Bob Ortega

The Republic | azcentral.com

When Arizona workers refused to let Maribel Ontiveros see her son Christopher at the hospital, then came to her house three days later at 3:30 in the morning to take away her other two children, she kept asking what seemed a simple question: Why?

More than a year later, she’s still asking.

Ontiveros and her common-law husband, Antonio Garcia, a house painter, had never had any run-ins with the police or child-welfare workers before they took their son Christopher, then 13, to Phoenix Children’s Hospital in August 2015. They hoped doctors could figure out why he’d started having debilitating panic attacks. The hospital kept the boy for observation.

But after several daily visits to Christopher, one Saturday, security guards refused to let his parents see him.

“‘You have to talk to DCS,’ they said,” remembered Ontiveros.

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Shocked, confused, she called DCS, Arizona’s Department of Child Safety. But “they said they couldn’t give me any information,” she said.

Nor would DCS caseworkers say why they’d come, early on Sunday, when they knocked on the door in the dark and demanded to see the couple’s daughter Carolina, 9, and their son Irving, 16.

They wouldn’t say why when they returned with two police officers a few hours later and took the children away in a van, as Ontiveros sobbed and Garcia filmed their removal on his cellphone. He tried to calm her, saying it had to be a mistake they’d soon sort out.

All the caseworkers left the parents was a piece of paper with the vague word, “neglect.”

The Garcia Ontiveros family isn’t alone in finding that DCS can seem to be an informational black hole. There are a great many questions about why DCS removes children that the agency itself can’t, today, answer — because no one there knows.

Over the past decade, only tiny Wyoming and West Virginia may have removed children at a higher rate than Arizona. Arizona has seen easily the steepest increase of any state in how many kids it removes from their families. Since 2005, as the number of children in the foster-care system declined in most states, it climbed in Arizona, nearly tripling to peak at more than 19,000 children at the end of February.

That surge overwhelmed the Department of Economic Security’s Child Protective Services division. By late 2013, CPS faced a still-rising backlog of more than 14,000 inactive, uninvestigated reports of child abuse or neglect. There were too few foster families, too few spaces in group homes. Children waiting to be placed were sleeping in caseworkers' offices and cars.

“Nobody could handle that kind of rapid growth,” said Greg McKay, director of the Department of Child Safety. “We had a capacity crisis. It was a snowball effect.”

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Buried under huge caseloads, many workers defaulted to removing a child if they had the slightest doubt. A few missed clues, leaving children home who later were killed by their own parents. Burned-out caseworkers quit in droves. The agency seemed under siege.

Gov. Jan Brewer and the GOP-led Legislature had slashed the division’s funding and staffing deeply in 2009, amid broader cutbacks after an economic downturn. But as the crisis became inescapable, in 2014 they decided to rebuild CPS as a stand-alone department: the Department of Child Safety.

They restored some of the agency’s funding so it could hire more caseworkers, increase pay and recruit more foster families. Comparing numbers is tricky because of one-time costs, including with the switch-over; but essentially, the new DCS got about $120 million more from the state’s general fund over the past two fiscal years (including a special session in 2015), than it received in 2014. This year, under Gov. Doug Ducey, general-fund contributions to DCS fell about $23 million from last year, which included one-time spending to trim the backlog of uninvestigated cases.

Now, as the Arizona Legislature considers where to focus its attention and spending, McKay can point to significant successes:

The new department has recruited more than 1,000 additional foster spaces for children. DCS has cut the wait time for a child to be placed in a foster or group home to under 10 hours from almost 44 hours. The department trimmed its backlog of inactive cases to under 2,600 and falling. Recent calls to DCS’ child-abuse hotline average 35 seconds on hold, down from more than 11 minutes.

Perhaps most importantly, the number of children taken from their families has plateaued, at least for now. The 13,132 children whom DCS workers removed in the state fiscal year that ended June 30 were just eight children more than they removed in fiscal 2015. After peaking last February, the number of children in out-of-home care declined by more than 900 by October, to under 18,000.

Arizona lawmakers might feel tempted to declare “mission accomplished,” and move on. But not only do serious problems remain — the agency continues to lose more workers than it would like; and it struggles to find enough foster families, for example — DCS also lacks the information that it needs to fix key issues. Both the department and lawmakers, in effect have been making important decisions without clear answers to vital questions. That hamstrings efforts at effective reforms.

