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PROTECTING OUR MOST VULNERABLE RESIDENTS:

A REVIEW OF REFORM EFFORTS AT THE

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CHILD AND FAMILY

SERVICES AGENCY

HEARING

BEFORE THE

COMMITTEE ON

GOVERNMENT REFORM

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED EIGHTH CONGRESS

FIRST SESSION

MAY 16, 2003

Serial No. 108–24

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

(II)

COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM

TOM DAVIS, Virginia, Chairman

DAN BURTON, Indiana

CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut

ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida

JOHN M. MCHUGH, New York

JOHN L. MICA, Florida

MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana

STEVEN C. LATOURETTE, Ohio

DOUG OSE, California

RON LEWIS, Kentucky

JO ANN DAVIS, Virginia

TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania

CHRIS CANNON, Utah

ADAM H. PUTNAM, Florida

EDWARD L. SCHROCK, Virginia

JOHN J. DUNCAN, JR., Tennessee

JOHN SULLIVAN, Oklahoma

NATHAN DEAL, Georgia

CANDICE S. MILLER, Michigan

TIM MURPHY, Pennsylvania

MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio

JOHN R. CARTER, Texas

WILLIAM J. JANKLOW, South Dakota

MARSHA BLACKBURN, Tennessee

HENRY A. WAXMAN, California

TOM LANTOS, California

MAJOR R. OWENS, New York

EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York

PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania

CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York

ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland

DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio

DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois

JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts

WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri

DIANE E. WATSON, California

STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts

CHRIS VAN HOLLEN, Maryland

LINDA T. SANCHEZ, California

C.A. ‘‘DUTCH’’ RUPPERSBERGER, Maryland

ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of

Columbia

JIM COOPER, Tennessee

CHRIS BELL, Texas

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BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont

(Independent)

PETER SIRH, Staff Director

MELISSA WOJCIAK, Deputy Staff Director

ROB BORDEN, Parliamentarian

TERESA AUSTIN, Chief Clerk

PHILIP M. SCHILIRO, Minority Staff Director

(III)

C O N T E N T S

Page

Hearing held on May 16, 2003 ............................................................................... 1

Statement of:

Ashby, Cornelia, Director, Education, Workforce, and Income Security,

U.S. General Accounting Office; Dr. Olivia A. Golden, director, District

of Columbia Child and Family Services Agency; Judith Meltzer, deputy

director, Center for the Study of Social Policy; Anne E. Schneiders,

esq., chair, the National Association of Counsel for Children, Washington Metro Chapter; Jennifer Massengale, J.S., MSW, acting executive

director, D.C. Children’s Advocacy Center; Marilyn R. Egerton, deputy

director, Foster and Adoptive Parent Advocacy Center; and Judith

Sandalow, executive director, the Children’s Law Center ......................... 10

Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:

Ashby, Cornelia, Director, Education, Workforce, and Income Security,

U.S. General Accounting Office, prepared statement of ............................ 13

Davis, Chairman Tom, a Representative in Congress from the State of

Virginia, prepared statement of ................................................................... 4

Egerton, Marilyn R., deputy director, Foster and Adoptive Parent Advocacy Center, prepared statement of ............................................................. 99

Golden, Dr. Olivia A., director, District of Columbia Child and Family

Services Agency, prepared statement of ..................................................... 38

Massengale, Jennifer, J.S., MSW, acting executive director, D.C. Children’s Advocacy Center, prepared statement of ......................................... 85

Meltzer, Judith, deputy director, Center for the Study of Social Policy,

prepared statement of ................................................................................... 57

Norton, Hon. Eleanor Holmes, a Delegate in Congress from the District

of Columbia, prepared statement of ............................................................ 8

Sandalow, Judith, executive director, the Children’s Law Center, prepared statement of ........................................................................................ 112

Schneiders, Anne E., esq., chair, the National Association of Counsel

for Children, Washington Metro Chapter, prepared statement of ............ 70

(1)

PROTECTING OUR MOST VULNERABLE RESIDENTS: A REVIEW OF REFORM EFFORTS AT

THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CHILD AND

FAMILY SERVICES AGENCY

FRIDAY, MAY 16, 2003

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,

COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM,

Washington, DC.

The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10 a.m., in room 2154,

Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Tom Davis (chairman of the

committee) presiding.

Present: Representatives Tom Davis, Van Hollen, and Norton.

Staff present: Keith Ausbrook, chief counsel; David Marin, director of communications; Scott Kopple, deputy director of communications; Victoria Proctor, professional staff member; Teresa Austin,

chief clerk; Joshua E. Gillespie, deputy clerk; Shalley Kim, legislative assistant; Early Green, minority chief clerk; Jean Gosa, minority assistant clerk; and Cecelia Morton, minority office manager.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Good morning and welcome to today’s

oversight hearing on the District of Columbia Child and Family

Services Agency [CFSA].

This hearing is a continuation of the Government Reform Committee’s oversight of the child welfare system in the District. During the 106th Congress, the Subcommittee on the District of Columbia held hearings to examine the status of CFSA while it was

under Federal court-appointed receivership.

Last Congress, the subcommittee continued its examination of

the city’s child welfare system with a special focus on the reorganization of its judicial component, the D.C. Superior Court Family

Division. Congress worked with D.C. court officials, government,

and community leaders to create the D.C. Family Court.

Last year, I requested a followup GAO report on the status of reform efforts at CFSA. Specifically, GAO examined the Agency’s performance measures and compliance with the Adoption and Safe

Families Act [ASFA], the implementation of key foster care policies, and the relationship between the Agency and the family court.

GAO’s preliminary findings identify some critical areas that have

yet to be addressed by CFSA. For instance, the Agency must still

comply with ASFA requirements regarding the termination of parental rights, permanency hearings, and notification to participants

for hearings and reviews.

Furthermore, I am concerned by the delay in establishing policies

related to a child’s permanency goals, the licensing of foster homes,

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social worker visitation, and parental visitation in reunification

cases. Also, GAO’s findings demonstrate that the Agency needs to

do a better job of entering data into the FACES case management

system to ensure the most accurate and relevant information is

available to caseworkers.

Many of the challenges that CFSA must address are comparable

to those faced by child welfare agencies nationwide. They include

the recruitment and retention of caseworkers, foster families, and

adoptive families. Our witnesses represent a variety of participants

in the child welfare system and can provide insight and recommendations on how CFSA can meet these challenges.

It is a daunting task to rebuild an Agency, establish and implement new policies and procedures, and radically overhaul the

Agency’s infrastructure. Since the safety and well-being of children

are at stake, this can’t happen fast enough.

But the Agency has made progress and I think it is important

to highlight its achievements. Based on the GAO’s preliminary results, I am encouraged by the CFSA’s efforts to develop written

plans to help it comply with some of the ASFA requirements and

performance measures. I am also pleased to note the Agency’s development of numerous foster care policies and, in the case of faceto-face intake interviews, their standards even exceed accepted best

practices. Furthermore, CFSA’s efforts to lower the number of underage children who are placed in group homes is commendable.

Communication is the first step to ensuring that all components

of the child welfare system, CFSA, the courts, and public and private agencies, work together to achieve the common goal of serving

and protecting the city’s most vulnerable children. The vital relationship between CFSA and family court is improving and includes

regular meetings between the heads of both organizations. And

they are working collaboratively to find constructive solutions to

problems such as hearing schedule conflicts.

Recently, CFSA met the minimum criteria necessary to end the

probationary period and transfer the Agency from Federal receivership back to the District’s jurisdiction. That was a great step forward for the Agency and the city. Now CFSA has until 2006 to

complete the incremental steps laid out in the final implementation

plan.

So today’s hearing will focus on CFSA’s progress and the challenges it faces as it pursues reform efforts. How can CFSA best resolve staffing and operational problems in order to address the critical shortfalls identified by GAO? The Agency requires a stable,

well trained, and experienced team. Without solid and consistent

staffing levels, the Agency reform cannot be accomplished and children will not receive adequate services. While the salaries for social

workers in CFSA are competitive, the Agency’s low employee retention is linked to what many employees perceive as an unsupportive

environment.

Furthermore, I cannot stress enough my concern about the slow

rate at which the Agency meets a child’s permanency goal. For this

very reason, approximately one-third of the children CFSA currently serves are teenagers. Many grew up in the system. How

would they have benefited from a permanent placement? We will

never know.

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To help us examine these questions, we have assembled a panel

of experts who work with the city’s abused and neglected children

every day. I look forward to hearing from CFSA and the court monitor, as well as witnesses representing the perspectives of legal

services providers, private agencies, and foster parents.

I now recognize my colleague from the District of Columbia, Ms.

Norton, for her opening statement.

[The prepared statement of Chairman Tom Davis follows:]

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Ms. NORTON. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I want to

thank you, my good friend Tom Davis, for his continuing interest

in this Agency, flowing in no small part from the work he and I

did when he chaired the D.C. Subcommittee and this Agency was

in a Federal receivership.

I thank you for today’s hearing concerning the progress of the

District of Columbia Child and Family Services Agency since coming out of Federal receivership in June 2001. While CFSA is a city

Agency, this hearing is an appropriate followup to the work Chairman Davis and I did when CFSA was in a Federal receivership.

As a followup of that work, Chairman Davis requested a GAO report. This hearing is also appropriate because of our work with Majority Leader Tom DeLay in thoroughly revising the family court of

the District of Columbia Superior Court and reenergizing the family court with 15 new judges and other personnel. That legislation,

H.R. 2657, had to be written in Congress because Congress pays

for the D.C. Courts, and alone has jurisdiction under the Home

Rule Act to make changes in the Superior Court. However, D.C.

Superior Court’s new family division was drawn in full home rule

consultation with D.C. officials and personnel.

The District itself has literally had to reconstruct CFSA from the

ground up. This committee in prior hearings found little progress

under the Federal receivership. Meanwhile, Mayor Tony Williams

and the D.C. Council were making considerable progress in improving other agencies. Therefore, I argued that the city should be allowed to reassume jurisdiction, and most in Congress who were familiar with the issues agreed. Ultimately the matter rested with

the Federal district court, which returned the Agency to the District almost 2 years ago.

As might be expected, in its early period out of receivership,

CFSA had some distance to go. The district court has given the

Agency until 2006 to come into full compliance. I will leave it to

today’s witnesses to evaluate the Agency’s progress. However, especially considering the disrepair of the Agency, even as it emerged

from receivership, many of the early objective measures are heartening. Of particular importance, the District has now created one

unified Agency involving both abuse and neglect of children, eliminating confusing and counterproductive implementation and accountability.

The committee should also find it encouraging that the District

is meeting most of the requirements of our 1997 Adoption and Safe

Families Act, and has met a number of performance criteria. And

it must be mentioned that this committee, which initially investigated CFSA receivership because of the death of a foster child,

will be pleased that CFSA has both adopted and implemented appropriate child protection and foster care placement policies.

I will be interested to learn more from today’s witnesses. May I

welcome all of today’s witnesses, and thank them for their testimony.

[The prepared statement of Hon. Eleanor Holmes Norton follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you.

Members will have 5 legislative days to submit opening statements for the record.

The first panel is Cornelia Ashby, Director, Education Workforce

and Income Security, U.S. General Accounting Office; Dr. Olivia

Golden, director, District of Columbia Child and Family Services

Agency; Judith Meltzer, deputy director, Center for the Study of

Social Policy; Anne Schneiders, Chair of the National Association

of Counsel for Children; Jennifer Massengale, acting executive director, D.C. Children’s Advocacy Center; Marilyn Egerton, deputy

director of the Foster and Adoptive Parent Advocacy Center; and

Judith Sandalow, executive director of the Children’s Law Center.

