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| Peer training at House of Corrections hopes to be a model for both unions and prison facilities. The county contract vote -- just what did it mean? AFSCME 48's take on the Kettl Commission. Check out Political Opinion from AFSCME 48's newspaper.
Wayne Krueger, president of Local 645 and a new Executive Board member for Council 48, has spent three decades in county human services. 
Children carried signs for children in a Local 645 protest. |
Slow Response to Crisis in Child Care Proved Key to Current Milwaukee Mess Crack cocaine. Back in the 1980s it was a major element in what caused Milwaukee's child welfare system to implode. Both Wayne Krueger, president of Local 645, and Circuit Judge Michael Dwyer, presiding judge at the Children's Court Center, cited the aftermath of the street drug as they recalled what happened. From drugs and related social factors in the Reagan and Bush years came a maelstrom of crime, disrupted families, demands by the public for harsh penalties, birth defects, learning disabilities, emotional trauma, lack of rehab facilities and a whirlpool of caseloads and referrals for children abandoned, neglected and abused. All this fell on the county division at that time responsible for foster care, adoption, foster home licensing, kinship care and related services throughout Milwaukee County. The money to run all this came from the state, either as part of budgets voted by the legislature or as pass-through from the federal government. The system in Milwaukee, though, was clearly being overwhelmed by numbers and the money and methods didn't keep up. There were also major arguments over how the state concocted block grant schemes that, many argued, denied Milwaukee its fair share of federal Title IV-E funds for foster care and adoption services. "We had workers who were individually handling 100 foster care cases at a time," Krueger recalled. "We had children we couldn't place or were being bounced from place to place. These were not children who were identified early. They were 8, 9, 13, finally noticed by schoolteachers and counselors. They were hard to handle, hard to place. And the state made the numbers deliberately confusing. Did you know that the state counts its caseloads by family and not by children? Yet we had and still have families handling many, many children, then losing them, then gaining others." The situation turned all the truisms of "Oprah" talk shows on their ears. Perhaps there are thousands of families out there eager to adopt, but not for these children. Certainly there are many excellent and committed foster parents, but there were also well-meaning adults who had no idea what problems they would be facing in foster care and were working in a system staffed too lightly or too bogged down in paperwork, duplicate regulations and fear of litigation to offer them sufficient guidance and resources. And along with the dedicated adults came some troubling cases of "foster parents who thought they could feed their own families on the money they got from the system, and then found they couldn't and dumped the children back," said Christopher Ahmuty, executive director of the ACLU of Wisconsin Foundation. The system failures, sadly, joined with society's failures, as many observers commented in interviews. As a nation we pride ourselves in our reaction to children in need, be they victims of disease, natural catastrophes or highway accidents. For children in the foster care system, there is a curious lack of response, "as if somehow they deserve it because their parents were drug addicts or criminals or whatever," said one official. "There does seem far too much of that sentiment in our society," said Ahmuty. "It's as if we are punishing families that failed and keeping them in a cycle of poverty and dysfunction." The truth is that children in foster care, and those being placed for adoption, are in effect wards of the government that removed them from homes or took over responsibility for their own good . If instead they are further harmed by a government system, then the public sector is failing its responsibilities. The evidence indicated that the government had failed in providing both attention and resources. So in 1993, Children's Rights along with the ACLU filed suit in federal court against the state (a case originally called Jeanine B. v. Tommy G. Thompson, but now changed to Jeanine B. v. Scott McCallum) on behalf of all children in Milwaukee foster care, charging widespread mismanagement and violations of federal law. Much of the information actually came from county workers who out of conscience had been speaking out about the failures in foster care and what was needed to change that. "One of the ways we got into the Milwaukee case was through the union," said Marcia Lowry, the head of Children's Rights. "We had worked closely with the (AFSCME) International in our Washington (D.C.) case. What would have been good for us, good for the children, would have been for all sides to sit down and work out what should be done." The county, too, admitted to failures in the system, all of which apparently infuriated the state government, on the theory that it exposed them to liability in the lawsuit, as opposed to simply telling the truth.
