PRESS RELEASE

A Special Child Welfare Advisory Panel today released a report finding that New York City's Administration for Children's Services (ACS) is marked by such fundamental problems as: "insufficiently skilled" workers; service planning that is "rarely tailored to individual needs;" "too little urgency" about the timeliness of services and permanency; "too little attention to effectiveness of services and outcomes;" varied and "insufficient" training; and, "unacceptable lapses in professionalism" with regard to the child welfare system's performance in Family Court."

Appointed as a result of the settlement of the class-action lawsuit, Marisol v. Giuliani, the Panel conducted extensive data-gathering on "what is actually happening in the interaction between child welfare worker and child, birth parent, or foster parent, and between worker and supervisor." While acknowledging ACS has put in place better policies, management controls, and infrastructure, the Panel's 66-page Advisory Report on Front Line and Supervisory Practice concluded that "front line and supervisory practice in New York City are in need of substantial improvement." (p. 7)

"This first independent appraisal of the actual impact of ACS reforms has found that many of them are empty when it comes to making a real difference in the lives of children," stated Marcia Robinson Lowry, executive director of Children's Rights, a national non-profit advocacy organization that represents the plaintiff children in the Marisol lawsuit. "The fact that ACS workers are holding planning conferences within 72 hours of a child being placed in foster care is good, but the Panel reports that participants 'were often uncertain about what the conferences were supposed to accomplish.' It does little good making the trains run on time if you don't know where they're going. While we commend the movement that has been made, the reforms ACS have started will count for nothing if they don't make life better for children they're supposed to protect and care for. Clearly, ACS needs help to make these reforms real. The Panel's recommendations provide the necessary blueprint. We certainly hope the agency will take the recommendations to heart and work vigorously to implement them."

The Panel members and expert consultants conducted numerous field visits to program sites, contract agencies, ACS sites, and Family Court. They held meetings with sitting judges, judges who have left family court, referees, and Legal Aid and Legal Services attorneys. They also conducted focus groups with teenagers in foster care, birth parents, and foster parents. They also observed trainings and conducted a survey of child welfare providers.

Based on all of this data, the Panel concluded that "If ACS meets the challenge of improving front line practice...children and families will have better experiences and better outcomes. If it does not, the good work done to date will have too little lasting benefit." (p. 6)

KEY FINDINGS:

Assessment Skills:
"....we found the assessment skills of most of the front line staff we observed to be weak." (p. 9)

Case plans are based on an incomplete or unsophisticated assessment.
Weakness in assessment skills is an obstacle to good risk evaluation, appropriate service planning and timely achievement of permanency.
Service Planning: "...workers sometimes seemed honestly puzzled when asked to describe what it would really take to re-unite a family or to best meet the needs of a child in care." (p. 10)
Services appear to be chosen from a limited menu of formal programs.

Plans read as lists of commands with little of what the agency or worker will do to assist family.

Workers thinks services are not available, do not exist, or do not know how to access them.

Despite the fact that New York City has "a remarkably rich array of funded social services programs," too many service plans look nearly identical to one another.

"Frontline practice in the child welfare system continues to rely on a very limited array of services to address complex and difficult problems. Unless this weakness is addressed head-on, it is unlikely that New York can achieve the outcomes it desires for children and families." (p. 11)

Permanency: "On the whole, the case activities we witnessed lacked both a sense of urgency and a clear focus on permanency." (p. 11)

If a case was not in crisis, the most likely plan seemed to be to continue the existing services.
"We saw limited use of case conferences as critical tools for planning, engagement, and movement towards permanency." (p. 11)
Strongest emphasis was on ensuring necessary forms were completed and signed by all parties.

Compliance with Court Orders:

It is commonplace for caseworkers to fail to timely implement or simply disregard court orders.

Supervision:

"First the knowledge and practice skills of supervisors themselves appear to vary widely." (p. 15)

"Second, with a few exceptions there seem not to be formal standards for how supervisors are expected to do their work." (p. 15)

Transmission of Information:

"Judges report that these foster care workers sometimes do not know, even long after a child enters placement, the real history of the abuse or neglect that made foster care necessary." (p.17)

The lack of case information "creates real obstacles to appropriate placement decisions, good service planning, and the achievement of permanency." (p. 17)

Adolescents:

"New York City's child welfare system too often acts as though (a) troubled teens need to go into foster care in order to receive services and (b) most such youth need to be placed not with families but in group care." (p. 19)

"There are few preventive services resources that are specifically geared to the needs of teenagers and their families." (p. 19)

Pay and Turnover:

The egregiously low pay in most contract agencies for caseworkers working directly with children and adolescents contributes to "unevenly prepared" workers, with little experience in child welfare.