It is the policy of the committee that we swear all witnesses before they testify.

[Witnesses sworn.]

Chairman TOM DAVIS. What we will do is start with Ms. Ashby,

and after everybody has given their testimony, we will ask some

questions and if you want to add something at the end, you may

do that. Your total statement is in the record. So for historical purposes and analytical purposes, your statement is in the record. You

have 5 minutes to kind of sum it up.

Ms. Ashby.

STATEMENTS OF CORNELIA ASHBY, DIRECTOR, EDUCATION,

WORKFORCE, AND INCOME SECURITY, U.S. GENERAL ACCOUNTING OFFICE; DR. OLIVIA A. GOLDEN, DIRECTOR, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CHILD AND FAMILY SERVICES AGENCY; JUDITH MELTZER, DEPUTY DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR

THE STUDY OF SOCIAL POLICY; ANNE E. SCHNEIDERS, ESQ.,

CHAIR, THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF COUNSEL FOR

CHILDREN, WASHINGTON METRO CHAPTER; JENNIFER

MASSENGALE, J.S., MSW, ACTING EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR,

D.C. CHILDREN’S ADVOCACY CENTER; MARILYN R.

EGERTON, DEPUTY DIRECTOR, FOSTER AND ADOPTIVE PARENT ADVOCACY CENTER; AND JUDITH SANDALOW, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, THE CHILDREN’S LAW CENTER

Ms. ASHBY. Mr. Chairman and Ms. Norton, I am pleased to be

here today to discuss the preliminary findings from our study of

the D.C. Child Family Services Agency that you requested. We will

issue our final report later this month.

My comments are based primarily on our analysis of data in the

District’s automated child welfare information system known as

FACES. We verify the accuracy of the data, but for some of the

data elements we needed, CFSA had not entered into FACES information for about two-thirds of its active foster care cases. Consequently, we obtained and analyzed information from paper case

files to supplement FACES information for some cases. Most, but

not all, of the cases with incomplete data originated prior to

FACES going online in October 1999. Top CFSA managers told us

including data in FACES for active cases that originated prior to

FACES is not an Agency priority. In our full statement we discuss

the importance of having accurate, timely, and complete information on all cases.

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In summary, CFSA has addressed various ASFA requirements,

and met several of the selected performance criteria, established

child protection and foster care placement policies, and enhanced

its working relationship with the D.C. Family Court. However,

much remains to be done. CFSA implemented six of the nine ASFA

requirements, and met or exceeded four of the eight performance

criteria. For example, CFSA signed a border agreement to achieve

timelier placement of District children in Maryland, which relates

to the ASFA requirement to us cross-jurisdictional resources to facilitate timely, permanent placements for children. However, CFSA

did not fully implement ASFA requirements involving proceedings

to terminate the rights of parents in certain situations, annual permanency review hearings, or notice of hearings and reviews.

One of the selective performance criteria requires 60 percent of

children in foster care to be placed with one or more of their siblings. As of November 2002, 63 percent of children had such placements. The criteria for which CFSA’s performance fell short was

social worker visitation with children in foster care, placement of

children in foster homes with valid licenses, progress toward permanency, and parental visits with children in foster care who have

a goal of returning home. For example, none of the 144 children

placed in foster care during the 2-month period prior to November

30, 2002 received required weekly visits by a CFSA caseworker.

CFSA has written plans to address two of the three ASFA requirements that were not fully implemented, and three of the four

unmet performance criteria.

CFSA has adopted child protection and foster care placement

policies that are comparable to most, but not all, of those recommended by organizations that develop standards for child welfare programs. However, caseworkers did not consistently implement the six policies we examined. CFSA has policies for investigating allegations of child abuse, developing case plans, and establishing permanency goals for foster children. In addition, it has

policies for managing cases, policies for licensing and monitoring

group homes, plans for training staff in group homes, and a goal

to reduce the number of young children in group homes.

However, CFSA lacks some recommended policies, namely written timeframes for arranging needed services for children and families, limits on the number of cases assigned to a caseworker, and

procedures for providing information about planned services for a

child. For five of the six policies we examined, FACES data indicated that the percentage of foster care cases for which a policy

was implemented ranged from 9 to 83. This variation is due at

least in part to the incomplete FACES data. For the sixth policy,

CFSA could not provide automated data. CFSA officials told us

they recently made changes to help improve the implementation of

some of the policies we reviewed. Additionally, timeframes for implementing certain policies improved from 2000 to 2002.

However, CFSA caseworkers still took longer than the 24 hours

prescribed to initiate investigations and complete safety assessments for some cases. For example, while caseworkers took an average of 30 days to complete safety assessments in 2000, the average time declined to 6 days in 2002.

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CFSA has improved its working relationship with the family

court through its commitment to promoting improved communication and by expanding the service support it provides for court activities. However, CFSA officials and family court judges noted several hindrances that can strain their working relationship.

Mr. Chairman, this completes my prepared statement. I would be

happy to answer any questions you have.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Ms. Ashby follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Dr. Golden.

Dr. GOLDEN. Good morning, Chairman Davis and Representative

Norton. I am Olivia Golden, Director of the Child and Family Services Agency for the District of Columbia. I am delighted to have the

opportunity to speak with you on the morning after U.S. District

Court Judge Thomas Hogan approved the final long-term implementation plan in the LaShawn lawsuit. This represents a major

milestone in the District’s 2-year reform of the child welfare system.

Decades of neglect resulted in a lawsuit in 1989, and continued

failure by the District resulted in 6 years of Federal court receivership beginning in the mid-1990’s. In 2000, however, Mayor Anthony Williams, the District Council, Representative Norton, and

other leaders committed to implementing major reforms as conditions for return of child welfare to District control.

In the first 2 years of District control, we have gotten CFSA out

of probation, demonstrated momentum for significant positive

change, and, for the first time, engendered hope that child welfare

reform really can take place here. Now the implementation plan

provides a solid blueprint for establishing a real safety net for children.

Two examples show how broken the protective system for District children used to be and the very basic issues that we have to

resolve to mend it.

First, for years, children who had suffered the trauma of removal

from their birth homes routinely spent 1 or more nights sleeping

in the Child Protective Office because placements could not be located promptly. Today, no children sleep at CFSA because we find

safe placements for them during the day. And for decades, abused

and neglected children of all ages were virtually warehoused in

group homes throughout the city.

In May 2001, 99 children under age 6 and many more between

age 6 and 12 were in group homes. Today we have cut those numbers by more than half by placing more children in family settings.

My written testimony describes four areas of early important and

measurable progress for children. This progress has been including

more children in families, fewer in group settings; more timely investigations; more social worker visits and other indicators of safety and permanence; third, hiring and retaining more social workers, leading to reduced social worker caseloads; and fourth, hiring

in-house clinical experts to enhance medical and mental health decisionmaking.

My written testimony also summarizes several essential system

reforms now underway. These are critical to improving outcomes

for thousands of children on a sustained basis.

First, as highlighted both in the opening statements and by

GAO, CFSA, the family court, and the Corporation Counsel are

working cooperatively for the benefit of children.

Second, for the first time the key players in the child welfare system are focusing together collectively on ASFA compliance.

Third, CFSA is focusing on quality not only internally but among

its contracted providers.

Fourth, CFSA is strengthening its formal policies to reflect reform. There is clearly more to do.

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Fifth, we are improving foster and adoptive parent recruitment,

retention and support.

And sixth, in terms of our FACES information system, 2 years

ago we could not tell which investigations were overdue, which

cases were assigned to which workers, or how many visits we had

made to children. Today our FACES computer system lists every

child in our care and where he or she is living; and managers, supervisors and workers can access reports on key measures of safety

and permanence at any time.

Additional improvements to FACES lie ahead, but we have come

a long way. Along with just 22 other States—that is the top half—

we have an automated case management system that meets most

Federal requirements. In fiscal year 2004, we intend to pursue full

Federal certification of FACES as meeting all requirements, a status so far achieved by only four States.

Finally, let me turn to challenges and next steps. The implementation plan is ambitious and comprehensive. It addresses all key

areas of child welfare, and establishes specific timeframes for performance. Its requirements add up to the strong safety net that we

all want for children and families.

Four major challenges lie ahead. First, continued progress in recruiting and retaining social workers. Second, continued progress

in recruiting, retaining, and supporting foster kin and adoptive

parents; third, strengthening key partnerships, and I want to especially thank the committee for the important role that the family

court legislation has played in strengthening our partnerships both

with the court and with surrounding jurisdictions. I urge continued

attention by the committee and Congress to supporting the District, Maryland, and Virginia as we seek to craft a truly metropolitan approach to the needs of children and families whose lives

cross State boundaries.

The fourth challenge is maintaining the momentum for reform

over the long haul because there are no quick fixes.

In conclusion, in the past 2 years, District leadership at all levels

have demonstrated that we can turn around problems that have

placed our children at risk for decades. Now we have both the great

challenge and the great opportunity of working together to achieve

our vision.

Thank you so much for your commitment and support. I look forward to answering your questions.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you very much.

[The prepared statement of Dr. Golden follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Ms. Meltzer.

Ms. MELTZER. Good morning, Delegate Norton and Chairman

Davis. Thank you for your ongoing and intense interest in the functioning of the District’s child welfare system.

The District of Columbia’s child welfare system emerged in January 2003 from court-imposed receivership. The placement of the

Agency into receivership was a historic response by the Federal

court to a malfunctioning child welfare system that was completely

failing to protect and support children in its care.

The receivership’s end in 2003 is a significant and positive accomplishment. It does not mean that the District’s child welfare

system is consistently functioning at an acceptable performance

level, nor that the District has achieved compliance with the

LaShawn order. As the District emerged from receivership, I was

responsible for working with Agency officials, the mayor’s office

and plaintiffs, to develop a court-ordered implementation plan.

That plan is included as part of the written testimony.

I am delighted that the U.S. District Court yesterday evening enthusiastically approved the plan, and I want to echo the court’s observations about the positive cooperation of all parties in its development and the joint commitment to its full implementation. The

plan is an enforceable order of the Federal court under the

LaShawn decree; but as important, it reflects the vision for reform

of the Child and Family Services Agency of the District of Columbia. The plan identifies specific performance outcomes and benchmarks, the steps and tasks necessary to achieve compliance, time

lines for task accomplishment, and resources required for implementation. The requirements of the court’s order and the plan are

consistent with the Federal Adoption and Safe Families Act and

the District of Columbia Adoption and Safe Families Act, as well

as standards of professional practice.

The LaShawn implementation plan sets ambitious, yet I believe

feasible targets between now and December 2006 for District performance across the spectrum of child welfare practices and services.

Among the most important are: One, continued improvement in

the timeliness and quality of investigations of child abuse and neglect. Two, high-quality social work and supervisory practice. It requires that case planning with families begin as soon as the child

or family enters the child welfare system. Three, wider availability

of community-based supports for families to prevent children and

families from entering the child welfare system. The plan requires

a biannual needs assessment, the first of which is due December

2003. Four, enhanced services provisions so the children enter foster care placement only when their families cannot be assisted to

provide them with safe and stable homes. Five, increased visits by

social workers to children in placement to make sure that once the

State assumes custody of the children, the State acts as a good parent. Six, development of an expanded range of high-quality family

placement options to continue the progress to reduce the numbers

of children who are in congregate care settings. The plan is built

around the need to provide families, not beds, for children. Seven,

providing reliable and accessible foster parent supports so placement disruptions decline and children experience fewer placement

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moves while they are in foster care. Eight, continued access to resources that children and families need, especially mental health

services, substance abuse services, and comprehensive medical,

psychological and educational services. Nine, locating adoptive families for the almost 1,100 children in this system who have a permanency goal of adoption.

