Lawyers for Connecticut Children Assert State is Trying to Back Out of Court Settlement, Reneging on

PRESS RELEASE

State's opposition to funding of court-ordered agreement is called "baseless" and another attempt to avoid improving safety and care for Connecticut foster children.

(Hartford, January 29, 2004) Lawyers for children in the class action lawsuit, Juan F. v. Rowland, today answered the state's opposition to a key provision in the modified settlement (called an "Exit Plan") to improve the long failing Department of Children and Families (DCF), stating that the state's challenge is "baseless, if not frivolous," and "an attempt to back out of the legal obligations of a bargained-for, Court-ordered agreement."

The legal brief was filed today in U.S. District Court, District of Connecticut by the children's attorneys, Children's Rights and the Center for Children's Advocacy in response to the DCF Commissioner and Governor who questioned the legality of a funding commitment in the Exit Plan adopted and approved by District Court Judge Alan H. Nevas. The Exit Plan, created by the court monitor, D. Ray Sirry, at the request of both sides to the lawsuit, contains 22 outcome measures that the state and DCF must meet to improve children's lives and contains a provision requiring the state "to provide funding and other resources necessary to fully implement the Exit Plan."

The children's lawyers state in their brief that:

Remarkably, after years of Defendants' dismal failure to comply with Court-ordered relief dating back to 1991 in this action, and barely 90 days after entering into an extraordinary new Court-ordered agreement that carries great potential to actually improve outcomes for abused, neglected and at-risk children and their families in Connecticut, Defendants challenge the Court's Order adopting and approving a new Exit Plan - the cornerstone of that new agreement.

"We have to wonder about the good faith in which the state entered into the settlement agreement to begin with," said Marcia Robinson Lowry, executive director of Children's Rights, the national child advocacy group that is co-counsel for plaintiff children in the Juan F. case. "As soon as this process produced something concrete, at the very first significant step by the Monitor, the state is backing away from what they wholeheartedly endorsed only three months ago. "

The state objects specifically to the Exit Plan provision requiring it to provide funding and other resources necessary to implement the Exit Plan. As the children's lawyers point out in their brief:

This is almost identical to the language contained in the Consent Decree, which governed this case for over a decade: "The State of Connecticut shall pay for, and fund, the costs for the establishment, implementation, compliance, maintenance, and monitoring of all mandates in this Consent Decree and all determinations and directives of the DCYS Monitoring Panel as may be set forth in Manuals, memoranda, or other materials issued in the performance of its duties." Paragraph 7 of the Exit Plan is well within the scope of the October 7 Order, and there is nothing facially unlawful about this provision. There is nothing in the October 7 Order that limits the authority of the Monitor to include this provision.

"The Governor and DCF agreed to be held to these 22 outcome measures to meet the most basic needs of these children so they must, of course, provide all necessary resources to get there," stated Ira Lustbader, associate director of Children's Rights. "The state's challenge to the resource requirements has no basis in law, fact, or common sense."

Background

In October of 2003, lawyers for the class of over 5,000 abused and neglected children in Connecticut reached a landmark agreement with the Governor, the state and the Department of Children and Families (DCF) in an effort to avoid a hearing on charges of the state's contempt of court for failing to comply with improvements for foster children in the longstanding civil rights lawsuit Juan F v. Rowland. Under that agreement, approved by federal judge Alan H. Nevas, the state admitted its longstanding non-compliance and agreed to hand over express management authority of DCF to the federal court monitor, in conjunction with the DCF Commissioner and the OPM Director.

The October 2003 agreement set up a Task Force for running the Department under the Court Monitor's ultimate authority, which included the Court Monitor, DCF Commissioner Darlene Dunbar and the senior state budget official Mark Ryan. The cornerstone of the October 2003 agreement was a provision allowing the Court Monitor to create a new "Exit Plan" that would set forth the improvements for children the state and DCF are required to meet, with a goal of ending the 15 year lawsuit in 2006 if the state and DCF are successful. The parties agreed to let the Monitor choose the terms of the Exit Plan and agreed that his decisions are final and binding.

The Monitor finalized the Exit Plan on December 23, 2003. It includes 22 required "outcome measures" in many basic areas of the state's foster care system, such as:

*Mandating that at least 90% of reports of abuse or neglect be investigated timely.
*Placing an upper limit -- 2% -- on the occurrence of abuse of children at the hands of their foster parents.
*Speeding the reunification of children with their parents when safe to do so, by requiring that 60% of all children who are reunified be returned home within a year of the child's removal from the home.
*Speeding up the adoption process for children that cannot be safely returned home, by requiring that at least 32% of children who are adopted have their adoptions finalized within 24 months of the child's initial placement into foster care.
*Mandating that at least 80% of children and families served by DCF have all of their medical, dental health and other service needs provided as laid out in the required treatment plan for every child.
*Mandating that at least 85% of foster children in DCF custody get visited at least once per month.

"These outcome measures will go a long way to focus DCF's attention on the most crucial needs for these children." said Martha Stone, executive director of the Center for Children's Advocacy at the University of Connecticut School of Law, co-counsel in Juan F. "The state's motion is baseless and should be denied. It can't be used as yet one more stalling technique in the Defendants' arsenal to avoid their long-standing legal obligations to the plaintiff class of children."

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.