opinion

Finally, Arizona's foster children take a stand

Finally, the foster children of this state are standing up for themselves.

Or more specifically, a pair of law firms and a national advocacy group are standing up for them.

On Tuesday, they filed a federal lawsuit against the state of Arizona, contending that the Departments of Child Safety and Health Services are abusing already-traumatized kids.

The lawsuit, which includes 10 children as plaintiffs, paints an alarming picture of an overwhelmed system that is seizing far more children than it can properly care for. The result is hurting the very children the state is sworn to protect.

"What you are seeing in the complaint and in the stories of these children is something that's been going on for a really long time," Anne Ronan, of Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest, told me. "It's just gotten exponentially worse with the 46 percent increase in kids removed."

Actually, from March 2010 to September 2014, the number of children in foster care grew a jaw dropping 66 percent, according to state records.

The lawsuit alleges:

-Too many kids torn apart from their brothers and sisters and not just for a few days but for years.

-Too few children helped with basic needs, like eyeglasses or treatment for the physical and mental traumas they've endured.

-Too few investigators coming to the aid of children who are being abused while in foster care.

-Too few foster care homes for the kids who are stacking up like cord wood, shuttled here and there, growing up in institutions rather than homes and even sleeping at times in DCS offices.

It's a heck of a way to spend those precious few years of childhood.

Unlike most of the country and despite last year's reforms that were supposed to start fixing the mess that was Child Protective Services, Arizona continues to yank kids out of their homes in unprecedented numbers.

Despite a goal of reducing the number of kids in foster care, it actually went up another 7 percent during the six-month period that ended in September: from 15,751 children in foster care to 16,990.

And rising every day, based on the crush of calls I've been getting lately, from parents and grandparents who have lost their children to DCS.

The kids are theoretically being taken to protect them. The lawsuit, however, paints a picture not of protection but of state-sanctioned abuse and neglect.

Like the 8-year-old girl who entered foster care in 2012 for the third time. She showed signs of PTSD and abuse yet was separated from her siblings and dumped into a group home as an "emergency shelter" – an emergency that lasted two years. The lawsuit alleges the state ignored the little girl's need for glasses, along with her limp and a nagging toothache and failed to get her proper help even though she began hearing voices and threatened to hurt herself or others.

Like the 7-year-old boy who has been in foster care since he was four and already has attended eight different schools and lived in 11 different places – including one place where he was physically abused and another a Spanish speaking home even though he doesn't speak Spanish. After his fifth placement, he became suicidal and diagnosed with PTSD. This, at the ripe old age of 6. He never sees his sisters anymore – the only people who mean something to him -- because they've been adopted. And he's not getting much therapy these days, the lawsuit says, because his current placement is considered "temporary".

Like the four siblings, ages 3 to 7, who didn't see their mother for the first four months they were in foster care, despite a plan to reunify the family.

Like a 14-year-old boy named Bryce who has been in foster care since he was 5, shuttled from one group home to the next, cut off from his brothers, denied psychiatric care he desperately needs.

"I feel like I get tossed around like a bag of chips," he said in October 2012.

In December 2014, Bryce threatened suicide and in January, he was put into juvenile detention after an incident at a group home. This boy has spent most of his life in foster care and says he doesn't expect to ever find a permanent family.

I could go on.

Instead, I'll talk about shortages. A shortage of preventive services that could allow children to stay in their own homes. A shortage of foster homes where kids can be nurtured and cared for – or at least treated better than a bag of chips. Or a lost cause. A shortage of mental-health treatment to help them through experiences that no child should ever have to endure.

Certainly, not when they are in our care, on our watch.

The one thing we aren't short on in this state? An army of children being yanked out of their homes – the vast majority due to neglect, not abuse.

"A lot of it is poverty and substance abuse," Ronan told me. "It's lack of child care. It's lack of jobs. If we decided we don't want to help those families then the state becomes their family and they better do a better job of being their family and they just don't."

They don't. Or put another way, we don't.

In addition to the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest, the lawsuit is being brought by Coppersmith Brockelman and Children's Rights, a national advocacy group that focuses on child welfare.

Ronan says they're hoping to get the lawsuit certified as a class-action suit, in order to force, finally, the state to do its job.

It's frustrating that it has come to this. Maddening that the new and supposedly improved DCS has apparently been unable to make a dent in fixing the problems plaguing woeful old CPS.

But mostly it's just incredibly tragic for 16,990 Arizona kids ... and counting.