family court. There is a Family
Division, and judges rotate in and out. It used to be that the
rotation was every 6 months. They have recently, in an attempt
to deal with some of these problems, tried to extend that
rotation to 2 years, but there are many of us who think that
even this is inadequate.
Mr. Horn. Did the General Accounting Office look at the
transition of judges in how long they stay in a place, and
where do they go after they have served in family court, this
type of thing?
Ms. Fagnoni. We didn't look at that specifically here in
the District, but we did issue a report a year ago where we
looked at the juvenile courts and some of the problems
encountered. And as Mr. DeLay pointed out, the courts really
drive a lot of what happens in the child welfare system. Our
report focused on the problems the courts face, and part of
that had to do with the judges rotating in and out, one judge
making some initial decisions on a child and then a different
judge being there when another decision had to be made. That
wasn't in the best interest of the child to have that kind of
rotation.
So there have been some jurisdictions around the country
that have tried to have, you know, one child/one judge sorts of
approaches so the judge can carry through with a child as that
case progresses. So there are some examples where jurisdictions
have tried to deal with this problem.
Mr. Horn. What would you say is the average months or years
a judge sits in a family court situation?
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Ms. Fagnoni. I think it really varies. I don't think it's
that surprising to hear of a 6-month rotation, and I think
something like 2 years is more what other jurisdictions may be
striving for at a minimum, but it is very tough to keep judges
in that kind of position.
Mr. Horn. Well, I think GAO ought to look at this and just
give us a report--my management committee would like to know it
also--give us a report on where do these judges want to really
go, and if you're not going to have people that really care
about children, we shouldn't have this type of situation. We
either should set up a particular court that is the family
court, and you know that you're going to expend at least 5
years of your career, maybe 15 years, and get somebody that
really cares about children, and I think that's what we need to
focus on.
And I think my instincts are probably right that they all
want to go off to the more classy things that they can then go
into a major law firm about, and I'd be curious if any judges
have ever gone with anybody to the houses that house these poor
kids. You ever know of any judge that showed up at the door?
Ms. Lopes. Yes, Mr. Horn, there are judges who have. In
fact, corporation counsel is here, I know, but I know that the
presiding judge of the Family Division is known for doing just
that sort of thing. So there are judges who do.
The other thing, just one distinction, is that after an
adjudication, many judges take the cases with them as they
rotate through the other divisions of the court so that they're
responsibilities vis-a-vis the cases do not cease when they
move to another rotation in the court. They actually take those
cases with them, which puts a tremendous administrative burden
on the Office of Corporation Counsel and other agencies which
have to deploy attorneys and other staff throughout the whole
court.
Mr. Horn. Well, along this line, I think, if I might
suggest, Mayor Graham, that the Mayor of the city of Washington
should talk to the chief judge and see if in the training--and
lawyers, I realize, and lots of professionals say, don't tell
me what to do, I went to law school, and blah, blah, blah, for
whatever it is. That's nonsense. I happen to have been one of
the founders of the National Institute of Corrections, and the
Chief Justice of the United States called us in and said, look,
you've got to do something to clean up State corrections in
America. And over 20 years we did make major improvements, and
we involved judges, we involved the DAs in a lot of these
things, the probation officers, all aspects, because they were
all blaming each other, and we got them in the same room to at
least get it out on the table. And I think the chief judge
should take a real interest in that and have them exposed to
every single one of you in your particular agencies. That's the
only way they're going to learn something and be sensitized to
something.
So let me move from that to, I guess, how often does--I
assume most of these are wards of the Court, are they not, most
of the children?
Ms. Jones. Yes.
Mr. Horn. All right. How often does a ward of the court
have a visit from a social worker?
Ms. Jones. That is one of the areas that has been
problematic for us primarily because of the shortage of workers
that I've had. But under normal circumstances we would expect
that a worker would be visiting a child, depending on the
importance of the case--new cases should be visited not less
than every 2 weeks. A case that is problematic, we have a
program-intensive family service where they may visit two to
three times a week. It really depends on the case, but not less
than one a month they should see and/or talk, and those visits
may be in the home, may be collateral with the schools, with
the child--taking the child to a health--for a health visit. So
it can take different shapes and forms.
We have not been able to meet that requirement on all of
our cases, and I'd be the first to admit, because I have been
short workers for most of this past year. What we've tried to
do is to spread the workers we have and with our supervisors to
at least get in a minimum number of visits wherever we can, but
hopefully that will improve with the fact that we are now going
to be pretty close to full staff.
Mr. Horn. Let me ask a followup here. Does the person
running the home in which the ward of the court lives, do you
announce when you're coming, or do you just knock on the door
and say, hi, we'd like to look around?
Ms. Jones. It depends. For all of our children placed in
group and residential facilities, we visit with or without
planned appointments. There are regular appointments, but we do
unannounced and announced visits, but most of our foster homes,
most of them are announced, and one of the reasons is that many
of our foster parents today work. We have very few foster
parents who are at home. They work so that we generally have to
schedule our visits around their availability or plan it with
them because most work. It's one of the things that's changed
in child welfare today that makes managing the system a lot
different, because we aren't dealing with people who are at
home for the most part.
Mr. Horn. Anybody else like to comment on this business of
home visits, should they be announced or unannounced, so forth?
Ms. Shellman. I would like to comment on one thing that is
not uncommon in the District of Colombia, and that is that the
social workers, as was stated earlier, are handing their
reports in that are due by statute 10 days ahead of time--
they're handing them in either the day of the hearing--some
judges will require them to do it 2 days in advance, but what
they're doing is they're handing it in the day of the hearing,
and they are visiting the home the day before the hearing, and
that's not uncommon. And it's difficult when they're trying to
cover 59 courtrooms with these things to get out. A lot of the
families will say that they know when they're coming because
they know when the hearing date is, and they are coming on that
day, and a lot of them just gear up for that day. That's the
word on the street.
Mr. Horn. Yes, Mayor Graham.
Ms. Graham. Mr. Horn, I think that we're going to have to
recognize that some of the requirements imposed on this system
by the attorneys handling this case are highly inappropriate. I
think that we have got to look at the whole staffing design of
this child welfare agency. There is no reason why you cannot
have other kinds of professionals and supporters of children
and their needs and families visiting and making these home
visits in support of the work that these social workers do. The
requirement that you have got to have an MSW doing a home visit
is absolutely ludicrous.
Mr. Horn. That's what I was going to get to next, so you're
clairvoyant here, and I put together when I was a university
president a very fine MSW program, but I'd like to hear from
you on the problem that do we really need MSWs to go and do
this work, and if not, what would you suggest?