The plan also then requires steady and measurable improvement

in several key infrastructure areas to support the practice changes.

Among the most important are: One, the aggressive hiring of social workers, leading to rapidly declining caseloads. The plan requires that the social work caseloads be no more than 27 by December 30 of this year, no more than 20 by June 30, 2004, and no

more than 17 by September 2004. Meeting this requirement means

that the District must effectively recruit, hire, and retain 45 new

workers and supervisors by this September. Two, implementation

of a high-quality training program for CFSA staff and for private

Agency workers. Three, revamping the contract policies and procedures to establish clear and enforceable expectations for performance by private agencies related to achieving safety and permanency and well-being outcomes for children. The District is going

to release new RFPs for services by September, and over the next

3 years they will develop clear, measurable performance outcomes

as part of those contracts. Four, full implementation and enforcement of new licensing standards for foster homes, group homes,

and independent living facilities. Five, revamping the Agency’s administrative case review system and their quality assurance systems so they can more effectively monitor the quality of their own

performance.

I believe that the implementation plan with its ambitious but

sequenced performance targets can be successfully completed, and

must be. My confidence that the plan is doable is based upon my

experience and knowledge from jurisdictions around the country.

We know enough about what works, and we have evidence that

positive outcomes for children and families can be achieved.

Dr. Golden has assembled an enthusiastic team of competent

child welfare professionals, and has mobilized the diverse talents

of many staff within the Agency and from a broad range of private

agency and community partners. In addition, and to a degree that

far exceeds anything that I have witnessed in the many years I

have been monitoring the LaShawn decree, the child welfare agency is working constructively with other agencies in District government.

My written testimony also responds to your questions about the

implementation of the Family Court Act. I am not going into that

now in the interest of time.

I also include in my written testimony some actions that I believe Congress can take to accelerate the positive change. I don’t

want to mislead the committee about the serious challenges that

remain. The difficulties of creating and maintaining a skilled work

force and of developing the substance abuse, mental health, and

other resources that families and children need are significant, but

I believe there is a renewed commitment to taking on these challenges, and I am optimistic that they can be met.

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I want to conclude by emphasizing the importance of continuing

support for the work of the District’s Child Welfare Agency. As external monitor, the Center for the Study of Social Policy will prepare periodic progress reports for the court, the District Government, the Congress, and the public, and we will work closely with

the Agency to improve their internal quality assurance and results

monitoring.

With our continued efforts and shared commitment, I look forward to a day in the not-too-distant future when we can celebrate

the accomplishments, rather than the deficiencies, of the system.

Thank you.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Ms. Meltzer follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Ms. Schneiders.

Ms. SCHNEIDERS. Good morning, Congressman Davis and Representative Norton.

I am pleased to have this opportunity to address the committee

from the perspective of one who has interfaced with the Agency on

behalf of abused and neglected children as a guardian ad litem for

almost 200 children over the years.

CFSA has made progress in the implementation of the time lines

set forth in the Federal legislation, but often at the expense of children rather than for their benefit. CFSA initiated the new time

lines with the same programmatic model that continues to recruit

and utilize the term ‘‘traditional foster homes’’ when there are no

more traditional foster children.

Today children coming into foster care come from experiences of

domestic violence, physical or sexual abuse, substance abuse, HIV/

AIDS and severe neglect. These are not candidates for traditional

foster homes; that is, foster homes with no specialized training or

support. Foster parents should not be recruited and led to believe

that they will be caring for the traditional foster child; that is, a

child without special needs. Every child coming into the foster care

system today needs a therapeutic environment, and families need

to know what will be expected of them when the child returns

home, is adopted, or remains until age 21.

As a result of the current policy of differentiating between traditional foster homes and therapeutic foster homes, some older children are left without homes and young children are placed in traditional foster homes and, again, are traumatized by loss when the

goal is changed to adoption in accord with the ASFA time lines.

CFSA needs to eliminate both the concept and terminology of

traditional foster homes. All foster parents should be recruited as

‘‘therapeutic,’’ with the expectation that they will be caring for children with special needs. Foster parents who want only young children under age 12, as many specify, should be recruited as ‘‘therapeutic foster to adopt’’ homes, with the full realization that if the

child is placed in their home and the goal is changed to adoption,

they will be expected to consider adopting this child. Very young

children should not be placed in foster homes, become part of that

family, form attachments, and have to be removed when the permanency goal is changed to adoption and told to start all over

again with yet another family. Many of these cases constitute emotional abuse far more damaging than the original abuse which

brought the child into care. Foster parents who only want to ‘‘foster’’ and not to adopt, should be told that in all probability they

will be given children 13 or older. Such children will likely not be

adopted, but will move on to independence.

The ASFA time lines, while well-intentioned, have caused very

traumatic disruption for many young children who formerly would

have grown up in foster care. When the ASFA time lines were created, there should have been a rethinking of the policy on how foster homes are recruited, trained, and utilized.

Child Family Service has formulated various policies which have

significantly altered the manner of delivering services to children

and families. Many of these are undoubtedly good, but many are

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mulated internally, with little input from others serving the children, and with virtually no knowledge of such policy changes by

those outside.

Attorneys advocating for children as court-appointed guardians

often learn of policy changes when they try to obtain services. They

then learn that the service has been restricted in duration, as in

the case of mentors and tutors, or that the limitation placed on

children seeking independent living programs which used to be

available at age 16, was changed to 18 with no notice. Attorneys

must now sign statements of confidentiality when attending administrative reviews or be barred from the meeting. And yesterday I

learned that the summer camp program is no longer being offered

to children this summer.

These policy changes are not made available to people who are

affected by them or who are advocating for children who will be affected. To date there is no policy manual available to replace the

volumes of policies available prior to the receivership. This seems

to be a step backward. CFSA should be encouraged to circulate proposed policy changes in draft form and elicit input from persons

implementing the policy regarding the impact on children or families.

CFSA has a solid core of competent and committed social workers truly dedicated to the care of children and supporting families.

With MSW degrees, they are probably the best educated of any jurisdiction in the country. This is the greatest resource available to

the Agency. Yet it is tragic that retaining these workers continues

to be a serious problem. Social workers continue to leave, albeit at

a slower rate than formerly, but still causing harmful disruption of

relationships and case management services. Many senior workers

grounded in child welfare practice, with the institutional memory

of the Agency, have left or been terminated. New workers right out

of school do not bring to the practice the experience needed.

Social workers still cite high caseloads and lack of appreciation

of the drain this work places on them. Following a previous hearing

where it was reported that caseloads were down in size, I asked

every worker with whom I interacted over the next 2 weeks how

large their caseload was, and was consistently told, ‘‘In the thirties,’’ or ‘I just got six new cases today.’’

Recruitment is less of a problem than retention. D.C. has five

schools of social work pumping out new graduates every 6 months.

The fact that they submit to the extensive training and shadowing

of experienced workers, yet leave so quickly, is of major concern.

Over a year ago I was asked to serve on a committee to deal with

the recruitment and retention of workers. The committee met once,

discussed some goals and possible action, and to my knowledge

never met again.

Congress needs to enlist the services of an outside group to interview current staff to identify what is at the core of dissatisfaction

so great that they are willing to forgo very good salaries and benefits rather than stay with the Agency. Retention will not occur

until the cancer eating at so many line workers is identified and

addressed.

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date the demands and pressures of the social workers. Hearings

start on time and are scheduled in a manner that does not keep

parties waiting; judges are more willing to acknowledge the quality

of the work of social workers; corporation counsel attorneys are

more involved with CFSA and facilitate communication between

the Agency and other attorneys.

The greatest difficulty seems to come when the family court

judges order the Agency to provide services. CFSA is more aggressive in challenging the court’s authority to issue such orders, especially where money is concerned. I, as guardian ad litem, find it

necessary to file responses on behalf of children far more often

than ever before in support of a court’s order. In most instances

there is a reluctance on the part of CFSA to make the resources

available to children; that is, to provide funding for a particular

program or service. The best interests of the budget seem to override the best interest of the child.

In conclusion, I am sure there are areas of great progress, as well

there should be. As an advocate for children, I find it necessary to

continue to address those areas where children continue to be

harmed by Agency practice.

I thank you for this opportunity to address some of these issues.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you very much. That was very

helpful.

[The prepared statement of Ms. Schneiders follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Ms. Massengale.

Ms. MASSENGALE. Good morning, Chairman Davis, Representative Norton, and members of the Committee on Government Reform. It is an honor to be invited to testify before you today on behalf of Safe Shores, the D.C. Children’s Advocacy Center.

The CAC is a nonprofit public/private partnership created to provide a coordinated and child-friendly response to child abuse in the

District of Columbia.

To accomplish this goal, we work with a multidisciplinary team

of local and Federal agencies, including the Metropolitan Police Department, the Office of the Corporation Counsel, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the Child and Family Services Agency, and Children’s

National Medical Center.

All of the cases that come to our center are referred by one of

our MDT agencies. Approximately 75 percent of our cases involve

child sexual abuse, 25 percent involve child physical abuse, or child

witnesses. The majority of our cases have CFSA involvement. In

general, the CAC has seen significant improvement in the way this

city’s child welfare system approaches child abuse cases.

Three of the most important changes, all of which the CAC advocated for in previous testimony before this committee, were the restructuring of MPD so that all child abuse cases are investigated

by the youth division of the Metropolitan Police Department, the

end of bifurcation of social services between court social services

and CFSA, and the termination of the receivership of CFSA. The

result has been a much smoother and more coordinated response

by the entire system.

We have also seen improvements specific to CFSA, including the

placement of more experienced social workers in the intake unit,

improved joint investigations with MPD, and the development of an

institutional investigations unit within the intake unit specifically

tasked with conducting investigations of abuse and neglect that

occur in out-of-home placements.

While there have been tremendous gains, the system as a whole

has not yet reached the level of excellence for which it clearly

strives.

In an effort to assist with this ongoing process, the CAC has recommendations for areas of continued improvement: Increase the

availability of therapeutic services for child victims—there is a severe lack of qualified and affordable community-based clinicians in

the D.C. area who are willing and able to treat child abuse victims,

particularly child sexual abuse victims.

Increase the availability of services for young perpetrators—the

CAC has observed an increase in cases involving younger perpetrators, particularly in the 7 to 9-year-old range. Practice and research

indicates that children this young who are perpetrating on other

children were most likely victimized themselves. To adequately address their perpetration issues, these sexually reactive children

need to have their victimization issues addressed as well, but access to organizations in D.C. specifically trained to address this

population is morbidly lacking.

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ing the evening, midnight and weekend shifts, to conduct joint investigations with MPD.

Designation of similar funding for other involved agencies—in

order to fulfill the consent order mandates, the city has increased

funding for CFSA as well as for the abuse and neglect section of

the Office of the Corporation Counsel. However, as the city has experienced budget problems, other agencies involved in the child

welfare system have had cutbacks and/or staffing decreases. For instance, MPD’s youth division has positions which remain unfilled

following the transfers of detectives to other units, and the Office

of the Corporation Counsel’s juvenile section only has 10 attorneys

to handle approximately 3,000 new cases per year.

Eliminate the dual rolls of the abuse and neglect section—as part

of the consent order in the past year, the entire abuse and neglect

section of the Office of the Corporation Counsel was co-located at

CFSA and was given the additional responsibility of representing

CFSA. This dual representation is a conflict of interest and presents some ethical issues for the Assistant Corporation Counsels.

