|
||||
|
||||
| How Did It Happen? -- an in-depth report on child welfare in Milwaukee. Aftermath: 199 Workers Getting Layoff Notices.
Protesters and their signs voiced suspicion that the state saw mainly revenue opportunities for cronies in its rush to drop the county's public workers from child welfare involvement. 
As one protester explained, this child was born when the state took over Milwaukee child welfare -- and no improvements in sight. 
Handmade signs sprung up throughout the series of union protests. | Child Welfare Fiascos Cost Hundreds of Jobs 
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Jamaal Abdul-Alim Two top Milwaukee County administrators will be docked two weeks' pay each, carefully spaced out over a year so as to reduce the hardship on their combined $200,000 plus salaries. This is the response to their mismanagement that paved the way for 280 county workers to lose their jobs. Milwaukee County Supervisors who had once professed support for county-operated child welfare colluded both deliberately and out of frustration with the state to rob their own government of further involvement with foster care, adoption and related services. Even when calmer voices and cooler heads prevailed, and some of these supervisors changed their minds and helped win a County Board vote to reconsider, the state used the supervisors' initial dejection as an excuse to dump the county out of these child services. Even while County Executive Tom Ament complained that the state was pushing the county out of child welfare, as it had pushed the county out of W-2 (welfare reform), he was acquiescing - to put it mildly - with the state decision to toss away the county workers. Pushing even harder for the state to step in was the chair of the County Board, Supervisor Karen Ordinans. The state, despite describing the county workers as an "excellent staff," quickly chose its existing private providers to replace them, including organizations that had been directly blamed for failures in a recent case where a foster parent was sent to prison for abuse. These private agencies reversed a judge's ruling barring the foster parent. As a further absurdity, the state blamed the county for not questioning the reversal by these oversight private groups even though the state had set up a system where the "excellent staff" had no operational recourse in the proceedings. County workers first learned of their impending job losses as they were gathering at the Italian Community Center to protest failures in the state-run system. That rally was designed to show how wrong-headed was a federal award of commendation to the head of the state's Milwaukee child welfare bureau, Denise Revels Robinson.
The award itself was a mini-theater of absurd. It turned out that the Administration for Children and Families, a division of the US Department of Health and Human Services, gives it almost automatically on the recommendation of a state's governor. It will surprise no one to learn that President Bush's current Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tommy Thompson, would approve the award recommended by Wisconsin's former governor, Tommy Thompson. Within days of this award came a new report by a nationally respected nonprofit organization that went even further than the county workers had in itemizing the failures of the Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare, the state-created labyrinth through which county workers and other providers must work. The report, commissioned as part of a longstanding federal lawsuit against the state for its Milwaukee foster failures, concluded that, under the state takeover, abuse and neglect of foster children in Milwaukee was often five times higher than minimal federal standards and seriously jeopardized "the safety and well-being of children in out-of-home care in Milwaukee." Even an editorial in The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel pointed out that the "county personnel probably boast more experience and stability than the staffs at the private agencies" where "high turnover, according to the report, has ill-served foster children." The editorial further suggested that "the county, properly funded, could do better." Yet within days of such suggestions, a plan apparently concocted last year was implemented at a speed totally at odds with how child welfare has been handled for the last three years. The county was not only dropped but the state put up further