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McKay recognizes the need for better information, and he is tackling it. A former Phoenix police detective, he ran an investigative unit within CPS before being appointed as director of the reborn department in early 2015. He knows one reason DCS can’t answer crucial questions: Five years ago, CPS gave up on having overwhelmed caseworkers fill out forms that detailed, in 17 categories, the safety or health threats that justified taking a child away — such as domestic violence, drug use, unsafe living conditions or young children left unsupervised, among others. Instead, caseworkers now fill out brief narratives that vary in what specific information they contain, and that aren’t easy to search or analyze.

At the time, given CPS’ antiquated data system, its shriveled budget and workforce, and the flood of new cases, there seemed to be little choice.

Still, “that didn’t solve the problem," McKay said. “The backlog continued to grow.” And the lack of detailed assessment and specific-enough guidelines “left a lot of people to operate on their own.”

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The biggest questions the department can’t answer all relate to the one Maribel Ontiveros asked about the removal of her children: Why?

Why does DCS remove so many children? Are Arizona parents simply the worst in the country? Or is something else going on? Given that four out of five children taken away are removed for alleged neglect, why hasn’t DCS systematically tracked and analyzed what kinds of neglect are the most common?

And could Arizona keep children safer — and spend less doing so — if it took fewer of them away?

Arizona’s child-welfare system has been a mess for a very long time. As far back as 1962, the Arizona Legislature appointed a special committee to investigate problems at the then-Department of Public Welfare and its Child Welfare division — including questions about when it took away children and how they fared in foster care. Many of that committee’s recommendations have been proposed repeatedly over the decades, and were made yet again in a 2015 report to the Legislature by the Chapin Hall Center for Children, a policy research center at the University of Chicago.

Warning of “a crisis is in the making,” the 1962 study said that due to overwhelming caseloads, “workers are not able to know their cases well enough to know their needs. … It is impossible to see how substantial improvements in program administration can be effected … (without) a staff training program; strengthened field service; reductions in worker caseloads … reduction in high rate of staff turnover (and) professional training for key staff.”

The Chapin Hall report neatly echoed those warnings 53 years later: “The inability of caseworkers to effectively protect children and serve families, given their increasingly high caseloads and lack of resources over the past few years, has been universally recognized as a contributing factor to the problems leading to the creation of the new Department.”

Each report called for lowering caseloads; for doing a better job in collecting and analyzing information; for doing more to help struggling families before removing children; and for giving caseworkers clearer guidelines, to help them better decide when to take away children in danger without removing others unnecessarily.

A review of legislation and press coverage over the past 55 years in Arizona shows a consistent pattern:

Roughly every eight or 10 years, often after a particularly shocking death, politicians and the news media discover that the child-welfare system is in crisis. For a year or two, a flurry of attention and short-term funding seemingly address the issue. Then, lawmakers’ attention flags, funding slides and the system gradually deteriorates until the next crisis.

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There have been genuine reforms. In 1978, for example, the Legislature created the Foster Care Review Board system. These volunteer boards advise the juvenile courts, independently reviewing cases in which children and parents were separated and the decision either to help reunify each child with his or her family, or put the child up for adoption.

For many years, the state board also put together an annual report analyzing data on every aspect of the foster-care system, from the most common reasons children were removed to how they fared in foster care or adoption.

In 2003, after the high-profile deaths of several children who’d been left with troubled families, Gov. Janet Napolitano called a special session of the Legislature to reform Child Protective Services. She and lawmakers ordered the agency to prioritize child safety over keeping families together. The numbers of children being taken away leaped 40 percent over the next two years, from about 5,700 to about 8,000 a year.

But also in 2003, as part of a broader move to reduce paperwork at state agencies, the Legislature cut funding and administrative staff for the Foster Care Review Boards, eliminating the board’s highly detailed annual reports.

Then, in 2008, two crucial events occurred. That spring, the Legislature broadened the statutory definition for when a child could be removed for neglect. The old standard required that the life or health of a child had to be “endangered.” The new definition called for removal when there was “an unreasonable risk of harm” to a child’s health or life.

The broader definition came into play just as Arizona’s economy tanked in the Great Recession.

Facing huge budget deficits, lawmakers cut $150 million from the Department of Economic Security’s budget in 2009 and another $110 million in 2010. Hundreds of CPS caseworkers, parent aides and other child-services staff were laid off.