There are clearly instances wherein ACC cannot zealously represent both D.C. and CFSA.

Development of a citywide Child Assessment Center—in prior

testimony before this committee, the CAC made four recommendations to approve the city’s response to child victims of abuse. As

mentioned, three of those four recommendations have been enacted

and the result has been an improvement in the system’s response.

However, the fourth and one of the most important recommendations has not yet come to fruition, the development of a state-ofthe-art citywide Child Assessment Center that will enable co-location of the MDT agencies under one roof.

Since 2000, the CAC and the MDT, in conjunction with the National Children’s Alliance, have been working with representatives

from the Mayor’s office to build this new center at the Gales School

site. When finished, this new center will house the entire youth division of MPD, the intake unit of CFSA, prosecutors and child advocates from the Office of the Corporation Counsel and the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and a medical suite for Children’s National Medical

Center. On one of its seven floors, the center will also house the

National Children’s Alliance which will make the center unique in

providing a collaboration not just between public and private agencies, but between local and national as well. In addition, the center

will have two fully staffed playroom areas, an expansive therapy

suite for child victims, seven sets of forensic interviewing rooms,

and a model training center. This new center will enable the CAC

and the MDT to better serve more child victims in a manner deserving of our Nation’s Capital.

In February 2002, the city pledged $7.3 million to assist in the

renovation of the Gales School. Additional funding will be raised

jointly by the CAC and the NCA. Partial city funding is appropriate because the Gales School will remain a D.C.-owned building

that will house D.C. agencies and will serve D.C. residents. However, 3 years later, roadblocks continue to emerge, delaying the

project, a project for which time is of the essence.

In 2002, the City Council passed legislation that codifies and expands the MDT approach in child abuse cases. In particular, the

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expansion of the MDT’s role in physical abuse cases will directly

and positively influence CFSA’s provision of services to this population. Yet at this point, space and infrastructure limitations are

impeding progress. Building this new center is an imperative step

in enabling our city to move to the next step of service provision,

particularly to the point of prevention of abuse.

We encourage this committee to support CAC, our Mayor, our

MDT agencies, and the NCA in the development of the center, and

to assist us in facilitating a groundbreaking within the calendar

year.

In conclusion, I thank the committee once again for inviting our

testimony. The CAC strongly supports our MDT agencies in their

goal of providing the highest quality of service delivery to child victims of abuse in D.C. The city’s child welfare system has made significant progress, and we are confident that with adequate support

throughout the system, this goal will be achieved.

Thank you.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you very much.

[The prepared statement of Ms. Massengale follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Ms. Egerton.

Ms. EGERTON. Good morning, Congresswoman Norton, Congressman Davis, and members of the committee. My name is Marilyn

Egerton, and I am a D.C. foster, kinship, and adoptive parent. In

addition, I am the deputy director of the Foster and Adoptive Parent Advocacy Center [FAPAC]. We are very appreciative of your inclusion of foster parent voices into these hearings, and thank you

for inviting us to participate and to share our experience with reform efforts of the D.C. child welfare system.

In the 12 years that my husband and I have been foster parents,

we have fostered over 25 children, had well over 50 social workers,

and I have been active as a member of the foster parent leadership

through three changes in administration.

I would like to start by pointing out some of the positive changes

that have happened during this administration. These changes include: The successful closure of the Respite Center in the CFSA

building. Second, at the insistence of foster parent leadership, a

CFSA mandate requiring all staff to give the name and number of

their supervisors on their outgoing voice mail message, enabling us

to immediately go up the chain of command when we cannot reach

our social workers. Third, the accessibility of upper-level management to both the foster parent leadership and the individual foster

parents has been extremely commendable. Fourth, the development

of a new placement information packet through a joint effort of foster parents and staff to address a serious issue of the lack of information given when children are placed in our homes. When CFSA

workers actually begin using these packets, this will be another

major improvement. Five, the introduction of disruption conferences which utilize clinical expertise to try to prevent placement

disruptions. And six, Principal Deputy Director Leticia Lacomba’s

creation of joint working groups of foster parents and staff to revise

and impact policy and practice guidelines.

And despite the good intentions and real improvement we have

seen, the tasks ahead for CFSA regarding its foster parent community are still great. There are many areas in which the support and

services we receive are inadequate to meet the needs of our children, and we have included some suggestions for possible solutions

to these issues in our written testimony. These areas include: First,

the need for the infrastructure of CFSA to improve to accommodate

the changes being made at the upper level. As a result of this process, problem resolution often goes around in circles. Hours more

appropriately spent parenting are spent in frustrating efforts to

seek problem resolution. Second, the reliance on social workers for

routine tasks which could be accomplished by administrative support staff, like looking up Medicaid numbers or Social Security

numbers. Quite frankly, I am perplexed that the Agency does not

utilize administrative support for these clerical tasks within the social work unit, freeing the social workers to actually practice social

work. Third, although the responsiveness and inclusiveness of the

upper level has been real and significant, the attitudes of true partnership have not yet consistently reached the front lines. Workers

often invalidate our experience, and, when it comes to the right to

make decisions, exclude, ignore, and rebuff the foster parents’

input.

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For children currently living in my home, I have been invited to

participate in a total of one administrative review at which permanency plans and progress are to be discussed. We have been assured very recently that the technological and logistical barriers to

notification have been resolved, and that consistent notification to

administrative reviews will now be implemented. We hope to see

evidence of this in the immediate future, and we trust that our notification of court reviews will be next.

Fourth, the inability of social workers to consistently access resources both within CFSA and from the community. We recommend that public and private agency social workers receive

training in this area. Fifth, the lack of sufficient numbers of infant

day-care slots in D.C. Although this is not a responsibility of CFSA,

it is a huge barrier nonetheless. Sixth, the lack of quality and timely mental health services. Our children are wounded. Many have

suffered emotional and sometimes physical abuse, and all have suffered much loss. It is outrageous that their mental health needs

have been addressed in such an inadequate manner. We do not

know the answer to this problem. However, this is so paramount

it cannot go unaddressed. Seventh, the lack of active Medicaid

numbers and cards. This creates barriers to health care for our

children. Eighth, the lack of an operating medical consent-to-treat

policy leaves us, as well as the hospitals, confused about who needs

to sign for what treatments. And ninth, the lack of availability and

access to respite care. All parents need a break from parenting

sometimes. Biological parents have the option of sending their children to spend the weekend with a relative or family friend, or to

visit a classmate for the weekend. As foster parents, we don’t have

that option unless those persons can meet many criteria, including

obtaining the clearances that we have to obtain as foster parents.

This puts us in a tough position. Not only are we asked to parent

without significant breaks, we are parenting children who often

have serious issues.

I believe that many seeds have been planted under this administration which can lead to very positive change for foster families

at CFSA. But many have not yet blossomed into actual day-to-day

improvement.

Responsiveness, accessibility, and inclusiveness of the upper level

toward foster parents have been real and beyond rhetoric. Active

and diligent work is being done by dedicated and committed CFSA

staff and administrators, and they are community partners toward

improvement and reform. However, we have much further to go before the infrastructure of CFSA supports and implements the philosophy of the upper level or the principles of best practice.

In closing, we do believe that the Agency is on the right path and

should continue in the direction in which they are traveling, which

they have developed in collaboration with foster parents and their

other communities partners. We also see the necessity for them to

further develop the infrastructure that will facilitate the kind of

changes essential to our children to receive the care they deserve.

We acknowledge, as Rome was not built in a day, that CFSA cannot complete its systemic reform overnight. However, we do encourage them to move quickly to resolve those issues which are immediately fixable.

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I appreciate the opportunity to speak to foster parent concerns

at this hearing. As an individual foster parent as well as the deputy director of FAPAC, I will continue to be available to assist in

system reform in any way I can and to work with CFSA to develop

its path of partnership with its foster parent community.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you very much.

[The prepared statement of Ms. Egerton follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Ms. Sandalow.

Ms. SANDALOW. Good morning, Chairman Davis, Ms. Norton, and

Mr. Van Hollen. My name is Judith Sandalow, and I am the executive director of the Children’s Law Center in Washington, DC. The

Children’s Law Center helps at-risk children in the District of Columbia find safe permanent homes and the education, health care,

and social services they need to flourish. We do that by providing

comprehensive legal services to children, their families, foster kinship and adoptive parents.

At the Children’s Law Center, we serve as the voice for many

children. We know their hopes, their fears, and their dreams. We

see the excitement in the child’s eyes when she is allowed to visit

her sister who lives in another foster home. We also watch teenage

boys resign themselves to never having a real family because they

cannot control the anger brought on by years of abuse.

The Children’s Law Center also represents caregivers. Through

our family permanency project, we help foster and kinship caregivers become guardians and adoptive parents. Many of our caregiver clients live in Maryland and Virginia as well the District of

Columbia.

Since the creation of the family court and the arrival of Dr. Golden to the CFSA, there has been an increased focus in the District

on improving the lives of abused and neglected children. Nonetheless, there is a long way to go before we can say with confidence

that children are traveling a safe and speedy course through our

child welfare system.

It is important to celebrate the achievements that Dr. Golden details in her testimony. The closing of the Respite Center, the dramatic reduction in numbers of young children in congregate care,

and the steady decrease of social worker caseloads are meaningful

accomplishments.

The Children’s Law Center applauds these successes. I’d like to

use my time today to discuss two topics with the hope that Dr.

Golden will give to these issues some of the energy, enthusiasm

and action that she has shown in other areas. I’m convinced that

these areas are essential to compliance with ASFA, and they are

essential to the success of the implementation plan.

When a child is injured in a car accident, the ambulance rushes

the child to the hospital where a team of doctors and nurses drop

everything to save a child’s life. We all recognize that without this

extraordinary effort, a child will die or be permanently disabled.

The same urgency and the same resources should attend removal,

abuse and neglect of children in their homes. Every day in the District of Columbia, children are permanently scarred because we do

not treat these first days in foster care as an emergency. What is

right for the children is right for the D.C. budget. Early and intensive intervention on behalf of children will speed reunification and

adoption and will prevent the financial and human cost of increased homelessness, incarceration and welfare dependents that

are found among adults who spend their childhoods in foster care.

I urge CFSA, with the support of targeted funding by Congress,

to create an emergency team to work with children and families

when a child is removed from his or her home. You might ask what

would such an emergency team do. First, an emergency team

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would convene a meeting of the child’s family within 24 or 48 hours

after removal to see what resources the extended family can provide. Often family members can step in to assist an overwhelmed

parent, can arrange visits in their home for the child, or can even

bring a child to live with them while the parent is in recovery.

An emergency team would have access to a flexible fund to buy

beds, clothes and, if necessary, food to ensure their relative can

bring a child into their home immediately so the child does not

have to stay in foster care. These tasks and the many more that

are detailed in my written testimony must be done within the first

few days after a child is removed from her home. Just as we staff

an emergency room around the clock and not only during business

hours, we must staff a child welfare agency team 24 hours a day.

Early intervention won’t help children if there are no services to

help children heal, to rehabilitate parents and to support families.

D.C. has an extremely limited number of mental health providers,

as you’ve heard from other witnesses. There are very few drug

treatment beds. Homemaker and intensive in-home services are almost nonexistent. As a foster and adoptive parent myself of extremely special needs teenage boys, I know from personal experience that it is violent and dangerous not to have those in-home

services.

I applaud CFSA’s recent efforts to evaluate the quality of the

service providers they use. This is the first time that I know that

CFSA under any administration has done such an evaluation. Now

their attention must be turned to increasing the availability of

these services within CFSA and in other government agencies that

are responsible for serving our children.