barriers to the county's getting back into the system, though the County Board subsequently voted to explore those options. When the curtain came down on this tale of Pontius Pilate Meets Alice in Wonderland, the state had thrown out of work not only the most experienced human service workers in the foster care and adoption system but some of the most vocal advocates for these at-risk children. These were the 230 members of AFSCME Local 645 plus various clerical and support personnel. They will either lose their jobs, be relocated to other departments or forced to go to work for a private agency hired by the state if they wish to continue in the field where many hold bachelor or master's degrees and have spent decades of their careers. "Once again," said Wayne Krueger, president of Local 645, "the workers are taking it on the chin for the mistakes of management." Another message, suggested one observer, is that those who care and speak out about improving the system are the first to be punished by the state. "I could certainly concur in that interpretation," said Christopher Ahmuty, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin Foundation, which is part of the lawsuit against the state. Interestingly, it was a grimmer reality that bothered many of these members of the Local in interviews, even overriding their anger over losing their jobs. What would be best for at-risk children should be at the center of governmental concern, they said, and that was totally forgotten in this firestorm of politics, budget bean-counting, blamesmanship and gamesmanship. "Listen," said one worker, "if the state has a better system, bless 'em. You won't hear complaints from me. But the state doesn't and it doesn't seem to understand what a mess they've helped create, aside from any mistakes the county administrators made." Support for this contention comes from the litigants in the federal lawsuit who in a sense really don't care if the state, the county or the Man in the Moon operates child welfare in Milwaukee -- as long as it gets better. Marcia Lowry, executive director of Children's Rights, a New York-based advocacy group, sees two things that are "unusual in the Wisconsin situation" compared with many other states where Children's Rights has stepped in with local partners to file lawsuits over foster care. "The system is in bad shape and has not gotten better" in the three years since the state took over, she said in an interview. "That's one undeniable fact. And two, there is overwhelming evidence that the state has not been interested in resolving the case." That's not been true elsewhere, she added, pointing to Tennessee as the most recent example where the state and the litigants sat down and came up last May with solutions a judge could approve. There, in fact, the settlement was groundbreaking on several fronts, since Tennessee and the plaintiffs focused on qualitative outcomes for children (such as frequency of movement of children among placements while in care and the number of children who stay in foster care longer than is appropriate) and chose a team of five independent child welfare experts to guide and assist in a comprehensive reform of that state-run child welfare system. "Now it would be understandable if a state stalled (in a lawsuit) while actually making improvements," Lowry said. "Had the state takeover worked in Wisconsin, you would not see us, because improvements are what we want. But we are not going away in Wisconsin because that absolutely has not happened." Speaking specifically of the state dumping the county, Ahmuty agrees. "All the state is doing is moving around the deck chairs on the Titanic," he said. All concede that the county blew it on budget oversight. What distressed many we interviewed was that money rather than children seemed to the primary focus of the politicians. While some cost overruns were anticipated in the nearly $30 million budget the county had from the state to run its portion of Milwaukee child welfare, a series of audits - including one by the county's own Department of Audit - exposed millions more spent than anyone expected and also detailed some of the charges from private vendors in such areas as mentoring and transportation. The reaction among the press and officials was both mirth and outrage - take, for instance, the charge of $690 to take six children to Chuck E. Cheese for five hours, or $40,000 to "mentor" six children in one year, or $82,000 for sleepovers.
