“A dead child.”
Nothing sounds worse. We expect boundless energy, tantrums, infectious smiles. But not death. Death is for the old, the decrepit, the sick, those who have already lived.
Which is why the tale of almost 80 children, from 2001 to 2004, who died while associated with Clark County’s Child Welfare System, is hard to comprehend. When you get into the details, when you hear the stories of how police and investigators found some of those children — one 2-year-old with cerebral palsy, starved to death, with cuts on her fingers because she couldn’t free her hand from her hair — you can’t believe such things took place in your own town.
Sadly enough, Las Vegas is not unique. Turn on your computer and do a search for “child protective services.” Pages of stories appear, citing cities, farm towns and beautiful oceanside villages throughout the country. But what is different about Clark County is that the abuse and neglect is now so bad, we’re becoming known for it. National organizations are setting up teams of lawyers to sue if it doesn’t get better. Experts from around the country are collectively shaking their heads, expressing disbelief at the situation.
Eighty kids in four years is a lot of kids.
But there is a reason to read about this apparent train wreck, a reason to lean in and get a closer look at the messy details.
That reason: Miracles do happen.
It was no secret that the agencies involved in the care of Clark County’s abused and neglected children had problems. Yet no one did much but finger-point until the release of the devastating report by the stateappointed Blue Ribbon Panel on Child Death Review early last year. Created in response to the need for accurate reporting of child fatalities in Clark County, the panel spared no one. The team investigated 79 suspicious child deaths during the first four years of the new millennium. They found that Clark County’s family services, police, prosecutors and coroner’s office failed to properly investigate or protect against potential abuse or neglect.
The details were mind-boggling. In one instance, the district attorney failed to re-open a 2002 shaken-baby death case after the same person was charged in a shaken-baby death in 2005. In another, social workers took 508 days to return to a home to check on the siblings of a child who had died. And of the 64 siblings related to the 79 dead children, only two sets of siblings were interviewed. In eight instances Family Services failed to investigate the deaths at all. (Although in some of those cases, no report had been made, making accurate statistics difficult.)
Perhaps most disturbing: Clark County’s system of tracking child deaths was so slipshod, it had officially reported that 35 children died of abuse or neglect in those four years. In turn, that led to the falsely optimistic determination that Clark County’s death rate due to maltreatment was only one-fourth the national average.
The veil of secrecy surrounding Child Protective Services was so thick, even national groups stopped trusting the information coming out of Clark County. In December 2005, Kids Count, a national organization that tracks children’s well-being, announced it would stop reporting abuse and neglect cases in Clark County altogether. “We’re going to wait until we’re convinced we have credible information,” said Dr. R. Keith Schwer, Nevada Kids Count director and executive director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at UNLV.
In a phone interview, Jess McDonald, the man who in 1994 became director of the so-called “Calcutta” of child welfare — the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services — sympathized. Changing child welfare systems, he says, is akin to “trying to turn a battleship in the middle of the Chicago River.” It takes time.
Yet even though the report sparked approval of funds to hire more county investigators and promises for sweeping reforms, the lumbering Child Protective Services agency still careened toward an iceberg. In August 2006, four children connected to Clark County Family Services had died. One stopped breathing while at Child Haven, the county’s interim facility for abused and abandoned children; a 14-year-old was shot to death; a 7-month-old, “Baby Boy Charles,” died of head injuries in his foster home; and a 5-year-old drowned in the pool at his foster home.
That same month, Oakland-based National Center for Youth Law sued Family Services, demanding changes. Additionally, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families sent a letter to the state expressing “grave concern” about conditions at Child Haven.
It’s not the kind of situation that engenders hope.
But don’t forget McDonald’s “battleship” analogy. If you think Clark County was a nightmare, all of Illinois was on par with Dante’s Seventh Level of Hell in the mid-1990s. Yet just a few years later, federal authorities had coined the phrase “The Illinois Miracle” when referring to how that state had bettered its child protective system.
What turned it around? When McDonald was in charge, he hired an outside consultant to evaluate and make recommendations to fix Illinois’ broken system.
That consultant was Thomas Morton.
WITH LITTLE EXCEPTION, public agencies are located in some of the seedier sections of a city. The official reasoning is that poorer areas have more needs. The unofficial reason is that any resident from a moneyed neighborhood would fight hard keep them out of their backyards. That’s why the Department of Family Services is located north of U.S. 95 at Pecos and Bonanza roads, surrounded by what can only be described as strip malls that look like broken teeth and homes whose better days were back when they could have been described as blighted. Inside the dated building Thomas Morton, the new director of Clark County Department of Family Services, spends his days researching, strategizing and brainstorming a solution that will turn our city’s shipload of children away from disaster.Morton has never been the head of a public agency before. In fact, since 1984, he has been the founder and CEO of the Child Welfare Institute, a nonprofit consulting agency to public welfare agencies. But when you talk to him, you see that he is going beyond the bounds usually set for public service directors: He’s soft-spoken, but doesn’t try to redirect and mislead on tough questions; he appears open and says the only way to cure his ailing department is more openness and public scrutiny.
If that works, and if Morton actually achieves his goal of fixing a system facing lawsuits and ridicule, we might one day erect a statue or name a street after him. Because this isn’t a job that he can come into and tighten a few practices here, do some belt-tightening there and, voila, the wrongs are righted. Kids have been dying in Clark County, and Morton’s job is to make that stop. Or at least slow it down.
And still, knowing what he faced, he accepted the job offered to him by former Clark County manager Thom Reilly last May and began his work in July. Just seven months in, there’s no way to say how he’ll do. But he talks a good talk. He has also started to make some moves.
