As state leaders tried to patch together fixes for Oregon’s troubled foster care system early this year, they gathered with foster parents in Polk County and listened to a wave of concerns. Caregivers connected their problems, again and again, to their region’s most powerful child welfare official.

One foster parent said case workers never checked on the medically fragile twin toddlers they were raising. Another foster parent described breaking into a sweat at the sight of a state car. Most foster parents recounted “negative and retaliatory interactions” with local officials whenever they voiced concerns.

“When asked who they were specifically talking about, they named Stacey Daeschner,” wrote Department of Human Services Director Fariborz Pakseresht. “Leadership in Polk County (child welfare) needs to change.”

For years, Daeschner was the top child welfare official in Polk and Yamhill counties. She had worked at the agency for a quarter century, the last 10 years as a manager.

The day after the February forum, her bosses placed her on leave.

The dozen foster parents gathered in Monmouth weren’t the first to voice complaints about Daeschner. An array of people -- from foster children’s advocates to top DHS officials -- had criticized her decision-making. She twice came to the public’s attention in the months before the agency disclosed she was on leave: first as a defendant in a lawsuit tied to her actions as manager, then as a supervisor whose employees reportedly had sex in a hotel room where they were caring for a teenage foster child.

News of Daeschner’s leave became public in March after the teen’s attorney gave notice that he would sue. Agency officials have insisted that the boy’s account of witnessing two DHS employees having sex in November 2018 had no bearing on the decision to place Daeschner on leave.

The Oregonian/OregonLive sought to find out the real reasons. In response to a series of public records requests and over the course of months, the agency provided hundreds of pages of records related to Daeschner’s tenure and leave, including Pakseresht’s notes from the foster parent forum.

Together, the documents lay out a timeline of the months leading up to Daeschner’s leave and the months that followed, while DHS officials quietly carried out an internal investigation into the allegations against her.

The records show DHS leaders had concerns about Daeschner months before foster parents shared their experiences at the forum. Child welfare director Marilyn Jones believed Daeschner defied direct orders and, in October 2018, issued Daeschner a formal letter of expectation that outlined what she must do better.

Emails also say agency officials decided to return Daeschner to work as a child welfare supervisor, then changed course after they were pressed to disclose to the public that she still held a role in child welfare. The emails say agency leaders planned to return her to a management position supervising case workers and overseeing decisions that might impact foster families, possibly even in Polk County. Pakseresht knew of the plan and endorsed it, the records show.

After The Oregonian/OregonLive asked about Daeschner’s role, however, DHS officials moved her again, this time to a division of the agency outside of child welfare.

Daeschner declined to answer questions for this story through her attorney. She gave notice to DHS in October that she plans to sue the agency under state protections for whistleblowers. In the tort notice, she contends she was the subject, not the perpetrator, of retaliatory actions.

Through a spokesman, Pakseresht declined to be interviewed. The agency provided a statement in response to a detailed list of questions, saying the “well-being of the children and families served by DHS is our top priority.”

The documents related to Daeschner’s leave reveal that agency officials investigated the foster parents’ allegations as isolated anomalies, disconnected from the statewide foster care crisis.

In recent years, Yamhill County Commissioner Mary Starrett heard directly from foster parents in her county about their problems with the system. She tried to make sure Daeschner would never lead child welfare programs in her county again. From her perspective, the agency’s handling of foster parents’ concerns is emblematic of the systemic issues plaguing DHS, such as defensiveness and an unwillingness to change. She estimated that during her five years in elected office, she’s tried to mediate 30 issues between local families and DHS case workers supervised by Daeschner. She never had any success. Foster parents are afraid of the child welfare agency and its decision-makers, she said.

Starrett concluded her county’s experiences aren’t an aberration after talking with county officials from other parts of the state.

“We just keep moving these bad actors around,” Starrett said. “Then we wonder why the culture doesn’t change, the system doesn’t change, and then we get bad outcomes.”