Among other cuts to the social safety net, the state also eviscerated funding for child-care subsidies, cutting the number of low-income families getting help from 29,000 in early 2009 to 11,000 last year.

Past and current DCS workers say the cutbacks in help to struggling families, together with looser rules on when a child should be removed, sparked an even bigger surge in children being taken from their families.

Last fiscal year, on average, DCS took away a child somewhere in Arizona every 40 minutes.

Caseworkers still write down information about each child, family and home. The level of detail varies. They may, or may not, note whether the case involves drugs (and what drug), alcohol, or other issues. But whatever information they jot down goes into a narrative that isn’t readily searchable or analyzable.

Caseworkers categorize each case in which they take away a child as due either to abuse — physical, sexual or emotional — or to neglect. Neglect cases accounted for more than 80 percent of the 13,132 children removed last state fiscal year. But how many involved heroin? Meth? Alcohol? Marijuana? A child left unattended? Unfed? In an unsafe house? DCS simply doesn’t know.

“Data collection is important,” said Don Lash, a child-welfare advocate who spent eight years as an attorney for the New York City Administration for Children’s Services. He said that “child-welfare interventions aren’t effective when the problem is inadequate housing, so you need to know how many of those cases you’re dealing with.” And with substance abuse, knowing details helps you assess “does the problem require removal of a child, or can there be treatment that doesn’t involve tearing apart the family?”

That lack of information makes it harder for DCS to respond effectively, and to set up clear, consistent guidelines for caseworkers who — still — may be handling five times the caseload national guidelines recommend. And, as the Chapin Hall reported noted, that can force often-inexperienced caseworkers to rely on their gut instincts, and to play it safe by taking a child away.

And there are other information gaps.

DCS doesn’t track in great detail, by type, why children are taken away in cases of alleged criminal abuse. DCS doesn’t track the undocumented vs. documented status of parents.

Whenever a child is taken away, the parents are supposed to be offered a meeting, within 72 hours, with a DCS team. At that meeting, the team decides whether to work toward reunifying the child with his or her family (which means setting up services to help the parents fix whatever led to the removal) or to work toward placing the child for adoption.

But that doesn’t always happen. And though it tracks how often its workers fail to set up these meetings within 72 hours, the agency doesn’t have good data on why, said Katherine Guffey, DCS’ chief quality improvement officer.

“It’s difficult for us to know why did we fail to set one up. There are questions we’re not able to answer with the data we have,” she said.

And DCS doesn’t systematically track how often caseworkers fail to show up for foster-care review boards or court hearings — which can delay getting children back to their families or placed in a permanent home.

Or, consider the nearly 2,300 infants under a year old that DCS took away from parents last fiscal year.

Caregivers say they often don’t have enough information to figure out what those infants need — including which ones have been exposed to drugs, or may have other health or developmental issues, said Rebecca Ruffner, executive director of Best for Babies. Anecdotally, heroin addiction seems to be the biggest current problem, she said. But there are no hard numbers.

“We don’t have good data on this. Our DCS system codes substance-abuse issues with parents, whether they’re prenatal, postnatal, or drugs in the home, as neglect. We don’t know what percentage of those involve parents addicted to drugs or alcohol. That data needs to be studied, desegregated, we need to know what kinds of drugs, what kind of neglect, so our responses are specific, targeted,” Ruffner said.

Then there are the programs DCS offers to parents trying to get their kids back.

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In October 2013, then-DES Director Clarence Carter told the CPS Oversight Committee that DES didn’t collect data in a way that let the agency show what services worked best with particular families.

The Chapin Hall report echoed that critique, and said that some DCS workers weren’t familiar with all the services they can offer families (some through non-profit contracts or other agencies).

Many of those services are in short supply. This poses a particular problem in Arizona, where 25 percent of children lived below the poverty line, among the highest rates in the country, according to the National Center for Children in Poverty. (Among developed countries, only Greece has a higher child-poverty rate than the United States.)

Arizona has long been among the states that spend the least to help struggling families. In 1960, nearly half of Arizona families on food stamps got enough only to cover two weeks a month, according to state data. Fast forward to two years ago, when Arizona set the country's shortest lifetime time limit, 12 months, for the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program, which helps pay for food, housing and other expenses. Gov. Ducey proposed, on Jan. 9, raising the limit to 24 months. Today, fewer than one in 10 families in poverty in Arizona receives TANF cash assistance, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Those who do get an average of $205 a month.