In October, he asked for — and Clark County approved — a $30 million funding increase for 121 new positions within his department, including 60 investigators for around-the-clock service plus two attorneys to help indigent families. He also added 25 new positions to help foster-home recruitment, and others who will work in clerical jobs. Since October, another new report, as expected, blasted the county for its handling of child abuse and neglect cases. Just before Christmas, a report by consultant Ed Cotton laid bare in detailed facts and figures the problems that Morton hopes to end. Most damning was the finding that in Cotton’s selected sample of cases, some 60 percent of the county’s alleged victims of child abuse were never interviewed by case workers.
“We found not a lot of supervisory oversight,” Cotton told the LasVegas Review-Journal.Morton told the paper that he welcomed the findings, and that caseworkers were immediately sent to those children who had not been interviewed.
Morton admits fixing a system suffering from years of neglect won’t happen overnight. The $30 million approved for new positions this year is the first of his budgetary requests to the County Commission. This summer, he’ll ask for $30 million more. And for the following three years, he’ll ask for the same amount, totaling $150 million. A lot of that money will go for training of foster parents, investigators, recruiters — the essential pieces needed to build an infrastructure at Family Services that is one of the first things Morton noticed as absent when he arrived.
“For example, we have 500 employees and no internal staff development training,” he says. “I like to think the system wasn’t broken; in some cases, the system didn’t even exist.”
Of course, the first thing everyone will look for is a reduction in worker caseloads. Here’s the way they break down in Clark County: As of late November, 2,123 children, not including 18-year-olds still in foster care, were considered within the foster care system. Workloads for Child Protective Services caseworkers — who are responsible for maintaining contact with the child and foster parents, making safety evaluations and keeping accurate records — average about 39 kids per worker; some are as high as 59. In the best of all worlds, national standards call for a child-per-caseworker ratio of 1-to-15. The average is more around 1-to-24.
By state law, social workers are supposed to see each child at least once a month. And it’s not a quickie meeting. It’s driving to wherever in Clark County that child happens to be. In some cases, if located in a not-so-desirable neighborhood, it means arranging to have a police officer along. Then it’s talking to the child, the child’s parents — foster or natural — then driving back, updating notes and doing it all over again the next day.
It sounds daunting, and it is. But it’s nothing new. Child welfare systems throughout the country are in devastating states of disrepair. And one of Morton’s greatest successes — at least, one he had a hand in — took place in Illinois. Compared to the Illinois system in the mid-1990s, Nevada is something of a Shangri-la.
“Illinois was a system out of control,” Morton says. “It’s hard to do much worse.”
Morton came on board at a time when Illinois was reeling from the tales of unchecked child abuse and neglect. One infamous story involved Joseph Wallace, who three times was taken away, then returned, to his mentally ill mother. After the third return, the 3-year-old’s mother tied an extension cord around his neck and hung him to death. Then there was the “Keystone 19,” the story of 19 kids and six adults living in a decrepit two-bedroom apartment; Illinois family services workers knew about six of the kids, but did nothing to help or separate them from their mothers.
Facing lawsuits, the state first hired more investigators, lowering caseloads. And what happened was... very little. Cases of abuse and neglect remained steady or increased, while numbers of children admitted to the foster program kept going up. “But by bringing caseloads down, they took away the excuse,” Morton says. “I don’t mean that in a negative sense. It’s that, now they could see other things that needed changing.”
The key to the cure, Illinois learned, was training. That meant everything from training foster parents on how to work with foster children, to training birth parents for the return of their fostered child. It also meant training investigators to recognize both abusive and non-abusive homes. That second part is important, because the numbers of children entering Illinois’ system had become staggering.
At its height, according to a 2005 article in Congressional Quarterly Researcher, Illinois had the “highest prevalence of children in foster care — 17.1 per 1,000.” Morton says the number of kids in foster care grew from around 22,000 in 1987 to 48,000 in 1994, to a peak of 53,000 in 1997.
Now more than 10 years later, even as Chicago and state populations have grown, the number of kids in foster care in Illinois is down to 16,000 and in five years, the incidence of repeat maltreatment has dropped 50 percent.
“They got waivers for subsidized guardianship so more kids went into guardianship. Adoption rates started to grow, allowing the state to move a lot of kids to permanency and off the Illinois caseload,” Morton says. “And critical to it all is an issue that’s cited a lot in industry, but people don’t talk about it as much in government. And that’s leadership and vision.”
Morton was behind the scenes in Illinois, feeding administrators ideas and support. Now, he’s on point. He’s already started making moves toward reducing caseloads. Training is on its way. He’s also going to move to instigate investigations almost immediately in cases where abuse is detected, which Illinois found was the key to preventing repeated abuse. And when can we expect results? Morton smiles at the question. It’s not cockiness, because a man in his position heading such a beleaguered agency has no right to be cocky. He smiles because it’s the question everyone asks, he smiles because he can only hope that his leadership can do for Nevada what Jess McDonald’s did for Illinois.
McDonald really started to see things change after about 30 months. “I would say we should see things turn in about that time,” Morton says. “That is, assuming we do things right and get the right resource investment. If we don’t, it could go on forever. I can point out systems under court order for 16 years that are not performing remarkably better.”
Before he gets up to go to another media interview, Morton throws out one more bit of wisdom. To really fix what’s broken takes more than money, more than training, even more than new caseworkers. They are all important.
“But child protection takes the whole community,” Morton says. “We don’t go out and find instances of abuse and neglect; the community is needed. It’s not just this agency, it’s the agency plus community partners, plus individuals in this community.”
For the children of Clark County forced to start life at a disadvantage, it’s time to take Morton’s words to heart: Not only does it take a community to raise a child, it takes a community to protect them.
Copyright 2007  Las Vegas Life