The most important support that can be done for foster parents

and the best tool for recruiting and retaining foster parents is the

development of support services in the home for foster parents. The

short-term cost of providing services may be great, but the longterm benefits and personal and financial savings is extraordinary.

Indulge me with one story about a D.C. family that we’ve worked

closely with. We worked with the father, who, after the death of his

wife, was extremely depressed and having a hard time caring for

his three children. He managed to hold onto a full-time job, get dinner on the table and was available to his children every evening

after work, but he couldn’t manage to get his children dressed in

the morning and ready for school. Because of that, they missed

school frequently, and there were concerns about educational neglect. Limited early morning homemaker services that were provided by CFSA help to keep this family together. It is just one example of how important it is to provide some support services to

families to prevent entry of children into the child welfare system.

A foster child is, by law, in the legal custody of the government.

The government, therefore, has the legal right and the responsibility to parent that foster child. To me this means that we must

treat every foster child as if he or she is our very own. Thank you

for taking that responsibility seriously and for calling for and supporting measures that will give every foster child the promise of a

safe, permanent and loving home.

[The prepared statement of Ms. Sandalow follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Well, thank you all. A lot of different perspectives on this. A lot of information.

Let me just start by thanking all of you for what you’re doing.

Sometimes it is the most satisfying job in the world. Sometimes it

has to be the most frustrating, and you can imagine our position

as policymakers up here trying to end up doing the right thing. But

it is not just resources; there are just a lot of factors involved with

it. But you all are trying, and we’re improving, and I think we

shouldn’t lose sight of that. So we’ll have a long way to go, and we

want to give you the resources to do that.

Dr. Golden, let me start with you. What does a starting social

worker make now in the city? Do you know salarywise?

Dr. GOLDEN. A master’s level social worker, where they will come

in in terms of salary depends on years of experience and GPA.

The bottom is about $40,000. It can be well above that as people

have years of experience.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. So that is an MSW degree basically?

Dr. GOLDEN. Right. A master’s degree. So we have very competitive salary at the master’s level. At the bachelor’s level we’re not

quite as competitive with other jurisdictions, but at the master’s

level we are. And we’re also seeing—I think one of the other testifiers may have mentioned this—because we now have a strong initial training unit with 4 months that combines classroom and on

the job, we’re hearing that is the real reason that people are coming to join us as well.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. I mean, people who go into social work,

it has been my experience—and I ran a county government, as you

know, before I came here. A lot of them aren’t in it just for the

money. Money is certainly a factor, and you want to be competitive

and even more so, but it is not really what motivates people to go

into this business. Our business as well, I might add.

Dr. GOLDEN. That’s right. All of our work, I’m afraid.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. What is the reason—as you look at it,

what is the major reason that we get the turnover? Do people get

burned out of this, get frustrated, do they move, do they go into

some other profession, other jurisdictions? Is there one reason, or

is there just a series of things?

Dr. GOLDEN. Well, we do exit interviews to learn about our own

experience, and we’ve had the chance to look at the national context. We have a slightly better retention rate than the average of

child welfare agencies around the country, but that is definitely not

something to brag about. The average in this work, which is so difficult and stressful, is 20, 21 percent. We hit about 17 percent last

year. So——

Chairman TOM DAVIS. That is annually.

Dr. GOLDEN. Annually, that’s right. And——

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Most major organizations with that kind

of turnover, it’s hard to get the—not just the continuity, but to run

it effectively, because the high cost of bringing in new people and

training them, too.

Dr. GOLDEN. That’s right. And even when I used to be at HHS,

that is true across the number of human services field like child

care as well, but child welfare is especially stressful, and among—

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I think there are several factors that we’ve identified. One is just

that the work is really hard.

A second specifically in our agency, caseload size was always

cited, so as we bring that down, we hope to have some impact.

The committee will be interested to know, given your commitment to the family court, that the stress of interaction with the judiciary used to be on the list, and I actually haven’t looked lately.

I would guess that would be getting better; that as we work toward

teams, that would be better.

Some of the stresses mentioned by some of the other panelists in

term of the frustration of trying to get access to resources and administrative headaches are issues for us and others; quality of supervision, which we’re working on.

And then I would add I really think that the period of reform

itself is stressful, and some people love that, and some people,

that’s the perfect fit, and they love being part of this exciting

change. And people tell me that’s why they’ve come.

For other people, of course, it is a time of a great deal of change,

and so I think the other thing to say is that to the extent we’re

bringing in extraordinarily talented young people right after

they’ve finished graduate school, we will have some number of people who seek another opportunity after 2 or 3 years anyway, because they came to learn, and then they’re moving on. But we

think that as we really focus on those retention issues, we should

at least be able to stay where we are, below the national average.

We’ll see whether it takes us a little while to improve.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. If I state this—MSW, I start out, I’m

there 15 years, what could I expect to make salary wise?

Dr. GOLDEN. I’m going to give you a rough number. I think we

should get back to the specifics. I think we go up, particularly if

people move up in terms of their licensing, because we have——

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Assuming I do the normal——

Dr. GOLDEN. I think we can go up to the mid-60’s over a period

of time with licensing. I mean, this is a master’s level qualification,

and people, of course, have other options in the private sector if

we’re attracting good people with HMOs and other places. So we

definitely—it’s definitely——

Chairman TOM DAVIS. I forget who testified. It was one of the

earlier—on the number of children that move into their teens that

we still haven’t found a place for. I represent a suburban jurisdiction where I’ve just got families fighting to get kids. Whatever racial background, to do that, what’s the major obstacles to finding

people to adopt these kids? There is a lot of them—I guess the

older they get, the tougher it is in some cases. What can we do to

improve the adoption rate? Do you take suburban families? Do they

have to be from the city?

Dr. GOLDEN. Absolutely. I really appreciate your interest in

working with the Maryland and Virginia jurisdictions, because I

think it’s absolutely right that there are families not only in the

District, because there are many families in the District, but also

in the metropolitan area who really care about the District’s children.

I think there are a number of obstacles, and I think some of

them came up in the comments of other panelists. I think the first

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is that over many, many years, the culture, both in the agency and

in the District system as a whole, has often been to believe that

it stopped being possible to place children as they came to a certain

age, and over the years I’ve heard that from judges inside the agency, from private providers, and I think we have to turn that

around. And I think we’re starting to. I think ASFA is meant to,

but I think that’s one issue.

A second issue which, again, several people alluded to is that

where we haven’t done the right things in the way of services along

the way over 10 years of moving a child around placements, we

may have done some damage to that—to that child and their ability to connect to a family. So we’ve got to change that.

And then I think the third thing in terms of the big piece of responsibility that’s ours is very focused attention to those children

with very specific recruitment plans, adoption recruitment plans, so

that, for example, if a child has medical needs, that we’re looking

for parents who are prepared to meet those needs, who we find—

I mean, we——

Chairman TOM DAVIS. But that is a major obstacle, a huge medical or psychological problem. Those are probably the most difficult

kids to adopt, but I take it a lot of kids in the queue, there is no

outwardly mental or physical problem. We just can’t find—Ms.

Sandalow, do you want to address that?

Ms. SANDALOW. The problem is that when a child comes into the

system, you don’t know what level of damage has occurred, so it

is common for a child to be placed with a foster parent and for the

foster parent to be told that there are no known problems, and, in

fact, they may not know, and then for that child to develop very

severe emotional, psychiatric or medical problems over the next

couple of years.

The No. 1 barrier that we see among our clients to adoption or

to guardianship is the lack of support throughout the D.C. government agencies for good mental health and in-home behavioral

health services.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Obviously if you can get a kid—just

speaking literally—off the books and into a loving family that

wants them, that’s the best solution, isn’t it?

Dr. GOLDEN. Absolutely. And one of the things we’re proud of in

terms of the steps along the way is that one of the criteria for us

to get out of the probationary period was a 20 percent increase in

adoptions that we were able to accomplish last year, but we have

to do much more.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Do you have any comments on that?

You’ve been through this. This will be my last question before I

yield to Ms. Norton.

Ms. EGERTON. I was just saying that also my experience has

been almost exclusively with teen boys over the last 12 years, and

people often say that you cannot get them adopted out. And one of

the barriers to that is that they themselves don’t want to be adopted, and we really have to acknowledge that these teenagers don’t

necessarily see adoption as a positive thing.

And a part of what we need to do is, one, start talking with our

teens and training our teens and giving them a better understanding of what the positives to adoption could be in their lives, and

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also working with the foster families and the biological families

and training them to work together, because the teens are very

afraid that what will happen with adoption is that they lose their

connection, whatever that connection is, to the biological family,

and that doesn’t have to happen.

I’ve got 16-age boys who I’ve raised to adulthood who I have very

close relationships with all of their biological families, and we all

get together now periodically through the year as one big massive

family. It can happen, but foster families and biological families

have to be trained at how to get over that hump.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. I just will conclude with this before I yield

to Ms. Norton. We try to put public policies in to change the world,

but the fact is you do it a kid at a time, and I mean, what you’re

doing is so important. And all of you, I really do appreciate it, and

it’s tough, and we get on you when things don’t go right. I know

we all want to try to make it work, so just continue to work with

us. Thank you very much.

Ms. Norton.

Ms. NORTON. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and I do

want to congratulate you, Dr. Golden, that the court has approved

the long-term plan. It must be gratifying to the agency, and, of

course, on some of the testimony you’ve heard here, it must be

gratifying as well in the progress of the agency. As I said earlier,

that you’ve met most of the important requirements of the Adoption and Safe Families Act is particularly gratifying.

While my good colleague—and I appreciate his being here for a

few minutes—Mr. Van Hollen is here, I would like to ask a question relating to the distribution of our children within the region.

First, let me ask how many of our children are in the District of

Columbia, how many are in Maryland and how many are in Virginia, with rough percentages, please?

Dr. GOLDEN. About half of the children in care in the District of

Columbia are in Maryland; a very small number right now in the

District, 60 or 80 children—I mean, in Virginia, I’m sorry. The

other half are in the District.

Ms. NORTON. So most of these children are in Maryland.

Dr. GOLDEN. About half of the children are in Maryland, about

half in the District.

Ms. NORTON. Now, I recall that at our last hearing there was discussion about a border agreement and even perhaps some need of

Congress to be helpful with respect to a border agreement. Would

you indicate to us what your experience has been in executing and

enforcing the border agreements with our regional neighbors?

Dr. GOLDEN. Yes. I think that’s a very important issue and one

in which I want to say thank you to the committee and urge your

continued involvement. In the family court legislation, the Congress wrote a sense of the Congress piece of legislation urging the

District, Maryland and Virginia to work together on a border

agreement, and we, with Maryland, achieved an interim agreement, which we now—it’s a formal signature while we work with

a new administration. Maryland, we’re getting involved and working with the new people, but we’re all working by it, and we’ve had

several phone calls from Virginia and are planning to engage them.

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The key elements of it, which I think are really important, the

first is that right now—just—this is a metropolitan area where

families and extended families and children’s lives just cross State

boundaries all the time. A father may be one place, a mother another, an aunt another, a family that goes to the child’s church and

wants to care for them may live in another jurisdiction. So we have

to figure out ways not to have too much bureaucracy around the

State lines.

Key provisions in the agreement with Maryland included expedited placement of children, so that if a child lives in the District,

but their relative is in Prince George’s County, that we would have

an expedited way to do that placement. We are putting in place the

last implementation pieces for that. We are providing some resources to make that easier for Prince George’s and trying to make

that happen.

The second piece is around non-kin families so that where there’s

a family setting in the metropolitan area that would be right for

the child, that’s better than being in congregate care, although we’d

rather have a child in their family in their very own neighborhood.