Ms. Meltzer. May I speak to that? The remedial order
requires that social workers be MSWs. That provision was
actually put in there at the request of the District
government, because the District licensing statute currently
requires that you have to be a licensed MSW in order to perform
social work. We have explored this issue with the receiver and
with plaintiffs, and there is nothing in the remedial order at
this time that would bar the receiver from using non-MSWs for
these positions.
So it is really a red herring. They ought to be hiring
PSWs. One of the recommendations that we have pushed is that
they move to creatively redesign the job descriptions and the
work so that they can use non-MSW positions where they're
appropriate.
Mr. Horn. What I would say, and go ahead, but I just want
to get one more thing into the brew, and that is, it's true, I
think, of all professions, you can have a wonderful master's
degree, you can even have a community experience and internship
which decides whether you really want to do this or don't want
to do with it, and if you decide you don't want to do with it,
you ought to get out of there, because if you're not happy
helping people that are in misery, you shouldn't be a social
worker.
And I might say my mother was director of county welfare,
head of the--chief probation officer before that and head of
the county hospital. So I grew up with the problems of social
welfare, and my question would be, how do you check for a heart
in terms of social workers? You can get an MSW, you can get
people with As. How do you know they have got a heart? Sort of
like the Wizard of Oz, but, you know, what kind of experiences
have you had? I mean, do you get qualified people regardless of
whether they have the degree or not? Some offer a bachelor of
science undergraduate degree. OK. Who are the best types of
people with what experiences that help children in this kind of
situation?
Ms. Jones. Well, let me take a stab at responding to that.
I described that--I think I would put that in the language of
what we call the old traditional social worker, the person went
into this field because you cared about children, you cared
about what others--that others did not have what you may have
been able to acquire. And we wrestled with this for quite some
time trying to figure out why workers turn over, and I think
one of the things we are wrestling with in this country is that
people now go into fields such as teaching, social work: it's a
job, it's not a profession.
And the difference--the way you begin to sort that out is
how they begin to take on the responsibility of their job, when
they are in training, when they begin to look at the various
things that go on in their caseload, when you hear folks who
are more concerned about whether or not I have a parking space
or my office has a window or I have--can leave promptly at
4:45. That, to me, is an indication of someone who's wanting a
job.
Now I say that, but I also want to make clear that there
are substantial number of workers in that agency who are
professionals. Many of them have stuck with me for this past
year when we've been short and have run around and got those
last-minute reports done because we didn't have other workers.
But we have a large number in the past, and we'll probably have
some more for whom it is a job and that's what we have to sort
out.
But let me also, while I'm--I have the microphone, respond
to the issue of workers, or whether or not we can use the BA or
MSW. Clearly I come from a background where I believe you can
do a lot of the work we do with non-MSWs, but I had to deal
with the hand I was dealt. Now, once that was changed and we
were given flexibility, we have begun to look at it, and we
have changed some. Our licensing workers, for example, no
longer have to be MSWs, but that's also an issue I have had to
battle in the newspapers because I was challenged on that,
critiqued on that. A lot of the negative publicity began
because I was seen as someone who was changing the standards of
the profession. I have had to live with that, but that's a
choice we had to make, and we are indeed looking to move where
we can, where it does not denigrate the work, because there's
work there that has to be done and should be done by
professionally trained people.
Children who come by way of the advocacy center more often
than not do need professionally trained workers, but at the
casework level, taking a child for an appointment, completing
paperwork to do with interstate compact, that doesn't require
an MSW, and we are taking steps. But I also have to juxtapose
that with the dollars I have for how many staff can I hire
because it will take more of those kind than it does MSWs.
I think we're on the right road of getting a good balance
on that, but it is going to take a few more months.
Mr. Horn. Thank you for the passion with which you replied
to that question. I can tell you care.
Any other comments here? Mayor Graham.
Ms. Graham. I think that it is--this work in the area of
human service where we are dealing with the frailty of human
life is a work that comes, I think, out of a context of the
heart. It is a passion. Ms. Jones clearly has impressed me
during my time and my interaction with her as having that
passion. So does Ms. Shellman. It came out all over the table
here today as we listened to them. This is--and this is not
something that is acquired by a degree, you're absolutely
right, and when it comes to nurturing and caring for and
ensuring the safety of children, you don't have to be degreed
to do that. And we are willing to work with Ms. Jones and Ms.
Meltzer to make certain that we can modify these requirements
in such a way as to support the children, and if it means
taking on the unions, the union of social workers, we are
prepared to do that.
Mr. Horn. Congratulations.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Davis. Thank you, Mr. Horn.
Ms. Norton.
Ms. Norton. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. First, let
me say I am very impressed with the commitment of everyone at
the table, and thank you for that commitment. And I want to say
that I recognize from your testimony and from the problems that
you've encountered in the city what a complicated issue we're
dealing with.
I want to ask about what I see as the two major problems
that have come out of this testimony. One relates to caseload,
which I see as fundamentally related, as well to what my
colleague asked in his questions about the MSW degree; and the
other relates to the kind of coordination it takes to even
begin to do a satisfactory job for these children.
Let me just say that I've been in Congress for 10 years,
and I have seen a lot of black hole funding of the District
government, so that even when we are faced with a very serious
problem, I look very deeply before I believe that the answer to
that problem is funding.
Let me say to you right now one of you testified that an
equal proportion of the Medicaid funding needs to go here as is
the case in other jurisdictions.
This would be the kind of thing this Member would be
pleased to put into the Congress. I have to tell you that based
on some of the questions I am going to have to ask you, I am
not prepared to put an amendment before the Congress to that
effect, because I have not heard testimony today that convinces
me that the complicated issues underlying this function are
being well managed. I don't think that anything as complicated
as this will submit to anything but the most skillful
management.
Now, let me give you an example of what I mean. If, in
fact, more money is needed, as your testimony indicated, for
substance abuse services, day care, mental health, foster
parent rate increases, you are talking children. That is the
kind of thing, it seems to me, that increases ought to go for.
But let me go to the MSW degree. Nothing has been more
frustrating and to hear your answer, ``Well, the D.C.
government is who required that.'' that ought to be a
presumption against it right there. The D.C. government had to
take this entire function from it. Here we live in a, not only
a city but in a country where we can't get enough people to
teach our children how to read and write, and so the Mayor
rightfully has come forward and said in order to be able to
recruit teachers to come to an inner city school, we have got
to be able to raise their salaries, and I am absolutely with
him. He hasn't said the first thing we need to do is make them
all get masters in teaching and then somehow they will teach
our children to read and write. If ever I have heard of a non-
job related qualification--my colleague asked about whether or
not having a heart is a qualification. Of course not. Having an
MSW is a qualification.