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“Poverty with no supports is very much linked to child neglect,” said Dana Wolfe Naimark, president and chief executive of Children's Action Alliance, a non-profit children’s advocacy group. “When you unravel the safety net, families wind up in crisis and kids wind up in foster care.”

Over the past decade, while removing tens of thousands of children, Arizona also has been among the slowest and stingiest states in providing help such as parenting classes, child-care assistance or drug-treatment options, to families trying to regain custody of their children. Last year, parents who’d had children taken away had to wait more than four months on average to get access to such services; some waited as long as eight months.

Knowing in more detail why it removes children would help the agency figure out how most effectively to focus efforts to help families, said DCS Director McKay. Figuring out and showing what programs work the best could help the agency get parents the right help and return children to them more often and more quickly.

Even while the department works on immediate, bailing-out-the-boat challenges, such as shrinking the backlogs of inactive cases and cutting employee turnover, McKay also is rolling out changes to improve how DCS collects and analyzes information so it can come up with better long-term strategies.

“Part of the challenge,” said Guffey, DCS’ head analyst, is DCS’ decades-old computer and data system. Guffey said it “doesn’t make a lot of sense to spend a lot of time and money fixing problems with our existing system” when DCS is replacing it starting this year.

For example, as part of an $86 million data-system project, DCS plans this summer to bring back an automated version of the 17-point child-safety and risk assessment form, to get a clearer picture inside that now-vague basket of “neglect” cases.

“We’re eager to get data on the specific safety threats we identify," Guffey said. “This will provide us more information about the types of situation for which we’re removing children or opening cases, what kind of services we need to develop — basically, what do our families need?”

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DCS plans to give caseworkers tablet computers with direct access to the records system, so they can do assessments from the field, freeing more time for them on each case. It also will give the agency specifics about what drugs — meth, opioids, others — and other issues are leading to kids being removed.

“We don’t want to drown caseworkers” with forms, McKay said; but it’s important to get data that can help DCS better prevent child abuse and better treat family problems.

DCS also has agreed to give data on neglect cases to the Morrison Institute for Public Policy, a nonpartisan research organization at Arizona State University. As part of a three-year project (also involving The Arizona Republic), the institute will analyze the different types and combinations of neglect. That analysis aims to help DCS and lawmakers better target services to prevent or address the different types of neglect and abuse — potentially letting DCS protect kids better while taking fewer of them away.

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To get a better feel for why nearly a third of caseworkers had been quitting each year, DCS’ Guffey dived last year into 73 recent employee resignations. She found that 60 of those workers transferred back to the Department of Economic Security, where they took lower-stress jobs that paid, on average, 12 percent more.

“This is the infantry of social work,” McKay said. Every decision to take away or leave a child could be the wrong one, could lead to trauma. “It’s an infinitely hard space to be in.”

McKay said other issues matter to workers, too — such as lower caseloads and feeling listened to — but he is using hard data about pay discrepancies to ask for money to further improve pay and training while continuing to reduce the average caseload, which DCS said fell from 145 open cases per investigator in April 2015 to 37 per investigator as of last June. The national recommended standard is 20 open cases per investigator.

For the six months ending last September, DCS took away 5,669 children. That’s a lot — one every 46 minutes — but it’s almost 500 fewer children than in the prior six months, and the least since the first half of fiscal 2013.

Meanwhile, the agency reunified 3,386 children with their families, up almost 9 percent; and it increased adoptions 12 percent to 1,936 over the prior half-year.

“Everybody is killing themselves to get this thing done. Most of this organization let their vacations roll over through the holidays so we could get through the work,” McKay said.

Those efforts aren’t always apparent to families whose children have been taken away, though.

Take Maribel Ontiveros and Antonio Garcia. When caseworkers knocked on their door that Sunday at 3:30 a.m., “they interrogated us about were there drugs in the house, was there domestic violence. I said, 'None of that,' ” Ontiveros said. Both she and Garcia struggled to understand the caseworkers. Emigrants from Mexico, they speak and read very little English, and the caseworkers didn’t speak Spanish.

“They had a paper, they said, 'Sign this,' ” Ontiveros said.