And then third piece is there’s a whole lot of other issues around

licensing and sharing information that we want to work on as well.

So we think that the Congress’s work in keeping us focused

across the jurisdictions on the fact that child and family lives are

lived in metropolitan ways is really important. At the same time,

we’re focusing intentionally on recruiting foster parents in the District, because where there aren’t those kin or other ties, we’d much

rather have children in their neighborhoods and not have their

lives disrupted.

Ms. NORTON. So if there are resources involved, the District has

to provide the resources, the families, going to Maryland or Virginia?

Dr. GOLDEN. That’s right; until the point of adoption, that’s right.

Ms. NORTON. So you think that this agreement is functioning

well now?

Dr. GOLDEN. I think it’s not finished. I think we’ve made—it’s

like everything we’re talking about today. We’ve made important

progress to have an agreement and get some pieces down on paper,

but we have a lot more to do and think it would be useful to have

the continued focus of the Congress on those remaining pieces.

Ms. NORTON. So there’s no shared funding here? It’s funding—

if the child is—has been in your agency here, there’s not a funding

problem with Maryland? I want to make sure, because as I recall,

there were some of those issues before, and if they have been

ironed out, I would be very pleased.

Dr. GOLDEN. No. I think there are some issues, and I think we

made a start on them, but I think there may well be a role for Congress in the future. One of the issues, for example, is that the surrounding jurisdictions pay lower rates for foster parents than the

District does. Our Federal court decree required us to raise rates

for all the good reasons you’ve heard, that it’s enormously expensive to raise a child in the metropolitan area. Some of the surrounding jurisdictions are worried that if families are available for

District children and pay at that rate, that will reduce their ability

to serve their children. And so one of the things we’ve all talked

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about besides the recruiting that we’re doing is whether over time

there would be an opportunity for them to supplement within the

metropolitan area to meet the high cost of living here. So that’s the

kind of issue that hasn’t been solved yet.

Ms. NORTON. I’d be willing to yield to Mr. Van Hollen before he

left if he has any issue or any question.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Thank you very much, and I want to thank

Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton for all her leadership

here. As a new Member, I’m here largely to learn, and I thank all

of you for your testimony. I’m going to read it over as well. I thank

the chairman of this committee for his leadership on this issue as

well.

As a State legislator, I did a lot of work in the area of child welfare, and I look forward to contributing in any way I can, working

with the chairman and Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton on

those issues and with all of you to improve and make the D.C. system better and to help you with Maryland to the extent that there

are issues. I welcome any of your suggestions for help and support

I can provide. I’m not familiar with all the issues in the agreement,

but if you have any problems, I’m here to help, and I look forward

to working with you on those issues.

Ms. NORTON. Thank you.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Please bring them to my attention, because

that’s an issue that is important to all of us, important to the region. It’s also important obviously to do the right thing by the children.

Dr. GOLDEN. Thank you, sir.

Ms. NORTON. Thank you very much, Mr. Van Hollen.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Thank you. I’m sorry I’m going to have to

leave now, but I thank you for that.

Ms. NORTON. At least initially it might be troubling that the District pays more than the two other jurisdictions, although I believe

we need to know more of the implications of that. It may be that

to take a child from the District of Columbia when they read in the

paper so much about the difficulties of urban life for much of these

inner-city children might be considered by some to be just the kind

of incentive you might need. I just don’t know how to judge that.

I would not want some inequality of that kind to develop among

the jurisdictions so as to present barriers among us, but I’m not

sure of the implications.

Yes, Ms. Schneiders.

Ms. SCHNEIDERS. This is an area that is of great concern to a lot

of people in the agencies, because there is no standardization of

rates in this area for what a foster family gets. If they go to agency

A, they may get paid X amount of dollars per month. If they go to

agency B, they get something higher or lower. Then when the child

is adopted, the adoption subsidy is lower than the foster care subsidy, so it discourages adoption. And it would be helpful, I think,

if there could be some standardization of rates for different types

of children, as New York does. You know, there is a State rate, and

everyone pays the State rate. And——

Ms. NORTON. They pay the same rate for foster and adoption—

New York pays the same rate to an adoptive parent as they do to

a foster parent?

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Ms. SCHNEIDERS. No. There’s a State—I’m talking about foster

care. The State rate—but here in the District, for example, a foster

parent will get a certain amount of money as a foster parent and

then learn that when they negotiate the adoption subsidy, it can

be lower than the foster care subsidy.

Ms. NORTON. And you don’t think that’s right? You think that

the—that was my question. Do you think that the adoptive rate

should be the same as the foster rate? I mean, you’re taking full

responsibility for the child as an adoptive parent, albeit with some

subsidy. A foster parent, of course, is not taking that kind of responsibility.

Ms. SCHNEIDERS. I think it depends on the type of child. All I’m

saying is that I think there needs to be some equalization or standardization as to what agencies—whether it’s the D.C. home versus

the private agency home versus the second private agency home,

that there should be some standardization of what the cost of caring for a child with one set of disabilities is versus a child without

those disabilities or a child with more severe disabilities.

Ms. NORTON. Let me ask Dr. Golden. Is there some reason for

lack of standardization? Is there some need to tailor rates based on

the needs of the child, or what is the reason?

Dr. GOLDEN. Where we are right now, which I think is what Ms.

Schneiders is referring to, is that we have a basic rate that we pay

for foster parents that’s set in our court decree, and that’s, I think,

derived from an index of how much it costs to care for a child in

the urban Southeast. But we support foster parents for what we

call therapeutic care through contracts to the private agencies that

work with foster parents, and it’s absolutely right that there’s inconsistency there.

Where we would like to go to is toward, perhaps, which I think,

Representative Norton, may have been what you were thinking

about when you said the needs of the child. We would like to get

toward more clarity about the level of need of the child and having

that better matched with the payment. We’re right in the midst of

the next set of working with our contracted providers around that,

so I think it’s right that there should be some difference related to

the needs of the child. I also think that it should be more clear

than it is right now.

Ms. NORTON. More standard than it is now.

Dr. GOLDEN. Exactly.

Ms. NORTON. And you’re working toward that end.

Dr. GOLDEN. We are. It won’t happen immediately, but we’re

working toward it.

Ms. NORTON. Let me go on. It is troubling that the GAO found

that data was not available for 70 percent of the current foster care

cases. That’s, like, most of the children that you don’t have the

most important data for. What is wrong with this FACES system,

or is there some other reason for this unavailability of important

data? Whoever can answer it. I take it it’s you, Dr. Golden.

Dr. GOLDEN. Great. No. I would love to. I didn’t want to interrupt the GAO.

As I understand the GAO’s finding, it’s particularly about an

issue that many States have, that when you move to a good system

like a FACES system, a good case management system, you have

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to struggle with what to do about the old data that was either

manual or was in old systems, and after discussing with the GAO

their conclusion that we really should have done more than what

we did, we’ve called a lot of other States to find out what people

have done about that transition, because the data that aren’t there

aren’t basic data about where the child is and so forth. Their information about—in that investigation process, for example, that occurred 3 years ago, perhaps with MPD or in the fragmented system, how quickly did that investigation happen? And that’s the

kind of thing that if it was tracked before would have been in a

file or some previous system. So we talked with other States to find

out if they had a recommendation for us.

The sense we got from the other States was that really they

would recommend doing just what we did, which was pick out

those data that are high quality and try to do an automated transfer, which we did, not do a special project to go in and try to examine the files for more. And the reasons they don’t recommend that

is that the reason so many States are switching to the new, better

systems is that the old data isn’t very good, and you add another

administrative burden to social workers if you try to have them

come through it. But I’m very open to exploring with other jurisdictions.

The key thing, I think, in terms of our FACES system is that it’s

a strong automated system, and what we’ve got to do is keep improving the way it supports our process so that social workers

enter visitation and enter case plan data, and we’ve made——

Ms. NORTON. Let me go on. It’s an issue that obviously when you

have that large number out there from the GAO needs to be

worked on. I do accept what you say. I mean, you can get yourself

into, you know, data heaven here. You’ve got to decide how much

of your time, energy and resources are going to be put on bringing

old data over, and that’s a very knotty question. It may be that

what is needed is to earmark certain kinds of basic data that simply must be in a file of a child, period, knowing full well that you

can’t do an encyclopedic search without putting too much of your

resources in data and perhaps less in children.

Ms. Egerton, I must tell you you’ve raised my interest when you

said that some of these teenage boys—I have a commission on

black men and boys. I am so concerned about black family life in

our community, our community where most of the children are

born to never-married women and never will be married women,

our community which has lost the family centeredness that held us

from slavery through a century of discrimination. I regard this as

the most serious problem facing black America today, and there

has been a lot of focus on the women and children, because the

women are custodians of the children, you must look to them, and

very little focus on the men.

This commission consists of 12 men in the District of Columbia.

It’s not your expert commission. They have some expert advisers;

12 men in the District of Columbia who have the confidence of men

and boys in the District of Columbia, because they’ve worked with

them. And I’m very interested. I mean, I’m this great big feminist.

I’m real interested in black men and boys, because I’m interested

in the revival of the black family. All this stuff that we have here

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today, you know, is about accepting that we would get there in the

first place, and, you know, how can we accept that we’re going to

get there in the first place, where huge numbers of our children are

in foster care? The rest of them are hanging on by their fingernails

with some single woman. Very few of our young people are getting

married because of the disparity between the marriageable young

men and marriageable young women, because so many of the boys

when they are young get off into the underground economy or the

criminal economy or the drug economy or the gun economy. This

is the problem of the African American community.

Now, you really get my attention, Ms. Egerton, when you say

that a lot of these boys don’t want to be adopted, and I wish you

would explain that to us.

Ms. EGERTON. They don’t. Our children need the connection to

their biological families, and as I said before, whatever that connection is, and many of them, the teenagers, are afraid that the adoption cuts that tie.

Ms. NORTON. They still feel some tie with the biological families?

Ms. EGERTON. They feel some tie, even when they have no contact. My oldest sons made it very clear when the subject was mentioned to them of adoption, they made it very clear to their social

workers, to my husband and me and to anyone else who questioned

them, we don’t want to go anywhere. We want to be here. There

is where we feel safe. This is home. This is where we want to be.

We don’t want to be adopted. We don’t want to leave you, but we

don’t want to be adopted, because if we get adopted, we have no

connection to our families. And very often our kids have an

unspoken fantasy that their parents will get it together even after

years and years and years and years of the inability to parent

them. They have that unspoken fantasy, and many of them are

afraid that if that adoption goes through, should their fantasy come

true and their parent is able to parent them, then they still don’t

have the—you know, it’s impossible at that point.

Our children are not trained. We talk a whole lot about training

our professionals, and we broach a little bit on the subject of training up foster parents, but we don’t talk about training our children,

and they need—particularly our teenagers, particularly children

who have been raised in the system, they need to begin to understand that adoption does not have to mean it’s the end of any relationship with your biological family. And they need to understand

the positives to adoption and not be left out to try to come up with

some answer on their own as to what adoption means.

Ms. NORTON. Well, perhaps——

Ms. SANDALOW. We need to listen to them and be trained by

them as well, I think, and I think Marilyn—we would agree on

this, which is the measure of well-being of a child is often not adoption, but compliance with ASFA through long-term foster care. And

D.C. has a new guardianship law which provides the flexibility, if

it could be extended beyond kin, to foster parents to allow children

to acknowledge through law the truth that they have two families,

and that is important.

Ms. MELTZER. Adoption practice in the whole country has

changed dramatically since ASFA, and many States allowed by

statute something called ‘‘open adoption.’’ An open adoption recogVerDate 11-MAY-2000 10:00 Aug 05, 2003 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00128 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 D:\DOCS\87806.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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nizes that for many older children, you can have an adoption and

have a permanent connection to a new family, but still maintain

ties to your birth family. D.C. statute does not allow open adoption.