Let me tell you why that frustrates me. If, in fact, it is
difficult to get people to go into social work today and get
them to graduate from social work school--remember all the
things a young woman can be today--that is who usually becomes
a social worker. Then, to put another hurdle up there that says
that, by the way, we want only people with MSW degrees and
after you get your MSW degree you come into a system that then
uses money--and here I am quoting from the testimony of the
GAO--that provides new hires a minimum of 80 hours. That is
somebody with an MSW degree; 80 hours of classroom and 80 hours
of field pre-service training.
What in the world were they getting with their bachelor's
and their MSW? This is like going to school for another year.
Then provide all social workers a minimum of 40 hours in-
service training each calendar year. That all might sound very
well, but to say that that can only happen after you have got
your MSW degree and then to come in and say, we can't hire
social workers, and then on top of that to say we are doing all
of these things to keep social workers which, of course, won't
keep social workers.
Anybody with an MSW degree who just gets out is coming in
here to get some kind of training, the way you do if you are
going to be a resident at Howard University Hospital or at your
public hospital here, and then you are going with that MSW
degree, because you have your family to support. This is not
rocket science.
So when I hear, well, we are going to recommend, and they
already have training, I don't think you should get a dime
until that is not a requirement or until you go to the city and
say that shouldn't be a requirement anymore; rather, maybe
these hours should be a requirement. I don't know and nor did
any of your testimony tell me what an MSW degree brings you
except shortages in people to hire and complaints about their
competence.
So I want to ask you whether or not you will go to the city
council right now if you need to, or otherwise break down the
requirements right away and begin hiring some people to be
social workers so that you will not pile a caseload which, on
your own testimony, is twice what it should be on the social
workers you have.
I mean, I just see this as one commonsense approach to it
and I don't know why the taxpayers of the District of Columbia
should pay the receiver more to hire MSWs doing the kind of job
to which Brianna fell victim. I want to know whether or not I
can get your promise. If not, then I want to know why I
shouldn't have your promise to immediately say you are going to
recruit master's of social work people tomorrow as they get out
and try to flag down as many of them as you can. Because
whether they are master's or whether they are bachelor's, they
are coming here for a reason, to get hard core experience
hopefully, with hearts in hand, to get hard core experience so
you are not going to keep them forever. They are young people
and they have lots of opportunities.
The first thing I want to ask, to clear away some of your
caseload, is are you willing to hire competent people who have
bachelor's degrees, who are getting out of Howard University,
out of Catholic University, out of GW, out of Trinity this
year, to come work in the District of Columbia and help us
immediately make a cut in the caseload that these social
workers are hampered with?
Ms. Jones. Let me answer that, Congresswoman Norton. We
have already recruited, and I made a statement earlier in my
testimony that we have now identified staff with a selected
date and with offers. They have accepted the workers to fill
the vacancies that we have. Among some of the workers that we
have recruited are bachelor level workers for some of the jobs
that we have already moved over to----
Ms. Norton. I am asking you, can the requirement to come
work here, given what you know is going to be the turnover--
1989 is when I guess it all started, then 1995 you went under
receivership. Do you really think that you are going to keep
these folks? Given this enormous amount of in-service training,
why do you need an MSW in the first place rather than looking
at true job-related qualifications for the job?
Ms. Jones. We already submitted such a request at an
earlier point.
Ms. Norton. Let me just pin this down. Is it a matter of
law or is it at the discretion of the Mayor or the agency or
the receiver?
Ms. Graham. Ms. Norton, we issued a memorandum, we issued a
Mayor's order about 6 months ago that changed the requirement,
which allowed the receiver to recruit non-MSWs for certain
positions. We are prepared to work with her more aggressively
in eliminating any outstanding requirements associated with
advanced degrees to do basic work.
Ms. Norton. Say that again, I am sorry.
Ms. Graham. We, about 6 months ago----
Ms. Norton. The last statement. I heard that. You are
prepared to work with her to do what?
Ms. Graham. To move more aggressively in making any further
changes where job restructuring is necessary.
Ms. Norton. Ms. Graham, do they advertise for the MSW or
not? Do they advertise that you have to have an MSW and if you
don't, we may take some of you who have----
Ms. Jones. We advertise for both, both MSW and BSW. We have
hired recently both MSWs and BSWs. We have done that already.
And we intend to indeed continue to hire because we know normal
turnover means you are going to lose some people. So we have
already instituted that.
Ms. Norton. You have hired MSWs who cost the city more and
don't get us any more. Given what you have told us yourselves
about the quality of work you receive which is very uneven, I
don't see what MSWs have gotten you.
Ms. Lopes. Ms. Norton, if I may, with respect to the legal
requirements in the case--and I think this is emblematic of
some of the problems those requirements have posed--our
position is that we are working aggressively and will work
aggressively with the plaintiffs, the court monitor and the
receiver to identify those requirements that don't make sense,
that haven't been practical, that have been difficult to
implement, and attempt in the first instance to reach agreement
on moving the court for a modification.
Ms. Norton. Ms. Meltzer, I don't need what you have to say.
They now say that they have reached that agreement. I just want
to make sure--this doesn't need any kind of coordination. All I
want to know is that if you come here, you look at somebody's
qualifications, whether or not this person has looked like they
are willing to go into tough neighborhoods--work--give more
than is required to the job--as opposed to let me see your MSW
degree and you get some kind of preference for showing me a
piece of paper.
I don't need to hear about coordination. It doesn't take
coordination. Ms. Graham and Ms. Jones have said that they are
willing to hire people--I just want to make sure that you don't
advertise that you have to have it. That will discourage a
whole set of folks who might be willing--precisely because it
is their first job. Let's get some folks who don't cost us an
arm and a leg, but are willing to get in there and do the grunt
work of helping these children because, for all that, your
MSWs, up until now, have cost the city--and there is not a lot
of evidence that they have brought the city any added value--
for that piece of paper.
Ms. Graham. Ms. Norton, may I just address that for a
moment? You are absolutely on point and that was one of the
frustrations that Mayor Williams identified when we began to
explore issues with this agency that caused it not to be as
successful as it could have been. And certainly the staffing
piece was one. We dealt with that immediately with the issuance
of a Mayor's order. We did get pushed back from the union and
will continue to get----
Ms. Norton. What do they care? They represent whoever comes
in.