“I said, ‘I can’t sign it. I don’t understand what it says.’ They said, ‘You have to.’ But the document was in English. So we wouldn’t sign it.”

When the workers returned a few hours later with two police officers, Garcia let them in, and politely asked permission to record everything on his phone. He, too, was frustrated and upset because he didn’t understand what was happening.

“To me, this was like a kidnapping,” he said. But he kept assuring his increasingly distraught wife and children that it had to be a mistake, to just go along and they would straighten it out.

Ontiveros has long volunteered at community organizations, including her children’s school, ASU Preparatory Academy. After the van drove off, she pulled herself together and began calling everyone she knew for help.

At Phoenix Children’s Hospital, Christopher, 13, didn’t understand why his parents weren’t visiting him anymore. No one would tell him.

“I felt sad. I just wanted to come back home,” he said. “I asked the lady, the doctor, ‘When do I get to go home?’ She kept saying, ‘In a couple of days, in a couple of days.’ ”

Irving, 16, tried to put a brave face on things for his sister Carolina, 9, until they were separated a few hours later at a DCS office. He said he slept in the DCS office for two nights before being sent to a group home.

“They searched me,” he said. “When I got to that house, they asked, ‘Are you going back to your parents?’ I said I didn’t know. I was scared. I didn’t know where my sister was, I didn’t know if I was going to be returned to my parents, or where I’d go.”

Carolina, too, was terrified.

“I didn’t know what they were going to do with me. I didn’t know what was happening or why,” she said.

She was placed in a foster home, taken to a new school where she didn’t know anyone. Her long brown hair was cut short. Each night, in her bunk bed in a room with three other girls, she imagined herself at home under her pink unicorn bedspread, with her mother.

“I imagined I heard her voice saying good night and I pretended she was kissing me on the cheek goodnight,” she said.

Ontiveros and Garcia said they were not given a “team decision making” meeting with DCS within 72 hours, or, indeed, at all.

They tried again to see their son Christopher at the hospital.

“Six security guards chased us off as if we were criminals,” Garcia said.

A community activist, Salvador Reza, connected them with the local Spanish-language TV stations of Univision and Telemundo. Tuesday night, their story ran on the news.

On Wednesday, DCS called.

“All they said was sorry, they had made a mistake. They gave us back Irving on Wednesday in the DCS office. Carolina was brought to (our) house by a worker Thursday morning,” Ontiveros said.

She and Garcia went back to Phoenix Children’s Hospital that afternoon.

“The hospital said, ‘We have no child by that name,’ and security took me out. I called the police and said they wouldn’t return my son. When they saw I was talking to police, they said, ‘Oh, we found him,’ and took me to (the) 15th floor.”

But when he saw his parents, Christopher wouldn’t look them in the face.

“The first thing he said was why had I abandoned him. I said I hadn’t,” Ontiveros said.

“At first, I didn’t believe her,” Christopher said. “Then they showed me the video.”

Statistically, the removals of Christopher, Irving and Carolina from their home for several days barely registers as a blip in the DCS system.

But to the children, and their parents, it was terrifying.

For months, said Ontiveros, “they were panicked all the time. When the bell would ring, they’d shout, 'Don’t answer, don’t answer!’ Carolina cried all the time. It was very hard. And it was unjust.”

“They’ve never given us an explanation, and neither has the hospital,” Ontiveros said. “We still don’t know why they were taken. The case-closed paper they gave us said we abandoned Christopher at the hospital — but that’s not true. They kept us from seeing him.”

DCS Director McKay said he understands the parents’ frustration. But he said that in cases in which criminal behavior is alleged, DCS provides little information to parents and delays team decision-making meetings, to avoid interfering with a possible investigation.

Garcia said it’s intimidating to speak out against DCS. There’s the fear they could come back. But he said the agency needs to be more cautious about taking away children, and to do a better job of telling parents what it’s doing and why.

There, at least, he and McKay are on the same page.

“We are working at getting better at that,” he said, suggesting that in a similar situation today, the children might not have been removed. “Our oversight of removals has become more robust” since August 2015. “There is a much more methodical process between caseworker and supervisor.”

“When you talk to foster families, to birth parents,” and others involved in the system, it’s clear, McKay said, that “it’s still under duress. But the changes that have set in are real,” and, with continued attention, “sustainable.”