It needs to be changed to allow that.

The other piece that I——

Ms. NORTON. Why doesn’t D.C. allow open adoption, Dr. Golden?

Dr. GOLDEN. I don’t know the answer to that. I’ve asked the

judges about it, and I think it is an area——

Ms. NORTON. It is the——

Dr. GOLDEN. It doesn’t—it makes it impossible to require it, as

I understand it. That is, people can choose to do it, but it makes

it impossible for that to be a condition, and so that is an area that

I think we should investigate for possible statutory change.

Ms. NORTON. I wish you would investigate that and let this committee know if there is any interest in the council in open adoption,

you know, where, in fact, the relationship with the parent is a part

of the process.

Ms. MELTZER. Sometimes it’s not even the parent. It’s the relatives and the siblings that they’ve been separated from through

foster care.

But the other point is that in the past, professionals have been

too quick to assume that these 14-year-olds and 15-year-olds that

they ask—if they say, ‘‘do you want to be adopted,’’ and they say

no, that is the final answer. All of us who have teenagers know

that their first reaction to any change is to say no. So I think the

whole sense of how we work with kids around this issue has to

change.

Ms. NORTON. I mean, I just wonder—to ask a teenage black kid

if he wants to be adopted is not to raise his expectation. I wonder

if the question should even be put out there. I mean, how many

teenage black kids—black boys have any possibility of being adopted?

Ms. EGERTON. Well, I can tell you, I would adopt, like, all of

them. I love them. I love teen boys, and I’m not the only one out

there. And in the case of my——

Ms. NORTON. The statistics are awful for these boys, and in a

real sense, the best thing—they may have the best realistic sense

of what is going to happen to them, and they have come to grips

with it. They know that a teenage black kid is—just by presenting

himself—a menace as far as some people in society are concerned.

So they have decided, hey, wait a minute, I’m going to deal with

my head, and my head tells me don’t even think about adoption.

I got a gig here that I’m comfortable with, and I’m going to stay

with it.

Ms. EGERTON. But my boys knew that they were—the question

was being posed, because the question was first posed to my husband and me, and the answer was emphatically yes, absolutely. I

don’t want to see them go anywhere else, absolutely. So they

weren’t asked the question without there being someplace for them.

Ms. NORTON. Yes.

Ms. EGERTON. But I would also say, too, that our black community would be more willing and capable to step in and take care

of these black boys if the support systems were in place for us to

do so. As foster parents, we have to be supported. The services that

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our children need need to be there, easily accessible, and when that

is, in fact, the case, there will be more meetings, because I would

not hesitate to go out and in my circle of friends say, y’all need to

do this, you know. But those supports need to be in place. I’m not

going to ask my friends and my constituents to do this when the

supports are not in place.

Ms. NORTON. Well, let me followup with the notion of supports,

because Ms. Schneiders in her testimony talked about therapeutic

foster homes and the notion that the traditional foster home notion

was obsolete. And I relate that to Ms. Egerton’s testimony in which

she testified on—I’m quoting from page 3. She testified about an

extremely serious problem. Children have historically been placed

without being told imperative medical, psychological and behavioral information.

My question is first for Dr. Golden. Is it realistic—I mean, this

notion about recruiting is therapeutic for foster homes, knowing

full well that many of these children come with conditions, huge

numbers of them, maybe conditions that you won’t even know

about no matter what you do—my question is how—how realistic

is it, and if it is realistic to regard a foster home as therapeutic for

all of our children, then why aren’t we doing that given what the

data shows us is, in fact, the state of these children, the problems

that they come with? And Ms. Egerton even testifies that—although she says there is now a placement information package,

that even what was known was not always available. I mean, is

there some sense that you don’t want to tell people all that they

need to know, because maybe there would be reluctant of people to,

in fact, be foster parents? Is there the sense that in order to have

a therapeutic foster home, we have to provide the kind of services

that we don’t have the resources and the funds to do?

Dr. GOLDEN. I think you’re asking questions both about what we

tell and how we support homes, because both of those things are

incredibly important.

Ms. NORTON. Right. I was interested in this notion when I first

read Ms. Schneiders’ testimony about therapeutic foster homes. It

strikes me that she really was talking about probably the majority

of our children, that they—to say, you know, his—we need some

foster care parents, you know, of the kind we always—we used to

try to get when I was a youngster does not speak to the children

that are coming into the system now. And if not, then what would

a therapeutic foster home atmosphere or approach by your agency

entail?

Dr. GOLDEN. Right now, I guess the way I see the vision, the way

I see where we’re going is that we want homes that can meet the

needs of all our children and that are well supported and that are

grounded in the community, because for a lot of our children, it

may not be—I mean, there are going to be some kinds of clinical

services, but some of it is being able to keep that child connected

to the early childhood provider who was wonderful for them. That

is some of what you need for that child to stay stable isn’t about

putting in new—sort of high-intensity clinical services. It is about

making sure you’re not disrupting their lives more in the first

place. So that is the key piece of it is having the homes be in that

community and connected.

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In terms of the clinical services, where I would say we are, right

now we make too stark a distinction. We have several hundred

therapeutic homes that we have much more intensive services, and

we don’t do enough wrapping services around other homes.

I don’t think that we need—I think there’s a risk of stigmatizing

children if we describe them all as needing an enormous amount

of services. Sometimes we found, for example, what we’ve done internally is we’ve built up our clinical staff so that we’re able to

guide these decisions better. We now have two RNs and a pediatrician and some mental health clinical capacity, and so, for example,

with the RNs when there’s a medically fragile child, we’re able to

try to find and work with a foster parent who’s comfortable dealing

with that, but that may not mean they need a huge amount of

other things.

So I think the answer that I would give is that the direction we

ought to be going in is both informal and community support so

that foster parents can rely on neighborhood help of all kinds and

the kinds of mental health and health care where a child needs

that, and I think early information is critical. I think that one of

the things that I think Ms. Egerton would also say is true is that

sometimes it may be that people don’t choose to share it. It’s also

that the chaotic atmosphere during which a removal might happen

may mean that you don’t have all the information at the beginning,

but you should get it absolutely as quickly as you can and share

it.

Ms. NORTON. Well, I don’t want to go much more deeply into

this. I would agree with Ms. Schneiders. I would—even if the child

does not look like the child has a serious problem, the notion of

presenting these children who are in foster care, which is the last

place any child wants to be, and waiting until the—some service

is needed would not, it seems to me, be the best approach. The notion of assuming that these are children that need services that a

child in a traditional home would not need does seem—might indeed save the District of Columbia of the kinds of resources that

ultimately you have to provide when a child goes into this strange

new environment, never acted out, but all of a sudden finds himself

in a place where he didn’t want to be. So the notion that, well, you

know, he seems fine to me may really not be—considering the environment that these children come from, be the way to approach

these cases.

Dr. GOLDEN. And I think individualized and flexible services I

guess would be the way I think about it, that we want what that

child——

Ms. NORTON. Ms. Schneiders, would you want to say something,

because I want to go on?

Ms. SCHNEIDERS. For some of us who have been in this business

for 30 years or more, the traditional foster home came into being

when the mother died in childbirth and the father was killed in the

war, and you had a——

Ms. NORTON. But they are already not operating in that

atmosphere——

Ms. SCHNEIDERS. But the child that we bring in today, the fact

that we had to take him or her away from that parent means

something happened in that home that is traumatic. It’s an autoVerDate 11-MAY-2000 10:00 Aug 05, 2003 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00131 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 D:\DOCS\87806.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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matic assumption that something happened that was traumatic to

that child that says we have to get that child out of that environment. Taking them out then is the second traumatic experience,

and then putting them into a new and unrelated home is a third

traumatic event. You need a therapeutic environment for every

child that we now have in care. If we didn’t have to do that, we

wouldn’t bring them into care.

Ms. NORTON. I don’t know the kind of resources that it would

take. I agree with you, and I know the strains the District is under,

and I realize that some parsing out of this must be done, but I

want to endorse your notion that ultimately a presumption in favor

of—now, maybe you can waive that presumption when you find

that the child is fine. The child may be so relieved to be someplace

that’s safe.

I do want to pursue the chairman’s question, because, I mean,

this notion of social workers has come up time and time again

when we see that zero percent of the children in foster care had

at least a weekly visit with a social worker and zero percent had

at least a monthly visit. I don’t believe that a weekly visit should

be necessary. Just let me say that for the record. I don’t believe

that anybody is ever going to have the resources or the number of

social workers to do that, so I don’t know where that goal came

from, but it does seem to me perhaps a monthly visit would be necessary, and I want to know the extent to which we’re chasing social

workers here, chasing college loans.

I was frustrated by the notion of master’s degrees before. Are we

still requiring master’s degrees? Can you have the social worker degree without your master’s degree and get a job in the District of

Columbia?

Dr. GOLDEN. Yes. The District requires licensed bachelor’s level

or master’s level social workers, which is still more highly qualified

than other States. Other States often allow other bachelor’s degrees

besides social worker——

Ms. NORTON. But the chairman asks how many vacancies do we

have now among—for social workers.

Dr. GOLDEN. Well, we just got new positions for this fiscal year.

Ms. NORTON. New what?

Dr. GOLDEN. New positions to fill for this fiscal year. The Congress approved the request we had made. So we are intending to

fill about 50 or 60 additional social worker vacancies here.

Ms. NORTON. Leave aside the new. I’m asking a question about—

I’m obviously not asking about new. I’m asking where you have the

full data. How many social workers as of, I guess, 2003 were there,

and how many vacancies were there?

Dr. GOLDEN. Our current number is about 270 social workers on

board, and we’re expecting to get up to about 310 to 320.

Ms. NORTON. How many vacancies were there when there were

200 on board?

Dr. GOLDEN. 270.

Ms. NORTON. 270. How many vacancies were there?

Dr. GOLDEN. We had—I’m trying to—the reason—the only reason

I’m having difficulty answering is that I think of all vacancies together rather than which were old and new, but we probably had

about 20 to fill before we got the new positions.

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Ms. NORTON. Mr. Chairman, let me ask you this. You’ll recall the

nurses bill that we got through the House. We finally stopped talking about nurses and how nobody could find nurses, and with great

bipartisan applause there was a bill that was passed here. I believe

it was even last year.

What is happening to social workers is exactly the same thing

that is happening to nurses. It’s one of the most difficult jobs you

could possibly take on. You go to get a BA, and you go to get a

master’s. You’ve said to the chairman what the pay is, and I’m

wondering if you’d work with me on a similar bill for social workers, because I don’t see any answer to this social workers problem.

I don’t think we’re going to get them out of the clear blue sky. I

do not see an incentive for the usual group of women who, in fact,

we depended upon. Those women are now going into every occupation in the world. They are fleeing social work just as they fled

nursing. So we are chasing our tails here every time we mention

social work. I just want to ask him if he would work with me on

a bill.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. I would. I think one of the biggest problems is retention. It’s keeping people—and I don’t know if you do

a sabbatical or what you do to keep people in it, but any time you

have to bring somebody new and train them, there’s a huge cost

to that, and there’s a risk. So when you have good people to keep

them, I mean, as in the private sector, we incentivize them in a

number of ways.

Dr. GOLDEN. Well, and I think were you to work on a bill, I

would see really two areas sort of by the analogy to nurses and to

others. For those who come to us with master’s, I think people

come with pretty substantial loan burdens, and for people who

were choosing to come in to deal with the most troubled families

in areas of high need and work with the public agency, they’re not

going to make the salaries to pay that loan.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. That is my——

Ms. NORTON. Loan forgiveness.