Ms. Graham. No, they do not. They feel--it is my
understanding and those who are social workers can speak more
eloquently to this than I no doubt--but it seems that there is
a lessening of the profession if you begin to open up other
jobs. The job structure of social workers over the years has
become fairly stratified. And so as you look at restructuring,
you will get push back from the unions; but, as I said, we are
prepared to deal with that.
Ms. Norton. That is all I need. If I have your commitment
to hire people who can do the job as opposed to people who put
in a piece of paper that will automatically cost us more money
without knowing that they can do the job, then I am quite
satisfied.
The other problem that seems to me to be a frustration is
the coordination problem. I understand why that is at least a
real problem. Ms. Meltzer, you said we must understand that,
after all, they have all these agencies. Well, I do not
understand. Your job is to take the system as you find it and
fix it. So I don't have any sympathy for the notion that, well,
you have got to understand, there are a whole lot of agencies
out there and it is real hard to coordinate that. The whole
point of putting it under receivership is that the District
didn't do it and that is what the receiver is there for and so
I don't understand.
This is what I do understand. The Superior Court, as I
understand it, or its court services, handles abuse cases when
a child remains at the home. The MPD Youth Division handles
child abuse and another section of the MPD handles sex abuse.
The corporation counsel litigates the issues in court,
terminating rights, adoptions, and so forth. Child neglect
cases are handled by the receiver and the services to abused
children. I understand that to be very complicated.
What I don't understand is why some of the systems
discussed in the GAO report, some of which are so obvious you
would think that they would occur to anybody, given this
awesome complexity, that looking to other jurisdictions, GAO
looked at a few other jurisdictions. You all have had this
agency for a long time, because you are not unique at all in
having a large number of actors. And some of the things that
they suggested, you don't need an MSW degree to come upon. Like
a multidisciplinary advisory committee that just sits together,
around one table, instead of shuffling paper back among
agencies. Or Chicago. I get this straight out of the GAO
report. In Chicago, another big city, it must be a whole lot
more complicated than D.C.
You get nothing from me when you are talking complication.
I spent 12 of the best years of my life in New York City. I
know complication. Chicago, a city four times the size of D.C.,
what do they do? They get a group of 32 individuals--I get this
out of the GAO report--and then they divide into subcommittees
so that all those 32 don't have to be called together at one
time. In other words, a kind of simple committee system to sort
out all this complexity.
Some of these jurisdictions have begun to figure it out.
Why is it that we come forward and say, well, you have to
understand it takes a lot of work to get all these agencies
together. Why aren't we using some of these, what I would call,
management devices, that I think you should be required to
produce before you get more money for anything except very
direct services to children? Like this money--80 percent of it
must go to a mother and a child in child care or to a person
who is in the child care center, or 90 percent of this money
must go to the drug abuse problem and to the person working
with the drug abuse problem, the doctor.
Other than that kind of funding, it seems to me that the
receiver deserves extra money only when the receiver can show
that the receiver has implemented the kind of commonsense,
simple management devices, like getting everybody in the same
room and using committees to all work on one child so that you
don't have a Brianna--kind of situation develop where they
don't all sit down in the same room. Have a conference on the
child before they do something like give the child back to a
retarded mother who obviously needs to be taken care of
herself. So I would like to know why devices like that aren't
used in the District.
Ms. Graham. Ms. Norton, one of the startling things for me
when I started this work about a year and a half ago with the
administration was the isolation that this agency experienced.
I think one of the travesties of taking an agency out of the
governance structure is it gives other entities within the
governance structure permission to do whatever they want to do.
One of the first things is to ignore the needs of the agency.
We found backlogs of applications for foster care homes,
backlogs for fire inspections, backlogs, backlogs. The receiver
was not even permitted to engage in meetings or generally was
not expected to come to meetings with other government
agencies.
All of that has changed now. She works actively with the
other clusters that are under the human service rubric that I
am responsible for. We have eliminated all of the backlogs and
systematically have gone through looking at ways that we can
reintegrate this agency and the needs of these individuals it
serves with the other agencies. One of the requests in the
budget or one of the requirements of the remedial order is
substance abuse treatment services for the families. I think it
is absurd that that has to come out of the agency's budget.
That receivership ought to be able to refer individuals over to
the Department of Health's alcohol and substance abuse
treatment services. Without question. They should be a
priority. Not so. As I said, and you will find this as you look
at each of these receiverships.
You have not done the governance structure or the residents
of the city a favor in extracting these agencies out of the
governance structure. It simply gives the permission to treat
them as separate entities.
Ms. Norton. I agree with you, but the agency had to be
extracted. The District of Columbia was criminal, that is the
only word for it, in the way they treated these children.
Ms. Graham. We agree.
Ms. Norton. But what the government before you could have
done would have been what you have done. To say, well, they may
be out of the structure, but there is nothing that keeps us
from sitting around the table with them.
Ms. Meltzer. Congresswoman Norton, I want to just comment.
My discussion of the complexity was in no way meant to suggest
that the fact that it is complex means that it should not or
could not be resolved. I hope you understand that.
Ms. Norton. But you didn't suggest what can be done about
it. My problem is, I wouldn't accuse you of bad faith there,
but when I read in the GAO report the kinds of things that a
college student might think of to do--why don't we all get a
committee and try to deal with this one child--I lose patience.
Ms. Meltzer. The problem in the District is that there are
multiple committees with overlapping responsibilities.
Ms. Norton. Where was that committee on Brianna? What
committee had charge of Brianna? Name me the committee that had
charge of Brianna. There was a lot of paper that went back and
forth on Brianna. In fact, I want to ask about Brianna. It is
not so much Brianna. I want to focus on the mother. I didn't
know until this confidential report came out that the mother
was a borderline retarded woman. I knew she had eight children
and is now pregnant with another child. This may be somebody
who believes, and I don't know, I have no other information
about it, that the only way she can live is to have babies.
So you are talking committees. All I have heard from Ms.
Graham is that they know they must do this, but I haven't heard
anyone say that there are any such groups that work on the
individual child.
Ms. Graham. Ms. Norton, we are in the process of
reconstructing government here in the District of Columbia.
Ms. Norton. Tell me about it.