Critical juncture

The Department of Human Services has repeatedly and routinely failed to deliver acceptable outcomes for Oregon children. The agency has fallen short of benchmarks for quickly investigating reports of child abuse and finding safe, stable homes for children in foster care. When Pakseresht took over the agency in 2017, he pledged to improve child safety.

Records show Pakseresht discussed an investigation into Daeschner at least three weeks before the foster parent forum. The investigation by the agency’s human resources unit eventually homed in on allegations that she retaliated against and acted unprofessionally toward foster families, undermined local court proceedings and defied Jones’ authority. The investigation focused on Daeschner’s interactions with two foster families in particular, despite many parents’ and some co-workers’ broad allegations about her treatment of foster parents, court officials and Jones. The investigator compiled documents and interviewed Daeschner, Jones, Pakseresht, foster parents and others.

The human resources unit’s months-long investigation ultimately came to no conclusions about the accuracy of the specific allegations against Daeschner. Because the investigation into Daeschner “did not produce adequate evidence to substantiate allegations of misconduct,” agency officials took no action against her and reinstated her in June, said DHS spokesman Jake Sunderland.

The internal inquiry into Daeschner was being “wrapped up” when agency officials decided to bring her back as a manager, records say. Emails from June describe their initial plan: put her in charge of a statewide initiative to collect information about foster care certification, a critical process meant to ensure foster homes are safe for children.

The foster care system was then at a crucial inflection point. In April, Gov. Kate Brown declared the system in crisis and hired outside consultants to rapidly improve outcomes for children. Brown specifically called out the dire need to recruit and retain foster parents.

Putting Daeschner in the new statewide role analyzing how foster homes are approved was something “all think she will be a benefit to,” Deputy Child Welfare Director Jana McLellan wrote in an email to colleagues obtained through a public records request.

Early on in her stint as a manager, Daeschner oversaw foster care certifiers in Marion County. She helped reapprove a foster father who sexually abused numerous children. That led to her being named as one of many defendants in a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of victims. The state’s lawyers settled the case before the facts went to a judge or jury and agreed to pay the largest settlement ever by the state.

Later, Daeschner was promoted into the position in which she eventually earned $110,124 a year to oversee the safety of children in Polk and Yamhill counties. More advocates and foster parents raised concerns about her leadership, in two ongoing lawsuits and in multiple complaints to state officials. One lawsuit questions her willingness to acknowledge her and her agency’s lapses. The other suit, filed Nov. 19 in federal court, involves her supervision of the workers in the hotel room controversy.

Starrett emailed Pakseresht in June to ask whether Daeschner, along with the two employees who allegedly had sex in front of the foster child, would be returned to her county. Pakseresht was told of the plans to move her elsewhere.

“As long as the field is not Yamhill County, the commissioner will be fine,” Pakseresht wrote in a June 27 email.

What went wrong?

Daeschner started at the state’s child welfare agency in 1994 in Lake County. State payroll records show she was disciplined less than two years into her career -- with her pay docked one month -- but DHS officials said any records of why have since been destroyed.

She became a manager in 2009. She supervised Marion County workers who certified people as prepared to care for foster children. Lawyers for nine children alleged their clients endured horrific sexual abuse while in the care of one of the families approved by Daeschner’s workers. The foster dad, James Earl Mooney, is serving 50 years in prison for the assaults.

The children’s lawsuit named Daeschner among nearly two dozen defendants. It resulted in a record $15 million payout by the state on behalf of all DHS defendants. The suit contended Daeschner ignored red flags about Mooney and about her staffer’s lax oversight of the home. When Mooney and his wife needed to be reapproved to provide foster care, Daeschner signed off on the certification in March 2010 despite warning signs, the suit alleged.

Daeschner faced no discipline for her role in the case, according to the state.

By the time the state reached a settlement with the children harmed by Mooney, Daeschner had moved on to her more prominent role.

In October 2012, agency leaders tasked her with ensuring the safety of the more than 44,000 children who live in Polk and Yamhill counties. She worked out of Dallas and oversaw child abuse investigations and foster care placements.

Case workers must make difficult decisions, guided by directives that sometimes seem to conflict: keep children from harm while also trying to keep families together. The work can have life-and-death consequences. When children die from abuse or neglect after recently being called to child welfare workers’ attention, their deaths trigger an intensive review process and public reports to find out what may have gone wrong.

Although only one in 20 Oregon children live in Polk and Yamhill counties, at least one of every seven fatality reviews published between January 2014 and September 2019 focused on children who lived in the area under Daeschner’s supervision. Because state officials have begun to omit specific details from the public reports, such as the children’s names, ages and hometowns, the public often can’t detect geographic patterns. The Oregonian/OregonLive independently found at least seven of the 47 cases statewide during that period involved children from Polk or Yamhill counties.

Sunderland confirmed that child welfare offices in Polk or Yamhill counties managed the cases of all seven children who died.

Nevaeh Ellis was seven weeks old when she was smothered to death sleeping next to her mother in their McMinnville apartment. The mother had a long history of interactions with child welfare workers after people called in concerns about the mother’s and her children’s well-being. Advocates for Nevaeh’s siblings filed a lawsuit on their behalf that Daeschner and the agency are now fighting.

Daeschner resisted calls to classify Nevaeh’s death as resulting from neglect, which would have launched the review process, court records show. When a superior asked Daeschner to explain why her office had not found that Nevaeh died by neglect, she forwarded the message to a colleague and added, “this makes me want to throat punch her.”

The court documents say a top department official ultimately ordered that Nevaeh’s death ruling be changed to “founded” for neglect, triggering the fatality review process.

Daeschner was never disciplined for any reason tied to the case. Sunderland declined to provide any specifics about whether the state made changes after the review to improve safety for children in Polk and Yamhill counties.

During a deposition in May 2018, Daeschner denied that she disliked the fatality review process and the scrutiny that it can bring but said that she felt top supervisors disrespected local workers.

“We are scrutinized for making decisions when we have to make decisions based on the information we have,” she said. “And Monday morning quarterbacking is pretty easy to do.”

Records show that after Nevaeh died, the agency subsequently undertook at least three more reviews of deaths of children in Polk and Yamhill counties while Daeschner was in charge. Two of those reviews raised concerns that workers had failed to consider the “cumulative impact” of chronic neglect before the children had died. The agency didn’t undertake either review until more than six months after each child died.

DHS refused to say whether Daeschner’s actions contributed to the delays or if any one she supervised ever faced disciplinary actions as a result of either review. The agency also would not point to any specific measures implemented after the reviews to ensure better outcomes for children who live in Polk and Yamhill counties.

Foster parents push back

Child welfare workers statewide are struggling to find and keep enough qualified foster parents willing to take in vulnerable children, with roughly 200 fewer homes available as of July compared with a year ago, according to state data.

In Polk County, mistrust between foster parents and certain child welfare workers had been brewing since at least 2017, DHS found during its spring 2019 investigation of Daeschner.

Daeschner arranged the Polk County foster parent forum that preceded her leave. Child welfare leaders concluded, though, that they had to exclude Daeschner and her employees from the meeting so foster parents could speak freely.

“Specifically the families spoke about their mistrust and fear of criticizing DHS,” Foster Care Ombudsman Darin Mancuso told the state investigator. He said foster parents named Daeschner and a child welfare manager she supervised as the employees they feared and distrusted the most.

Sunderland declined interview requests on behalf of Mancuso. His accounts of Polk County foster care problems are based on emails and other documents released in response to The Oregonian/OregonLive’s records request.

After the Polk County forum, Mancuso talked with one foster father, who said the case worker responsible for his family had missed several meetings, arrived unprepared at another appointment and asked him twice to backdate paperwork.

Mancuso emailed the case worker’s supervisor the next week to find out whether the man’s complaints had merit. The supervisor did not write that the complaints were inaccurate but cited the case worker’s family responsibilities and potentially inadequate training.

After reading the message, Mancuso sent the email string directly to Daeschner’s interim replacement, criticizing the response.