The private vendors involved argued, in effect, that there was nothing wrong with all this because the county didn't stop them, though apparently many of the financial charges were in violation of such county policies as "one on one" mentoring standards. Ralph Hollmon, director of the county's Department of Human Services, said in interviews that he had been negotiating with the state to cover $2.6 million of anticipated additional costs but that $3.4 million more on top of that came as "a shock." So angry were some supervisors at this failure of program management that they called for the resignations of Hollmon and particularly Renee Booker, key administrator for the child welfare division. Ament declined to fire them and said he would handle any "discipline." The county clearly felt in a bind, and so did Ament. These administrators, after all, were his hires, and he was quoted as saying, "We don't shoot our own wounded." Instead, he docked some of their pay as gently as he could. He and Ordinans also balked at going back to the state with this budget abuse hanging over their heads, unwilling to beg for what translated into $14 million more to run the program through 2002. It was evident, given its historic difficult relationship with the Madison legislature in such areas, that the county did not feel this was an important enough issue - keeping the county involved in the care of these children - to take the hard route of lobbying the state. The unjustifiable overruns certainly weakened the county's hand in what had been a fairly strong argument - that the state has systematically underfunded foster programs for decades and failed to respond to changing needs and exploding caseloads, as is detailed here. The county did manage to keep a window open. After the state dumped it, the County Board voted 23-1 to explore options for creating its own Department of Child Welfare to compete as a provider of services. The state's reaction, through Susan Dreyfus, administrator of the state Division of Children and Family Services, was that maybe the county would be considered . . . in a couple of years. On the surface, Dreyfus makes points that play to the worries of taxpayers. "If indeed the county wanted to stay in this business, they would truly have to show us how they could reduce those costs," Dreyfus said. But others - and in this current volatile atmosphere, most officials we contacted asked to speak anonymously - argued that this was also an old shell game on the part of the state. The state itself, for instance, is dealing with high budget overruns in many areas of its services and hasn't taken such a harsh line with its own management. Compare the state's reaction to county overruns, one official suggested, to the state's reaction when private corporations running W-2 ran up some outrageous costs. The official pointed to an even closer example. Two years ago, when private agencies operating Milwaukee foster care used state money for gift certificates and management bonuses, they were asked to return the money but also commended by the state division for being forthright in admitting (though only after being exposed) that they had made mistakes. "Compare that to how the state treated the county overruns, and remember, most of them came from private vendors approved by the state to contract with the county," the official said. Krueger agrees. "Even when the county is only partly responsible, the pattern is to always blame it for everything," he said. "Our rally protesting Revels Robinson was not personal. She's a bureaucrat, she often makes the right noises in speeches, but she's serving her masters and many are right to center Republicans in the state legislature far removed from the realities of the system they have created." "But the state has clever people, you have to give them that," he added. "When the county makes a mistake they're all over it, though the workers have really had very little to say about how it's handled. "When this state system was first put in place three years ago, in fact, we knew there was something wrong and we tried to say so. We are supposed to follow orders, get approval for services, but all we know from the computers is the fee these services cost, and we never hear back where the spending levels are. Enterprise? Decisions based on our veteran experience? There's little room for that. The state tries to control everything - oversight, paperwork - and all these service vendors? They are supposed to be held to state standards but that's where all the budget overruns are. The system has definitely not stopped the abuse and neglect of children while failing to give us and others the resources to do the job." Consider, too, how many more sets of rules - their own and the county's - the county workers deal with, and contrast that with how difficult it is to get a handle on how the private companies operate. Some of the private organizations are nonprofit, some are for-profit. Several have lobbyists in Madison. There are curious internecine coalitions among the various private groups. Some operate with a combination of volunteers and professional personnel. In a further irony, some are actually receiving strong funding from organized labor since they are members of the United Way family. There has been a remarkably high turnover of workers in the state's system - 40% to 70% according to some recent reports. One company even went bankrupt. Documents and managers have disappeared in the dead of night, and the state bureau in a recent addition to the federal lawsuit was accused of altering or falsifying children's records to seem in better compliance with federal standards. No wonder, said Krueger, that few of his Local's workers are eager to join this state system even if the state lives up to its vague promise to give them first dibs on any job openings. "It's like a corporation that has all these dummy corporations," he said. "It's endemic of the way things are happening in our society when suddenly government money is available for private contractors. Here come these fly-by-night agencies who hope to make a quick buck, and they make both the public workers and the good private charities look bad." The children and the workers are victims of longstanding antagonism over child welfare between the county and the state, in the opinion of many. "From my perspective, the state never really trusted the county," said Ahmuty of the ACLU. "I think they would like a system where there is no public accountability except from state bureaucrats." "The reaction of some supervisors is pretty troubling," Ahmuty added. "There seems a sense of desperation, even futility. Leadership isn't coming from the politicians." "What I think this all does, whether intentional or not, is reduce the amount of advocacy on behalf of the children." Also see our in-depth report on a history of child welfare mistakes. |
 County marchers and supporters circled the Italian Community Center. Back to Top |