Ms. Graham. I make no excuses for the dysfunctionality that
we found. We are actively engaging. Yes, we do have work
groups. I think that the learning that the Child and Family
Service Agency--and Ms. Jones can speak to that--had from
Brianna and the other children who are dying, Brianna is just
symbolic of life in the District for so many children, far too
many. They have put in place systems that allow for better
coordination. But more importantly, the work that I am doing in
trying to bring agencies together to begin to look at how we
function cross-functionally is the work of this structure that
the Mayor has put in place, and I have been charged to achieve
some pretty monumental goals around better agency coordination
over the next year. This is not an easy task, especially where
you have got agencies who have grown accustomed to working in
silos.
Ms. Norton. Ms. Fagnoni, did you find any evidence that
these kinds of simple, almost simple-minded mechanisms that
other States and cities have put in place are beginning to
blossom in the District?
Ms. Fagnoni. Our hope is that by citing these examples,
these will help some of the people in this room and others
think about where they might move forward. Our purpose in
talking about the whole section is how do we move forward from
here? There has been some amount of progress, there is a lot
more to be done, but all of these sorts of approaches that
other jurisdictions have used were all borne out of crises,
whether there was a child's death or some other kind of crisis.
There are any number of jurisdictions, as you yourself said in
your opening statement, that have the same sorts of problems.
What we have seen is other jurisdictions moving ahead over some
period of years to really try to figure out some new approaches
that are less traditional that draw from the full range of
stakeholders who are involved in decisions about the child and
their family, and this is something that we hope people in the
District who are overseeing this system can think about and
learn more about and look at what might work best for the
District as they move forward.
Ms. Norton. Obviously the death of this child makes us very
impatient to get that under way. I can only ask, Ms. Graham and
Ms. Jones, if you might be in communication with those
jurisdictions. I don't know which one fits here. It seems to me
we do not need to reinvent the wheel here. I understand that
both of you have found this system in a mess, and I am
certainly not trying to assess blame, but I really do think
that this has gone on so long. And I know about the New York
system. I know about how pervasive this is across the United
States.
I just think we can't use that as a reason for saying we
have got to take more time. I don't think we have more time
with these children. I would like to know, what is happening
with Brianna Blackmond's mother now, this mother who may be as
incapable of taking care of herself as she is of taking care of
more children? Has there been any attempt--her children were
already taken from her--what is happening to this mother so
that this cycle gets broken, she gets some help, and we,
perhaps, at least do away with that problem?
Ms. Jones. We have a social worker that is working with her
and also with the children. One of the things that we have had
to do with that family is the children have been particularly
traumatized by the continuing reference to them in the media.
The older children read the paper and see the television. We
have put in a lot of additional special therapy and treatment
for the children, all the ones that require it. But we do have
a social worker that is working with the mom to try and help
stabilize her and to figure out what we are going to do.
Ms. Norton. She was certainly left out there on her own. I
almost feel as sorry for her as I do for her children. She was
left out there by the District of Columbia. When we focus in on
the children, I ask also that we focus in on really
incapacitated parents like this.
Finally, I have found your testimony very frustrating. It
has great urgency. You are people who come in as kind of the
final act. I recognize that it is frustrating for you as well.
I don't see the kind of innovation, though, I don't see the
kind of, as Mr. DeLay said, ``thinking outside the box.'' I
don't think you can break through this unless you get totally
outside of the box. The ``inside the box'' is very confused and
very messed up.
I was discouraged to hear about the declining capacity for
foster homes, the decline in 6 months' time in the number of
beds, when the number of children continues to go up, and that
you find this declining capacity across all your agencies. The
testimony cited several reasons for this: that there were
parents retiring from the system, that there was improved
recordkeeping so that if there was a parent who had three
children, that wasn't counted; that was counted as one child,
and adoption.
Suppose we take adoption out of the picture. How much of
the problem of capacity would be left? Most of it? Half of it?
Let's take adoption, which is the best way to get a reduction
in placements. I wouldn't have put it in there in the first
place. How much of the declining capacity in beds comes from
other causes?
Ms. Jones. There are a couple of things that I think are
creating problems for us in terms of capacity. Within the
District government, itself, the District boundaries, one of
the problems is what we see, and I can't substantiate this
factually, but I know from our work is that there are fewer
individuals who are indeed electing to do this because they are
in the work force. The general population of available people
who normally want to do this kind of work are not going to come
from young, single individuals.
Ms. Norton. This, I take it is a nationwide problem, this
decline?
Ms. Jones. Yes, it is not just unique to the District. The
other thing that is happening, Congresswoman Norton, is more of
our children are being placed with relatives. What we have not
had in the past is a way to provide some type of support system
for relatives who step up and are willing to take on the
responsibility of----
Ms. Norton. How is that related to declining capacity, more
of the people who are taken to relatives?
Ms. Jones. In terms of capacity it is at least our
perception that many of the people who would have been the kind
of individuals who would be taking in children in foster care
now are taking care of their own. But they too need a support
system. We are up against that issue.
And also in the District, there has been historically the
issue of getting the homes through the kind of inspections that
are required. And lead paint has been one of the issues here.
It is true nationally that that is a problem in urban areas.
Not as much in the more rural areas but in urban areas, a lot
of your housing stock is old and the housing stock has paint
that if you go below level three, you get down to level three
in the paint, you are going to hit lead. It is a very expensive
process to remove lead. We in some circumstance can use that
home, but not for young children. You can only use that home
for an older child. We use that also as an opportunity to try
and help families get the lead out of their homes. Even for
their own children, they shouldn't have it. Those are some of
the factors.
Ms. Norton. This is such a national problem--could I just
finally ask, this will be my last question, if ever there was a
problem that needed ``thinking outside the box,'' since this is
the pervasive problem of foster care in the United States, it
is the fact that there are not people at home to take care of
children.
I wonder if either Ms. Fagnoni, from the GAO, or any of you
as professionals have any out-of-the-box thinking, including
whether or not dealing with groups of children--and I know
there is some of that--would be preferable to what we are going
through now? Perhaps the only way to start thinking, or one of
the only ways--I am sure what I am asking you is are there
other ways to begin to think through? It scares me to death to
see that if in 6 months time you went from 1,929 beds to 1,568
beds, we are going to be going, going, gone pretty soon.
Somebody had better start thinking fast about what you do about
this rate of decline.
Ms. Jones. This is one option we certainly are looking at
and beginning to do something about. I think you have to
consider going to professionally paid caretakers as one way to
begin to build a core of individuals who would be available to
take children, and especially when you look at the kind of
needs that the children come to us with.
Ms. Norton. Professionally paid caretakers would be whom?
