Pubdate: Mon, 08 Aug 2005 Source: Rochester Democrat and Chronicle (NY) Copyright: 2005 Rochester Democrat and Chronicle Contact: http://www.democratandchronicle.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/614 Author: Richard Wexler Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/rehab.htm (Treatment) USE SAFE, PROVEN WAYS TO KEEP FAMILIES INTACT A child dies, allegedly abused by a parent. The child was previously known to authorities. In fact, it soon becomes clear that the case file had more "red flags" than a Soviet May Day parade. As investigations begin, caseworkers panic. Fearful of having the next such case on their watch, they tear far more children from their homes. Rochester, 2005? No. New York City, 1996. The child's name was Elisa Izquierdo. And Rochester can learn a lot from what New York City did wrong after she died, and then what it did right. The first reaction was panic. By 1998, the number of children torn from their parents over the course of a year had soared 50 percent. But instead of making children safer, deaths of children "known to the system" increased by 50 percent. That's not as surprising as it sounds. When a child "known to the system" dies, it's almost always because an overwhelmed, undertrained caseworker didn't have time to make a good decision. A foster-care panic overwhelms workers even more. With so many new cases to deal with, caseworkers have even less time to find children in real danger. New York City's experience is not unusual. Similar panics in Illinois and Florida also were followed by increases in fatalities. So New York City reversed course and embraced safe, proven approaches to keep families together. It cut the number of children taken from their parents in half. In 2003, a child was twice as likely to be taken from his parents in Monroe County as in New York City, after adjusting for child poverty rates. And while Monroe County is projecting little change, in New York City, the rate of removal continues to fall. Again, New York City is not alone. Illinois learned from its mistakes and now takes away proportionately far fewer children than Monroe County -- and independent, court-appointed monitors have found that child safety in Illinois has improved. This, too, is not as surprising as it sounds. Though it is cases like the death of A.J Gibson that naturally make headlines, most parents who lose their children to foster care are neither brutally abusive nor hopelessly addicted. Far more common are cases in which a family's poverty has been confused with neglect. Other cases fall between the extremes, the parent neither all victim nor all villain. But the reason to avoid a foster-care panic is not for the sake of the parents. A recent study of 600 foster-care "alumni" found that only 20 percent are doing well. One-third said they were abused by a foster parent or another adult in a foster home. Another study found that even infants born with cocaine in their systems developed better when left with birth mothers able to care for them than they did in foster care. That means drug treatment for a parent is almost always a better choice than foster care for her child. And it means that the reaction to a child-abuse tragedy should never be to mindlessly sweep more children into a system that churns out walking wounded four times out of five. - -- Wexler, a former Rochester-area journalist, is executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform (www.nccpr.org) based in Alexandria, Va. - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom