Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Another Death Due To Dysfunctional Child Welfare System

A month ago, while the community was expressing outrage about the death of Christopher Thomas, Jr., I opined that all of the grand talk by Alberta Darling and others involved with this debacle would add up to be a big bunch of nothing.

Today's newspaper highlights and reinforces my opinion. Crocker Stephenson again reports about another tragic death that occurred under the less than watchful eye of the Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare. The story is about a seven-month-old, little, baby girl who was allowed to starve to death by her own mother, who was too busy feeding her gambling addiction, among other things.

Notable parts from the story include:
A Milwaukee mother of five, who police say spent hundreds of dollars a month on gambling, was charged Tuesday with allowing her 7-month-old daughter to starve to death in 2006.

Layunnia Lewis perished even as child welfare workers repeatedly visited the family's filthy, roach-infested home to check on an abused older sibling, according to investigative reports.

And though various agencies were attempting to provide Layunnia with medical and safety services, it does not appear welfare workers involved with the older sibling's case were even aware of those efforts.

"At the heart of the circumstances that impeded the effectiveness of intervention in this child's case is a failure by the agencies involved to share information both within organizations and between organizations," according to a report by the Milwaukee Child Welfare Partnership Council's Independent Review Panel.

"Little was known of the full history of this family to most of those involved," the report says

[...]

Although the hospital workers reported to child welfare authorities that Cole was heard threatening to beat her other children, and that both parents showed up at the hospital drunk, the safety services were terminated at the parents' request about two weeks after Layunnia was released from the hospital.

Meanwhile, in the months leading up to Layunnia's death, child welfare caseworkers and a therapist made regular visits to her home to check on her 9-year-old brother, who was being monitored under a court order.

The brother's caseworker last visited the home Oct. 30. One month later, Layunnia was dead.

"For reasons not clear to the panel," the independent review panel wrote, "for some portion of time that the safety services case was open, neither the ongoing worker nor the safety service worker knew of their co-worker's involvement with the family."

This tragic story displays that the way the system is designed is where the true dysfunction lies.

When I worked for Milwaukee County as a child welfare worker, the entire program was done by the County. Investigations, on-going case management, adoption studies, and foster home licensing was all done by the County. Because it was all done by one agency, there was a high level of communication going on. If the foster home licensing worker came to check to make sure that the home was still following guidelines and requirements, and found something wrong, the case manager was notified, and appropriate action was taken, including removing the children from harm's way. Likewise, if the case manager saw problems, and had to remove the kids, the licensing worker was notified immediately, and necessary actions were taken to either correct the problem or to revoke their license.

Now, under the BMCW, all of these duties can be done by various different agencies. Furthermore, the way the BMCW has been structured, it actually hinders communication between these agencies and between the workers. The right hand literally doesn't know what the left one is doing.

Another problem with the system is how they decide to track and organize cases. Under the old system, the cases were organized by the family, with the mother being the main case. She would then be assigned a number for administrative purposes. All of her children were given the same number with an alphabetical suffix to reflect the order of their birth. For example, if a case was opened for a mother, it could receive a number like 123456. If said mother had multiple children, they would have case numbers 123456A, 123456B, 123456C and so on.

Under the Bureau, it goes by the child. The computer system was supposed to keep track of the names via a data base, and put members of the family in the same caseload, but the programming did not work. There were many times when a single family could have numerous case numbers and different workers scattered throughout the system, with the workers not even knowing that the other cases existed.

Instead of a system that has all of its different functions working together for a common cause, the design of the system, including breaking it into parts for privatization purposes, as caused an atmosphere of isolation and competition. Instead of working together to protect children, you have several agencies working against each other, in hopes to get a bigger part of the pie. The result is more needless and senseless deaths of the most vulnerable of our community.

I also feel that I should add that the County had workers with a wide range of experience to draw upon. When I first started, there were workers that had decades of experience that they were more than willing to share with the newer workers. Now, you have young people just getting out of school. With the exception of a handful of people, there is not many people in that system that have more than five years of experience. This includes the supervisors.

To add to the sick joke that child welfare in Milwaukee County has become, the review panel comes out with some vague and meaningless recommendations:
The review panel's report contains a host of recommendations, including improvements to the safety service program, beefing up coordination among service providers, educating caseworkers about medically fragile infants and encouraging the Visiting Nurses Association to develop a written protocol.
These are the same things that they come up with every time a child dies, but nothing ever really changes. That is because the system is designed to have these flaws.

The only way that these calamities will be stopped, or at least minimized, is if the whole damn system is finally revamped into a more cohesive, cooperative model. A first good step would be to have the useless lumps on the review board, like State Senator Alberta Darling, step down so that people who genuinely care about the welfare of Milwaukee's children can do the work needed. That will help for the nonce, but the only real effective solution would be for the state legislature and Governor Jim Doyle to get off their rumps and undo the damage that was started ten years ago, by that legislature and Tommy Thompson.

1 comment:

  1. Grrrrr, why are people so flipping selfish.
    And why can ANYONE seem to give birth, there should be a law about that!

    ReplyDelete