Ms. Jones. Individuals for whom this becomes a vocation as
opposed to being done on a volunteer basis. There are a couple
of things that I think make that an option that needs to be
looked at. These children have many serious problems. Using
paid providers would allow you to be able to use them as a way
to provide treatment. You would not have to then resort to
having someone else to have to take the children to do followup
treatment.
Ms. Norton. Is there a pool of people--I also want any
answers from the rest of you, but is there a pool of people
who, if they were paid enough, would be satisfactory surrogates
for children? Given what has happened to these children, I
think we have to look at everything that is put on the table.
Ms. Graham. I would say that there aren't, Ms. Norton. We
have looked at several communities in the country. We have
looked especially at the SOS village model. They are
undertaking right now a feasibility study right here in the
District. What happens is the community is actually created for
these children. Families are actually created for these
children. It is social construction, if you will.
In the two experiments that we have looked at, one in
Illinois and one in Florida, they both are working very well.
And actually we have asked, actually in the fiscal year 2001
tobacco money, for funds to be set aside for the creation of
such a community here in Washington exactly.
Ms. Meltzer. Part of the answer is that none of these
solutions by itself is going to work. All across the country as
States deal with these problems, they are trying a little of
this and a little of that to deal with the problems. The other
more general point is that people are understanding that no
matter what you do, we have got to keep families safe before
they come to the attention of the child welfare agency; that
the investment has to be in community partnerships, making sure
that there are community-based organizations, faith
communities, neighbors, all out there supporting families so
that you don't get to the situation where we need to be
removing as many children from their families permanently.
Ms. Norton. I couldn't agree more. I do think a little of
this and a little of that is more of what we need to do. We
need to experiment with what works. I couldn't agree more that
no one thing will work. But these declining numbers should
scare all of you very much.
Ms. Fagnoni. You are correct that adoption has to be a
piece of that. There has to be a whole package of efforts to
make sure that only those kids that really truly have to be out
of home for some period of time are in those placements. But
then are also needs to aggressive moves to put those kids in
more permanent settings, whether it is returned to their home
or to an adoptive family.
Ms. Norton. There was strong bipartisan support over here.
First there was strong support for family reunification. But
in, I guess it was 1997, we passed a law that said, OK.
Meanwhile, for families there has been a great presumption in
favor of whoever can speak, who can speak as some adult saying,
don't take my child.
I must tell you I have come slowly to the conclusion that a
child has but one life to give, and most of the people on my
side of the aisle strongly supported, the notion that says you
can keep this child in foster care for a limited period of time
and then if there is somebody that wants this child, let them
have that child.
That is where I have finally come down. Please do all you
can to keep a family from being in trouble. But the way in
which the presumption has been in favor of somebody who is a
dope addict, in favor of somebody who is hanging out with
criminals or having some thug sleep in alleys every night, the
presumption in favor of those people over the child, I have had
it. We have just lost too many of our children.
Let me ask if you think that the new adoption requirements
of the Federal law are being implemented in accordance with the
mandate? We have the number of months, 12 months and then 15.
Ms. Jones. Yes. We have implemented the adoption and Safe
Families Act in the District. This is the one area even prior
to implementation, I think, where we have demonstrated that in
spite of the system that we have made progress has been in
adoptions. That is the one area where we have seen steady
progress. It has to get better, but clearly even with all the
problems we have talked about, our adoption stats are going up.
We are getting children adopted.
But once again, I think another area that will help us help
a lot of children exit the system is to have a way to provide
some type of financial support to relatives who are willing to
take guardianship of their children. That is not federally
funded now. What we have to do at this point is to fund it with
local money. I have requested it. It will allow us to move a
lot of children out of the system, with guardianship, with
protections, but those families need some type of support.
Ms. Norton. Mr. Chairman, I am going to ask you if you will
consider with me--and perhaps you and I can speak to Mr.
DeLay--I don't know if this is feasible, but Ms. Jones has just
testified these declining numbers are--we are just not going to
have anyone in a few years in the work force and all, and that
is not just D.C.--on a pilot basis if we could fund on some
limited basis--relatives who would otherwise--you know what the
problem is and I have this problem, too, you see. I have a
problem that if it is your child, you ought to be willing to--
that is where I have got a 30-year-old child with Down's
Syndrome.
So I come to this: Who is supposed to take care of her as
long as I can? But I am trying not to put people in the
position that I am and to think of whether or not if there were
certain kinds of need that could be established on the part of
a close relative--and one would have to draw the legislation
very carefully--and on a pilot basis, whether or not we might
relieve what looks like a nationwide crisis developing with
just nobody to take these children. They have suggested that
what the cities are looking for now are actually paying people.
That is like paying a social worker, full-time person, to be a
parent. You might pay somebody a whole lot less if it were an
aunt who makes $20,000 a year, couldn't be expected to take in
another person. I wonder if there is something we might talk
about with Mr. DeLay who has a deep interest in this.
Mr. Davis. We have got a lot of issues to talk about that
have been raised here today, Ms. Norton, but we will certainly
take that into consideration. Any other questions?
Ms. Norton. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Davis. Let me ask a question. Let me start with Ms.
Fagnoni. You have been sitting over there quietly and did the
GAO audit. Could a Brianna Blackmond tragedy occur again today
under the current system? Is there any reason it couldn't still
occur?
Ms. Fagnoni. Unfortunately, it is probably a situation that
could still occur just about anywhere in this country. What one
hopes for, though, is that there is a system in place where it
is much less likely to happen. I think that is what they need
to strive for.
Mr. Davis. Have you seen any measurable strides since that
in terms of change?
Ms. Fagnoni. As we reported, there has been some progress
that has been made toward some of the issues under the court
order. But to really make the significant strides that will
really keep kids from falling through the cracks, I believe the
kind of collaboration and coordination we talk about is really
something that needs to be pursued as it has been in some other
jurisdictions facing some of the same problems.
Mr. Davis. Do you know what the national average length of
service for service workers is? Does anybody know?
Ms. Jones. I know what it used to be. An average of around
2 years. In terms of how long the average social worker would
stay?
Mr. Davis. In D.C. or nationally?
Ms. Jones. In D.C. right now, I don't want to give you bad
numbers, but looking at our work force in the last year, I
would say the average worker is staying a little less than 2
years. About a year and a half overall.
Mr. Davis. Let me start with Ms. Shellman, I am interested
in your perspective on this, and then I will let you, Ms.
Jones, respond and anyone else who wants to. Is the kinship
care program utilized nationally as a best practice option for
placing abused and neglected children?