The median annual turnover rate of contract workers is 33% annually. As a result of such a high turnover, "the problem of new workers having to learn the job from scratch continually replicates itself." (p. 22)

Training of contract agency workers:

Although contract workers serve 90% of the children in foster care and 80% of the families receiving preventive services, "ACS does not set meaningful standards, monitor the training provided or leverage sufficient financial resources to support training by contract agencies." (p. 26)

Consequently, "a family or child coming into contact with this system cannot count on being assigned a caseworker who has received enough training to be properly prepared for the complex work she is expected to do." (p. 27)

"This report goes beyond the numbers, and looks at what's happening to children and their families," stated Lowry. "The reforms implemented so far are not making a difference in their lives. ACS must take the Panel recommendations seriously and act on them swiftly and effectively. "

Karen Freedman, Director of Lawyers for Children, co-counsel with Children's Rights in the Marisol action, stated: "The expertise of the Panel has been highlighted by its ability to identify the crucial areas in ACS front line and supervisory practice that continue to traumatize children and families. I am confident that the Panel's determination to expedite reform will translate into rigorous scrutiny of ACS's progress in implementing the Panel's recommendations for change."

GOALS, RECOMMENDATIONS FOR ACTION, AND TIME FRAMES

The Panel sets out specific Improvement Goals, Recommendations for Action, and Timeframes for ACS's meeting these goals and accomplishing these actions, including, among others, the following:

Supervisors' Training:

1.2(a):ACS should, by September 15, 200, develop and begin implementation of a training curriculum for supervisors in both ACS and contract agencies, addressing both general supervisory skills and the special issues relating to supervising casework staff. (p. 32)

Strengthening Skills of front line workers:
2.1(a): ACS should, by September 15, 2000, develop a plan identifying the nature of the training to be delivered; how and by whom it will be provided; the financial resources that will support it; and the steps needed to fully implement it by September, 2001. (p. 35)

Develop measurements of quality of front line practice and outcomes related to practice and evaluate workers in accordance with those measurements:

3.1: ACS, together with contract agencies, should by September 15, 2000, develop measurements of quality and outcomes related to front line and supervisory practices, based on a common set of practice standards, and begin to incorporate these measures into personnel evaluations and incentive systems. (p. 38)

Improve programs and safety at congregate care facilities for adolescents:

3.4(a): ACS should, working together with contract agency partners, advocates, teens in the system, and parents, by August 15, 2000, develop and disseminate a set of principles governing how the child welfare system should work with adolescents and their families, including a description of the desired role of congregate care in the service delivery system. (p. 40-41)

Under the Marisol settlement, the Panel will monitor the City's implementation of all of its recommendations in this report, in its three previous reports. If the city fails to make adequate progress, the Panel can issue a finding to that effect, in which case the plaintiffs will return to court for further action, with the Panel members as expert witnesses.

ABOUT Marisol v. Giuliani

The federal civil rights lawsuit, Marisol v. Giuliani, filed in December 1995 by Children's Rights and Lawyers for Children, was certified as a class action on behalf of an estimated 100,000 New York City children who are in the City's foster care system or reported as abused and neglected. The suit by plaintiffs broke new legal ground by extending the constitutional rights of all children affected by a child welfare system.

Previously, courts recognized the right to constitutional protections for children in State custody, but had not extended those rights to children in danger of abuse and neglect but still living at home. The U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit upheld on appeal the class certification.

Lawyers for Children, Inc. founded in 1984, provides free legal and social work services to children before the courts in foster care, abuse and neglect, termination of parental rights, and custody proceedings. LFC's experience in providing direct services to over 15,000 children has led to a commitment to impact litigation and innovative projects which enhance LFC's ability to advocate for and protect children in foster care.

Children's Rights works throughout the United States in partnership with national and local experts, advocates and government officials to document the needs of children in the care of child welfare systems. Children's Rights helps develop realistic solutions and, where necessary, uses the power of litigation to ensure that reform takes place.