"At first," Lowry recalled, "the state tried to remove itself from the lawsuit, claiming it was all the county's problem. But that was rejected by the court. It is the state's money, the state's control and they are the legal custodians of these children." Faced with that reality, the state made a backdoor move. A few legislators (among them Margaret Farrell, now McCallum's lieutenant governor) tucked in a bill amendment without telling the county or giving local citizens a chance for input that allowed the state to take over the Milwaukee child welfare system by creating a Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare to seek private contractors and oversight the entire operation. The county, caught flat-footed, lobbied to be included, "but though the supervisors have taken credit for getting the county back in, I think what Local 645 did had a lot to do with it," said Krueger. "We invited several state administrators to come out with us, see what we do and see what we're up against, and I think that helped a lot." And so, in 1998, when the state bureau took over, it retained the county as provider of foster care in two of the five geographical regions (sites) that Milwaukee County was divided into for purposes of child welfare. Each site has about 50 foster care workers when fully staffed. Three sites are operated by private contractors, but the county also retained a countywide role in adoption, foster home licensing and related services. Currently, there are about 7,700 children in foster care and about 4,000 in kinship care countywide, plus the county placed nearly 300 children for adoption in 2000. But all this is run through a system where the state bureau handles referrals from the court and passes it along with instructions and its own system to the various providers, and also approves the lists of private companies and vendors for all areas of the child welfare system. It was not a veteran experienced system except for the county unit - the state itself suffered massive turnovers of its workforce for the bureau in the first years. The state may have thought that taking charge in this manner would demonstrate that it could protect children without federal court intervention, and it did delay a trial as everyone waited to see if the state system would work. But said Ahmuty, "Three years is plenty of time to start getting it right, and they aren't." The plaintiffs have gathered considerable evidence to support that view, and the recent dumping of county workers from the state system may actually serve to galvanize court activity. In March, the plaintiffs went to US District Court with depositions claiming the Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare was intentionally destroying, altering and falsifying children's records on an ongoing basis in order to claim that the agency was is in compliance with state and federal requirements. The depositions claimed that Denise Revels Robinson, the bureau director, repeatedly directed casework staff to modify case records relating to "high profile" cases after deficiencies had been detected. In May, Children's Rights and the ACLU released results of a devastating report on the bureau, conducted by the Children's Research Center, a division of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency based in Madison. While the report was commissioned by the plaintiffs, they were not involved in the conclusions and the center is a highly respected independent organization. The report examined 334 foster child cases from the time the state took over in 1998 through October of 2000. Among the findings: One of every six children was the subject of abuse and neglect complaints following placement and the substantiated cases of maltreatment by a foster care provider was more than five times the federal performance standard. Even worse, the report suspects that abuse and neglect may be even higher because almost a third of the records had no documented investigation or findings. Nearly half of the foster children moved one or more times while in care and 21% of children moved three or more times during their first year in foster care - nearly twice the federal performance standard. On average, foster children were seen by caseworkers less than four times per year. Four of every five children were not seen by their caseworker in any given month, despite a minimum requirement of at least monthly contact. On average, foster parents were visited by caseworkers approximately twice per year, despite a minimum requirement to visit foster parents at least once every two months. The majority of foster children have no record of ever seeing a physician while in foster care. Over 85% have never seen a dentist while in state custody. Less than 27% had a case plan filed within two months of being removed from their homes, as required by federal law. Moreover, the state system is way behind on filing termination of parental rights petitions (TPRs) or similar documents as required by the Federal Adoption and Safe Families Act. "If nothing else, we are uncovering and making available information about the system," said Eric Thompson, lead attorney for the plaintiffs. "We know the state has their own reports showing the same kind of thing. We have to conclude that the state is not interested in being accountable." Indeed, the state's own audits after the emergence of this report confirmed many of the findings and added some intense criticism of its own about services from private contractors. "What we want to see, for example, is lower caseloads and timely adoptions, not a system that just settles for allocating resources among provider organizations," said Ahmuty. He and others point out that when a lawsuit involving children extends out over a decade, you are now confronted with a situation where the children of these children are entering the system because their parents weren't helped or nurtured by the process. The price the taxpayers pay for all this, as children are bounced into adulthood, is far larger than the costs of getting the system right. "I think the state's theory is that private companies will pay more attention to the bottom line," said Ahmuty. "But there are real consequences if you create a system that doesn't take into account outcomes and the real needs of the children. Even well intentioned private organizations will want to keep their contracts with the state." Judge Dwyer, who daily in his court deals with the at-risk children, is most concerned about the long-range consequences, and he envisions serious disruptions in foster care with the county out of the picture. "This whole thing is a many-headed Hydra," he said, "and we dare not lose sight of what's best for the children." |
 John Goldstein (left), president of the Milwaukee County Labor Council, AFL-CIO, came to Council 48 headquarters to strategize with staff and Local 645 members on future action. Union leaders will urge their legislators to challenge the contracts about to be given to existing private contractors whose errors are itemized in recent reports. |