Ms. Shellman. I am not sure I am the best person to answer
that question because I don't have the expertise in the foster
care area. It is certainly something that as a child advocate
that we would advocate for.
Ms. Jones. It is a phenomenon that is happening all over
the country. But I think in all reality, it has happened by
default. It has happened because more and more children, we
have found families who find themselves with a relative who in
fact has gotten involved in some type of activities, usually
substance abuse, cocaine. It is a phenomenon that pretty much
you can almost synchronize with the introduction of crack
cocaine, where suddenly you had large numbers of young parents
getting caught up in the drug scene. They are a parent,
however, not having been involved in it. Therefore, being faced
with a situation with a grandchild or a niece or a nephew
suddenly left out there, not being able to be cared for. So I
think it has really been a result of there just not being other
type of caretakers available and the sudden surge in children
who were left without a parent.
Mr. Davis. Let me then, Ms. Shellman, see if you can help
with this. Do you think the collaboratives operate effectively?
Are they on an equal footing in terms of training and resources
they bring to the community?
Ms. Shellman. I have the gossip on the street, I have the
limited experience that we have had with the collaboratives and
we expressed concern over them. We expressed concern over the
level--as one of the things I said, we are dealing with
children with a lot of mental health problems who need a lot of
specialized care, and we are concerned about the level of
training and the level of expertise in dealing with the
children in the collaboratives. We have also had some concerns
where we have had reports that have been delayed because they
haven't come through the collaboratives; they have tried to
handle them themselves when they are in fact cases that need to
be reported.
Finally I would say that we have also encountered a few
cases where there has been cases that have come through where
there has been questions, where we have had sexual abuse cases
where they have occurred through relationships made through
collaboratives, as in baby-sitting care and things like that.
Mr. Davis. It is not data, it is more this is kind of your
instinct and your experience?
Ms. Shellman. It is my instinct and it is what is on the
street with talking to the people who are working in this
effort that there is just concern, not that they could not work
but that they are not receiving the appropriate support and
monitoring. I don't say that against Ms. Jones, but I just say
that is what we are hearing.
Mr. Davis. That is why we are just trying to collect
information. Ms. Jones.
Ms. Jones. I think in fairness to the whole collaborative
movement, it is new. It is a new thing that is evolving. We
have been working with them to begin to develop some of those
kinds of standards. In fact we are in the process of doing an
evaluation and assessment both qualitatively and quantitatively
of what they have been doing. But I think in general the
collaboratives were never envisioned to be a vehicle for taking
on the more severe type of case situations; but that is not to
say that in a community, this is the known place where you can
go and get help that people will start there. What we have done
by connecting them to us through a contractual relationship, is
that it provides a way for them to move those cases over to us.
Now, that requires training, that requires supervision and
monitoring. And we are and do have a structure to monitor them.
We are assessing now do we need to increase that? Or do we need
to expand that? Really we are looking at the whole structure to
see if there are other changes that need to be made. We want to
ensure that children are safe.
Ms. Shellman. May I make one more comment?
Mr. Davis. Sure, please.
Ms. Shellman. I think another concern, too, is the capacity
of the community. So certain collaboratives, depending on the
capacity of the community, are going to have a different effect
than other collaboratives in different communities. When we are
recommending this child victim center with the National
Children's Alliance, what we are saying is that we are going to
centralize all of the expertise and all of the services and all
of the resources so then maybe when you are having these
community collaboratives, they have that resource to also refer
to; because right now everything is so fragmented and
disjointed, it is hard for people in the community who want to
help to know how to help or how to correctly help.
Mr. Davis. Let me ask either Ms. Meltzer or Ms. Fagnoni,
how much time passes from the time a case is reported to the
hotline and a detective is assigned through, to when the first
joint forensic interview is completed? Any idea?
Ms. Meltzer. We have very poor information about that
transfer. We looked at a small sample of cases that were
reported to the police department for investigation of abuse,
and based on that small sample the children were seen within 48
hours in only 45 percent of the cases that were investigated by
the police. However, out of our even small sample, there were
some number of records that the police department was unable to
provide us. I suspect that those are the records that are going
into the boxes that Kim Shellman talked about. So we don't have
a lot of confidence that there is quick uptake.
Mr. Davis. Thank you.
Ms. Fagnoni. We also heard concerns that the calls aren't
always being answered and that questions about how effectively
those who are answering the calls are able to make the right
decisions on what to do about the calls.
Mr. Davis. Ms. Graham, do you concur with that basically?
Ms. Graham. I would concur with that. I too received a
phone call from Chief Gainer just before we came this
afternoon, because we have made it very clear that this is
serious business and it will not be tolerated. The the
continued neglect, I guess, of issues of crimes against
children, we cannot continue to tolerate; and will not. And as
we move aggressively to support the development of this CAC
model here in the District, we have got to have a system in
place that ensures that children will be protected and the
chief assured me that they were going to work with us in making
this happen here.
Mr. Davis. Ms. Lopes, let me ask you a couple of questions.
We talked briefly about the plaintiffs in the LaShawn A. case.
Have they been cooperative in working toward coming to an
agreement to end the receivership?
Ms. Lopes. They have indicated a willingness to discuss a
cooperative agreement, yes. We have been dealing with some
emergency issues in the case. Following the resolution of those
issues, we will turn to substantive negotiations with respect
to a transition plan.
Mr. Davis. Certainly that is the fastest way to get this
resolved?
Ms. Lopes. Absolutely.
Mr. Davis. We are dealing with a system that despite
anybody here can be doing their job 100 percent, we are dealing
right now with a system that is just--we have people stumbling,
it is just not going to work. That is the bottom line. Despite
the best intentions of everybody--we could throw as much money
as we wanted into it--we are dealing with a system that is just
unworkable. I am sure the plaintiffs realize this. I know they
have a lot of other things to go, but in the meantime we are
exposing every kid in this city to something that could fall
through the cracks. That is the concern.
I know the plaintiffs have a lot to say about this because
of where the court suit is and how this came into being. That
is why I asked the question.
Ms. Lopes. There is an extremely collaborative spirit
amongst the parties and with the court. The judge has actually
taken tremendous leadership in terms of bringing all of us
together informally to have discussions to resolve a series of
disputes that have occurred in the case. My expectation based
on preliminary discussions is that we will be able to negotiate
successfully and collaboratively a very constructive transition
out.