“In my opinion, this is a great example of the holistic themes that we heard at the foster parent meeting and a good example of the deflection from supervisors,” he said in the Feb. 21 email. “Trust, communication and honesty were the most critical elements.”

The personnel investigation into Daeschner ultimately did not substantiate or refute the broad complaints about her interactions with foster parents or the specific allegations in the two families’ cases.

Jones, Daeschner and the human resources officials who investigated her all fixated on what went wrong in the agency’s interactions with one of the two foster families, records show. That family’s case grew particularly fraught, as the foster parents questioned official decisions regarding their toddler foster son and child welfare workers in turn questioned the foster mother’s conduct. The complex case surfaced on the radar of Jones, the child welfare director. Jones ultimately concluded Daeschner was insubordinate and dishonest regarding her oversight of the toddler’s case, according to the investigator’s notes.

Jones retired from the agency this fall and did not respond to multiple phone messages to comment on this story, nor a text message or questions mailed to homes listed in her name in Baker City and Salem.

In her tort claim notice, Daeschner said her decisions in the boy’s case stemmed from doctors’ concerns that the foster parents were “overmedicalizing” the child by overstating his disabilities and understating his progress.

She said others who reviewed the facts of the boy’s case agreed that the boy should no longer live with the foster parents who originally hoped to adopt him. She said Jones involved herself in the case without knowing all the facts and insisted that the foster mother be allowed to retain a role in the boy’s life.

Jones convened an October 2018 meeting with Daeschner and her boss, Ormond Fredericks. Daeschner said Jones told her she could not “pick and choose” what orders to follow, according to the tort claim notice.

After the meeting, Jones issued the letter of expectation in which she ordered Daeschner to make “immediate and sustained changes” to her performance and behavior.

The letter did not stand. Daeschner and her lawyer “considered it a reprimand and submitted it to the Employee Relations Board,” Sunderland said.

Before the employment review board ever held a hearing, DHS agreed to change the letter, emails show.

Gone from the final version was the directive that “you must make immediate and sustained changes.” Instead, it concluded with, “This letter is not a formal disciplinary letter and will not be placed in your official personnel file.”

Reassigned twice

Daeschner remained on paid leave and under investigation from mid-February to late June. She still earned her $9,177 monthly salary.

Officials then gave her a temporary assignment at the agency’s Salem headquarters analyzing the state’s system for approving foster homes and how it might be improved.

After The Oregonian/OregonLive inquired about Daeschner’s new position, however, agency leaders reassigned her.

Just two work weeks into her new foster care gig, they moved her out of the child welfare division.

The shift was not the first time DHS officials moved a high-up manager into an equally high-paying job after the system they managed was called into question. In May 2018, foster care head Kevin George was moved to a newly created job implementing changes in federal law. Months earlier, child protective services leader Stacey Ayers was moved from overseeing the safety of all children in Oregon to a job supervising child welfare in just the north-central part of the state. The changes were not related to their performance, Sunderland said.

Daeschner’s new job title: “eligibility transformation portfolio manager.” According to the job description, that position is supposed to work as part of a central office team to launch a $372 million technology system that will allow the state to determine Oregonians’ eligibility for Medicaid, food stamps and other public assistance through a single portal.

Yet Sunderland said Daeschner has no direct responsibility to train employees or to implement information technology systems. Rather, her job is to make sure other employees “have done all the planning necessary to be ready to support the field staff” as they begin using the new system, a role that Sunderland said draws on Daeschner’s strength as a project manager.

The position, which the agency categorized at the same level as her former one managing more than 20 people, was not posted or advertised as open, he said. As to whether the job previously existed and was open to anyone other than Daeschner, Sunderland said he did not know.

“But that’s an important project and I don’t believe that something was invented just for her,” Sunderland said. According to emails, her paychecks continued to come out of the child welfare program’s budget, not from the eligibility unit where she now works.

-- Molly Young

myoung@oregonian.com

-- Hillary Borrud

hborrud@oregonian.com