Dr. GOLDEN. Right. And for those who come with a bachelor’s, I

think one of the keys to retention is their ability to carry on and

get their education and possibly scholarship and other kinds of

strategies.

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Chairman, I’m going to only ask one more

question, perhaps submit others for the record. I was concerned

about the figure. I think it is from the GAO’s report that says 25

percent of the children have three or more foster care placements.

Ms. Schneiders and I have been having this discussion about the

trauma of having one placement. I wonder if any work has been

done to see if there are any reasons that tend to be systematic for

why children are placed more than one time?

Dr. GOLDEN. Yes. There are some major problems, and we’re beginning to make headway. We have rigorous targets in the implementation plan. One of the reasons—and I think Ms. Egerton addressed her pleasure at the fact that we now have disruption conferences. We used to do nothing when a foster parent—you know,

in the middle of the night, you know the child—that they just

couldn’t cope or got to the end of their rope. We’re trying now to

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bring together the people who know that child and see if more supports in the home could help. We’re not——

Ms. NORTON. First, what is the reason? What is the major reason

that a child would have—a quarter of your children would have

three or more foster care placements?

Ms. MELTZER. Can I respond to that? First, is that the initial

placement was the wrong placement so that there wasn’t enough

of a matching between the needs of the child in the initial placement. Second, is the lack of supports to the foster families. Most

States find that if they increase the support to the foster parent

families early on, they can stabilize the placements.

And the third reason sometimes is just sort of systematic reasons

that relate to what the agency has out there. So the agency may

have some placements that they consider emergency placements.

They don’t have the right placement at the first time. They put the

child in a place, and then they just by definition have to move

them. That’s why——

Ms. NORTON. Some of this I know you simply can’t help, particularly given the dearth of such parents and the quick decisions that

sometimes must be made.

Ms. MELTZER. But that’s why I think—you’ve heard testimony

today that it’s real important for that first placement to then very

quickly on bring together a whole team to work with that foster

family with the worker, involve the biological family and relatives

if you can find them in putting together the package of supports

that are needed within that first week, and we have experience in

places around the country that when you do that, you can stabilize

placements.

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Chairman, actually, I have one very last question. This notion about a team that I think Ms. Sandalow mentioned, this committee and the entire city were particularly concerned about this issue when this infant was murdered. According

to the GAO, only 26 percent of child victims had a face-to-face

meeting within the first 24 hours, and I’m wondering what is the

reason if there is a child victim that as many as a quarter of these

victims did not have that meeting when they were most impressionable about what had happened to them and when you could get

perhaps the best information about what to do for them?

Dr. GOLDEN. Getting out really early in an investigation is enormously important for just the reason you give. We now, I believe,

are at something like 40 to 50 percent in our most recent month,

and we have to keep improving.

The GAO highlighted that the standard that we get out in every

investigation—that’s for any hotline call about abuse or neglect

within 24 hours is more rigorous than most States. Most States

give 48 hours to several days, because they triage and try to get

out on the most urgent ones. But our standard, for the reason you

give, is that we’ve got to get out there early. I think past reasons

for not doing that included staffing, but we’ve put a lot of our staffing focus on investigations to try to fix that.

You also heard, I think, in the testimony from the Child Advocacy Center that we focus on putting our most experienced workers

in intake, because the other thing you have to do is you have to

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find the child in the family, and you have to make sure that you’re

doing that well. So there’s a lot left to do on that.

Ms. NORTON. But these are a quarter of the children—these, I

take it, are emergency cases.

Dr. GOLDEN. No. These are all of the investigations that come in.

Ms. NORTON. I see. So this 26 percent figure relates to all child

victims, not just emergency——

Dr. GOLDEN. Well, it’s, as I understand it, to all—calls to the hotline—you don’t know yet if there’s a victim or not. You’re trying to

get out there as quickly as you can to find out.

Ms. ASHBY. I just wanted to clarify, that’s 26 percent of the cases

for which there was data in FACES.

Ms. NORTON. Yes. So we don’t know if the figure is larger or not.

Ms. ASHBY. We kept running into the issue of data, because, for

the most part, that’s all we had to look at. We did go to case files.

We found that data was missing in case files as well. So of the

cases that we could get information on, it was 26 percent.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you.

Ms. NORTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you very much, Ms. Norton.

Let me just ask a couple of questions, and we can move on.

Ms. Massengale, in your testimony you gave a very detailed description of the plans for the development of the citywide Child Assessment Center. I think clearly the new center would provide a

means to increase services to children. What’s the status of this

now? What action do we need to take?

Ms. MASSENGALE. Well, at this point we have detailed architectural plans developed which have been presented to several agencies in D.C., including the Historic Preservation Review Board. Because of historic designations on the building, they denied conceptual approval, and so now this has to become a Mayor’s agent case.

So that’s another layer of bureaucracy that we need to go through

for the center.

The funding has been put into the budget, but city council has

asked to receive some additional information on the center that

we’re now trying to produce to city council.

The other issues right now, there are—this is being used as a

temporary homeless shelter, and the Deputy Mayor Carolyn

Graham is working on plans to ensure that the homeless have a

place to go when construction starts on this center.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Could you keep us informed on that and

Ms. Proctor on my staff here in terms of where that is?

Ms. MASSENGALE. Absolutely, because——

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Chairman, weren’t you supposed—wasn’t this

center supposed to be part of the national organization that deals

with such children supposed to go into the old historic firehouse at

one point?

Ms. MASSENGALE. Right. There’s a long history with this center.

We started trying to find a place in 1995, and we were supposed

to be going into the firehouse on New Jersey Avenue. We even had

a lease that had been signed on that property, and it was revoked.

Ms. NORTON. And I just want to say it should not have been revoked. This was a firehouse which the then fire commissioner convinced the Mayor, who did not have the background to know, that

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the Congress had shut that firehouse after the city had tried for

years to get it shut, because there was no case to be made that we

needed that firehouse with all of the superstructure that is involved in keeping a firehouse and that the community could be

served. This firehouse is in—when you were literally trying to get

that firehouse, was snatched back, an underutilized firehouse. I’m

very sorry, because I think you would have been well on the way,

because you had gotten so far to getting the center with the national people along with our local people in the same place.

Ms. MASSENGALE. Right. And one of the criticisms that is regularly given to D.C. is that you have all these national organizations

that are located here, and they do nothing for the local people of

the city. And so having a place where we can put in all of our local

agencies, the police, the social workers who are so crucial in this

process under one roof and also have the link to a national agency

where the center would be the example within not just this country, but the world of how we should treat child victims is so important. And obviously we’re very frustrated that 8 years later there’s

no progress.

Our current center, we’re turning closets into office spaces in

order to provide more therapy, to provide more services. There’s no

way to go, and we’ve shown with recent progress that collocation

is important. So we’re just hopeful that we can get the progress

soon.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. That’s why I asked the question, and Ms.

Norton is obviously on top of this as well. So keep us in the loop.

Ms. MASSENGALE. I will. Thank you.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Let me just ask Dr. Golden, it’s my understanding that CFSA has a policy to reduce the number of children

that are placed in group facilities like St. Ann’s in Hyattsville.

Given the fact that so many of these babies are medically fragile,

where do the sick babies go, and what kind of services do they receive, and how many placements are we disrupting here, and how

long are these babies staying in and out of home placements?

Dr. GOLDEN. Well, as you say, we want children to be in families,

particularly young children, and that expectation of ours is very

formalized in the implementation plan. So we have targets to even

reduce dramatically how many young children we have in congregate care.

In general what we found, particularly with babies, with young

children, is that there are families who are eager to care for children. We also have been finding that when we do the early focus

that several people here talked about, we identify kin who are prepared to care for babies and young children; so we also often find

kin families who will care for children.

You specifically mentioned St. Ann’s, which we worked with

closely, because as we transitioned toward being able to ensure

that each young child goes to a family first, they have a very good

setting for being able to do some early diagnostic support where we

need that. But we are aiming to transition to being able to identify

the right family right away. We have made a lot of progress on

that.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you.

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Ms. Meltzer, let me just ask you, from your perspective, what are

CFSA’s most critical priorities in order to sustain and improve the

outcomes for the foster care children and their families?

Ms. MELTZER. The first is one we have been talking about, having an adequate, stable, and trained work force. I think achieving

a lot of the other things that we want to achieve can’t be done until

they have that.

Second, I think, is recruiting and supporting foster families and

adoptive families, both in the District and, where necessary, in surrounding jurisdictions.

The third priority is, creating and sustaining the change in the

culture, and in the practice culture, to believe that children need

permanent families, that the Agency can find permanent families

for them, and that they can support children through to adulthood

with permanent families.

We talked a little bit about the older teens. Thirty-five percent

of the children in foster care in the District right now are 14 and

over. That is really a reflection of the historical inadequacies of the

system.

A lot of thought has to be given to those children right now about

how to make the last years of their childhood meaningful and how

they can be positioned to become adults with supports as they get

older. We all know that 18 and 21 are not magic ages for being

independent, so I think that is something that has to be focused

on.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you very much.

Anything else anybody wants to add? It has been actually pretty

complete with the questions and answers. It has been a great

panel.

Ms. ASHBY. A couple of things. I have been taking notes here as

various people have been speaking. I will be very brief.

First, with regard to the data issues, I hope that Dr. Golden and

other managers at CFSA do take the data issues seriously, not just

in terms of going back and finding records of investigations and

bringing them forward to the current system. That may not be as

important as other information about the child in terms of the

early history, family ties, and so forth, which are not in the current

system.

We have found the paper documents, paper case files, to be in

disarray; to be voluminous, disorganized. So it certainly would take

a great deal of effort to go into those files and pull out reliable

data. We certainly aren’t suggesting that any unreliable data be

put into the system. That would make absolutely no sense.

I am not at all surprised that other States have not done this.

We will be issuing a report in a few weeks on what is going on with

data systems across the United States for child welfare. As I said,

I am not surprised at all that so few States are focusing on their

current data.

With regard to interjurisdictional adoptions, we issued a report

June of last year on implementation of ASFA throughout the country. In that report, one of the things we noted was that a big problem—and I don’t know if that is the case here in the District of Columbia—but something that might be considered the biggest problem with the interjurisdictional adoptions seem to be processes and

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the home studies, and what it takes to get a home study approved

for a potential adoptive family in another jurisdiction.

To the extent that those systems and processes can be streamlined, it would go a long way, I think, for improving the ability of

child welfare agencies to bring about interjurisdictional adoptions.

The other thing I want to market, a little bit, our reports. We

have issued several reports, and we will be issuing reports that are

applicable to what we have been talking about today, one about the

recruitment and retention of welfare workers. We will make it

available to you, Mr. Chairman, and Congresswoman Norton. It

talks about a lot of the issues we have been talking about in the

District of Columbia, and we have found that across the United

States.

We have also issued a report recently on the placement, voluntary placement of children in child welfare systems and juvenile

justice systems because of mental health needs. There are some

issues there that I think you might want to take a look at, if you

have not.

As I said, we will be issuing a report shortly on the status of

data systems, which we think might be relevant. Thank you.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you.

Let me just say, I thank all of you for what you are doing. Despite the shortcomings in some of the areas here, I know you all

have a great dedication to helping these children. We appreciate

that very much, and want to try to add value to the equation.

I want to thank all of you for taking the time from your very

busy schedules to be here. I think it has been a very productive

hearing.

The hearing is adjourned.

[Whereupon, at 12:05 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]

[Additional information submitted for the hearing record follows:]

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