Mr. Davis. I just don't think that we are going to do a lot
in terms of funding and stuff with this structure, for good
reason. We have got to get a structure. The court suit is the
best way out of it, the fastest way and the cleanest way out of
it. There are other ways we may be able to deal with
legislatively, but they all may entail litigation down the road
and everything else. That is why I am asking. What is the state
of the Child and Family Service Agency budget?
Ms. Lopes. The budget request----
Mr. Davis. Whoever wants to take it.
Ms. Lopes. The budget request, as I recall, was $184
million. Last year's baseline in terms of spending was $150
million as I recall, and Ms. Jones can correct me if I am off a
bit. The Mayor recommended for fiscal year 2001, up to $184
million in local funds and projected Federal revenue. The
proposed budget is going through the consensus process now with
the Mayor, the council and the Financial Authority.
Mr. Davis. Let me ask a question. Couldn't we all agree
that there is a more efficient way of doing this? If we had a
better structure this money could be better spent and we could
just handle these issues in a safer way and a better way for
the kids and in a more cost-effective way?
Ms. Graham. We could agree to that.
Mr. Davis. I am not saying what it is. I am not going to
try to get that. That is where we would probably break down.
Ms. Graham. We could agree to that. But one of the things
we have to acknowledge here is that there has been a
disinvestment in the service for the past 5 years since it was
in receivership. So not only did you not have full funding of
the modified final order, you didn't have basic services for
this agency funded at an appropriate level. And then add to
that the piece that Ms. Norton raised, the excessive design of
the staffing patterns in the agency which further complicated
matters.
And so one issue on top of another created a very complex,
almost unworkable system. And then you have got all of these
other services spread in all of these other agencies and you
have got dollars following those services. You are absolutely
right. Reconstructing the service, redesigning it in such a way
as to maximize its efficiency would result probably in less
failure.
Mr. Davis. What we would call ``business process redesign''
back in my days as a county executive. You would sit down, I am
sure that money could be spent much more efficiently, we could
have better safeguards. And with this court order hanging out
there, it just makes it very difficult for anybody to act. We
all do our best but we are dealing in a framework.
Ms. Lopes. One of the points I wanted to make earlier is
that as we transition out of this receivership, we are also
going to review quite aggressively the requirements in the
order. Because once the receivership terminates, the order
continues until we come into compliance and can demonstrate
sustained compliance. So that part of our approach in this
administration is to really review the order, review it
constructively and collaboratively at the onset but attempt to
pare it down, streamline it, make it something workable, make
it something that is practical and can be readily implemented.
Ms. Norton. Will the gentleman yield?
Mr. Davis. I would be happy to.
Ms. Norton. The chairman and I were discussing earlier the
confusion that arose from discussions we had heard over the
years from the District government that it had to fund whatever
the court said fund, and that the District often came and said
that there were difficulties with requiring it simply to give a
blank check. Now you are saying that the services weren't fully
funded. Would you clarify that? Hasn't the court ordered what
the funding should be? How is that done?
Ms. Meltzer. The agency has--never have any of their budget
requests fully funded. Part of that was because for a long
time, we did not have enough confidence that the agency knew
how to spend the money. That was your question about the wisdom
of throwing good money after bad. The court was very reluctant
to just go in and order more money even though the budget
requests weren't being met. It is only at this point, I think,
that all of the parties are comfortable that the agency is
sufficiently well managed that they could really spend the
money.
Ms. Jones. One of the things I wanted to point out, too,
and I think this goes back to an issue you raised,
Congresswoman Norton, is the the money we are asking for this
year is almost all directed at services, not at operational
things. And much of it is in my budget because I am charged by
the order that if the District government does not make those
services available through its other services, I am charged to
make it happen. That is why my request is higher than what it
would have to be. If substance abuse services were available
through that agency, prioritized for the children we have, I
wouldn't need to request it in my budget. That is why I am
requesting the additional $34 million, because I have to meet
the requirement for services that aren't being met in other
District government agencies.
Mr. Davis. Let me ask--I will try to get everybody, you
have been here a long time, I want to get you going--just a
couple of other pretty quick questions. Ms. Jones, I will ask
you. In the kinship care program, I am not clear if the
relatives of the children go through a background check, any
kind of program to train them to be foster parents, and are
they monitored regularly by social workers?
Ms. Jones. Yes. The requirements are----
Mr. Davis. At least in theory that is the way it is.
Ms. Jones. No, in actual practice. They are reviewed,
licensed, they have to have background clearance, the registry
clearance, of both Federal, FBI and local police clearances.
The requirements are the same.
Mr. Davis. Are you now identifying ways to ensure that
children are going to experience consistency of service from
the time they enter the system until they leave?
Ms. Jones. We are making every effort to. Part of our
ability to do that is being able to have the staff that allows
us to do that. We are focused right now, our main focus is on
trying to get our intake services working properly and avoid
any shortage there. In the other program areas, we are working
on those, too, but a lot of our ability to bring all of the
qualitative aspects is tied directly to our being able to cover
our workload and, of course, training and supervision.
Mr. Davis. Anything else anybody wants to add before we
conclude the hearing?
Ms. Shellman. Ms. Norton, would you like an answer to that
why only 10 percent of our cases for CAC have appointments?
Ms. Norton. I was going to ask that that question be
directed to you and to the courts and put in the record. But
yes, I would appreciate an answer.
Ms. Shellman. I can only speculate on that. But I do know
that I am very concerned about the fact that our CAC in the
District of Columbia only participates postdisposition. So,
therefore, what they were talking about earlier about in other
jurisdictions where CACs are appointed during the investigative
phase to assist children and families, ours do not come in
until disposition and postdisposition. The judge, the presiding
judge will issue an order if it is requested but I believe that
is the answer.
Ms. Norton. You think it should be changed, then.
Ms. Shellman. Yes.
Ms. Norton. Mr. Chairman, there is one more question I
would like to ask. That is, one of the most scandalous things
we heard in testimony today is that the judges rotate in and
out and leave these children where they find them or have to
take them with them and cause great confusion in the process.
Should the District of Columbia have a separate family court?
Ms. Shellman. Yes.
Ms. Graham. Absolutely.
Mr. Davis. Could we get that unanimous yes on the record?
Let me thank each and every one of you. It has been a long
session. We have tried to get a lot of facts collected. I am
not sure of what we will do with everything. If you want to
supplement anything, the record will remain open for 14 days.
If you want to supplement anything you have said or something
else occurs to you, we will put it in the public record. Again,
thank you for your time. We appreciate it. We are all working
toward the same goal. These proceedings are adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 4:55 p.m., the subcommittee proceeded to
other business.]
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