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Caregivers
rebel over state's payment cuts
Foster crisis for sexually aggressive
youths
Among the thousands of children in state foster care
are a troubling few who keep caseworkers on the phone late into the
evening trying to find acceptable placements, kids who have served time
for raping other children, young people deemed such a high risk for
sexual aggression that their bedroom doors must be rigged with alarms.
Group homes resist taking so-called sexually aggressive youths, and many
foster parents are unprepared to handle their sometimes extreme behavior.
For the past 10 years, Washington officials have relied on a small
battalion of regular folks who are paid extra to shuttle the children,
mostly boys, to therapy appointments, monitor their Internet use and
provide near-constant surveillance. Until recently, they shouldered the
responsibility with only intermittent complaints. But last fall, the
state Department of Social and Health Services began cutting their
reimbursement rates, prompting some to consider closing their doors to
the boys, and unleashing a torrent of criticism.
In sum, the foster parents say, the state provides
only the thinnest training to caregivers of sexually aggressive youths
and zero follow-through after the boys turn 18. More worrisome, they
add, is the agency's move to increasingly place high-risk children in
regular foster homes.
These aren't just angry kids, or aggressive kids, said Patricia M.,
who has been a full-time foster mother to sexually aggressive teens in
Mount Vernon for the last nine years. We've had boys putting sperm in a
squirt gun and shooting it at other boys. ... We've had kids so tough
that the state had to supply somebody to watch them so we could sleep at
night. In December, a 40 percent cut to Patricia's monthly foster care
stipend led her to take work at a knitting store, she said, and squeeze
a fourth boy into her home to make up the shortfall. (These kids) have
serious behavior issues, and we're required to provide round-the-clock
supervision, Patricia said. That's why we got the higher rate. It was
always supposed to be a 24-7 thing, which makes it pretty much a
full-time job.
The state says otherwise. DSHS policy holds that
foster parents must be able to maintain their households without
government payment. So while conceding that caretakers like Patricia
provide an important service, agency managers say that many of them
taking in anywhere from $24,000 to $72,000 a year have been improperly
using the system as their sole source of income. Supervising children,
they insist, was never supposed to be a career.
Some of these homes have become financially dependent on that revenue,
and it was never meant to be that, said Doug Allison, manager for the
behavioral rehabilitation and sexually aggressive youth programs at DSHS
in Olympia. It's not a job.
Shifts in the program
Last fall, the ax came down. In an effort to create uniformity in a
system that had disintegrated into a patchwork of payment-and-therapy
arrangements, the state which spends about $600,000 annually on
sexually aggressive youth began evaluating each child individually and
downsizing reimbursements accordingly. In the counties north of Seattle,
where there are about 100 children in the program, rates were sliced by
40 percent on average from about $2,000 per child each month to
$1,300.
I'm done, I've had it, said Cheryl C., an
exasperated foster mom to three sexually aggressive boys in Oak Harbor.
I don't know how long I can keep doing this.
Yet almost weekly, she receives new requests to house more children.
Though Washington has about 1,800 registered juvenile
sex offenders, only a small number 270 are included in the program
for sexually aggressive youths, who must be wards of the state and
abused themselves. About 120 of these are in foster care. The rest live
in specialized group homes or with their families. Some are registered
sex offenders; others are merely youngsters who have displayed troubling
behavior. Those under 12, who are too young for court, are referred to
the program by prosecutors.
Yes, these kids have offended against a child, but
they're children themselves, Allison said. Some are very young only
8 years old and they're being labeled 'sexually aggressive' based on
one isolated incident that happened because they were themselves being
sexually abused and acted out.
To Patricia and eight other foster parents interviewed
for this story, most of whom requested anonymity to protect the boys in
their homes, it appears that the state is trying to have it both ways
acknowledging that their work requires more than typical foster
parenting, yet paying them now at typical rates; demanding that their
kids sleep in bedrooms with alarms on the doors, yet suggesting that
many no longer need such strict oversight. As a reality check, Patricia
suggested that they speak to one of the four boys she cares for.
Will you ever be cured? she asked a clean-cut
18-year-old who came to her from a nine-month stint for child rape at
Echo Glen Children's Center in Snoqualmie. No, that's stupid, he said.
It's not a logical thing that could be cured. A murderer's never
cured. Nonetheless, the youth, who consented to an interview on the
condition that he not be named, has made huge gains, Patricia said. He
has a girlfriend who knows about his past he was required to tell her
parents and is considering community college. He likes cooking, but he
fears failure in the kitchen. He wants to explain himself, but is afraid
of being misunderstood. He is afraid, in fact, of almost everything of
keeping his past a secret, and of what might happen if it got out. He
hopes to get de-registered, but lives a life proscribed by shame. He
insists he will never again touch a child, but knows his thoughts and
fantasies will be an issue for life. I didn't like what I did to begin
with it was more of a cry for help than anything, the young man said.
There are some extreme kids out there that are really screwed up but
not all of them are, so don't judge a book by its cover. By minimizing
the risk boys like hers can pose, and housing them with less experienced
foster parents, Patricia believes DSHS is opening itself up to enormous
liability.
At least one lawyer agrees. Tim Farris, a Bellingham
attorney who settled a major lawsuit against the agency last year, won
its acknowledgement that DSHS had routinely violated the constitutional
rights of foster children by placing them in unsuitable homes, and also
secured an assurance that the agency would change its ways. That
agreement six years in the making would be violated if high-risk
youths are shunted onto families unequipped to handle them, Farris said.
Gia Wesley, a regional supervisor for DSHS who has
been fielding angry phone calls from caregivers threatening to quit,
acknowledged that the lawsuit looms constantly.
It's really increased the pressure, she said. We
just don't have placements-to-order and the staff here are often working
until 8 o'clock trying to put the pieces together.
'A right to be rehabilitated'
Foster parents who agree to take on high-needs, high-risk kids are
required to undergo training in this case it consists of a two-hour
video, recommended self-test and annual six-hour workshop. It's
laughable, a Band-Aid, a joke, said the Rev. Clyde Haynes, who
sheltered sexually aggressive boys in Marysville for 10 years and
retired from the program last summer, in part because he knew a rate cut
was coming. Haynes recalled one youth, Edward Hope, who was placed with
him for six months until the minister, no longer able to control the
boy, gave him up. He heard nothing about what had happened to him until
turning on the TV news in July to see that Hope, now 20, had been
arrested for luring a 12-year-old boy away from a baseball game in
Everett and raping him in a motel room.
Allison, the program director at DSHS, is a former
counselor to young sex offenders and concurred with prevailing research
that says they are essentially incurable, just as an alcoholic or drug
abuser would be. He also acknowledged that the agency makes no effort to
track the youths once they turn 18 and leave the system. More than
debates over money, it is this lack of follow-through that troubles
Cheryl, the Oak Harbor foster mom. Her work is grueling, but she loves
it. A former food service worker in the local public school, Cheryl has
turned her home into a haven and believes she provides an essential
service. Every child, I feel, whether a sex offender or not, has a
right to be rehabilitated, to get back into the community, and we try to
do that, she said. We try to teach these boys that there are better
things out there than where they've come from. Nevertheless, Cheryl
worries. In her kitchen, she waits for phone calls from her former
charges. Some have moved on and raised families. Others, she never hears
from again. No longer under state supervision, they receive no provision
for therapy, no oversight, nothing to prevent them from harming another
child. Once they leave our home, Cheryl said, it's, 'Hey, you're on
your own.'
Claudia Rowe
14 February 2005
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/211936_sexagg14.html
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