DEBATE

State seizes kids at unusually high rate

When a child abuse investigator took away Cathy Green's grade-school-age son, she felt like an explosion had rocked her family. "Out of nowhere, boom, a bomb hits the ship, and you are so dazed you can hardly see straight," said Green, a stay-at-home mom from Lorimor. "It's a really sick feeling." A teacher at the elementary school had reported that Green's child might have harmed his younger sibling. The investigator interviewed Green and her children for four hours Dec. 2, then decided that to best protect the other children, the boy should go to an emergency youth shelter. Green and others say the state is too quick to yank children from homes where abuse or neglect is suspected. Federal statistics appear to show Iowa resorted to foster care more than any other state in the country in 2003. The state's "rate of removal" was about three times the national average.

State officials say those figures are misleading. About 10 percent of the 5,736 children removed from their homes in 2003 were counted twice, they say. If a child is returned home but bounces back into the foster system within six months, Iowa counts it as two removals. Some states count it as one, with the return home considered a "visit," said Roger Munns, a spokesman for the Department of Human Services. Not counting those cases, however, Iowa still ranks among the top five states for removals. And there is no denying that Iowa has one of the worst records on children re-entering the foster care system within a year of returning home to their families. That happens to about 25 percent of the children, Munns said. The goal, set by national standards, is 8.6 percent or less.

Children's advocates say it's clear Iowa must do a better job at helping parents as they struggle to care for their kids at home. "Removing a child from everyone he knows and loves is enormously traumatic for that child," said Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform. "It can leave lifelong emotional scars. For a young enough child, it can be an experience akin to a kidnapping." He added, "Taking away so many children also overloads the system, leaving workers less time to find children in real danger." Mary Nelson, who oversees the system that helps abused and neglected children, said Iowa's removal rate "is not out of sync." Iowa courts remove children from their homes only under the most extraordinary circumstances when there's imminent risk of serious harm, she said. And even then, reunifying the child with the family is a top priority. When the number of children in foster care was counted on a single day in 2003, Iowa ranked in the middle among Midwest states. Iowa's ranking that day was lower than those of Nebraska, Missouri and South Dakota. It was the same as that of Illinois, and higher than those of Wisconsin and Minnesota. A federal review last year found Iowa does a good job with vulnerable kids in several areas: keeping them safe while in foster care, not moving them among more than two foster homes, returning them home in a timely way — or if that's impossible, finding them an adoptive home quickly.

But the state isn't doing as well at keeping children safe from repeat abuse, the review found. Better preparing families for the return of their child "clearly is an area we need to work on," Nelson said. A redesigned child-welfare system is meant to help that. Ottumwa grandmother Linda Downs is a clearinghouse for e-mails sent from families in pain. Our family was ripped apart, they tell her. Help me. Downs, 60, is director of Iowa Family Rights, which offers support for parents going through the juvenile court system. She stays up until 1 a.m. some nights answering the stream of e-mails. "We have a lot of desperate parents who just don't know where to turn," Downs said. "Their kids are being taken away from them for frivolous nonsense, for problems that could be corrected in the home." State officials can't defend their decisions case by case because of confidentiality rules. Of the 25,500 child abuse investigations in 2003, the DHS found abuse in 37 percent of the cases, a rate higher than in surrounding states. Munns said he knows that not all department decisions are right, but "people don't like to be confronted with the evidence they've harmed their own child. It's got to be somebody else's fault." Downs doesn't try to figure out whether someone is guilty of the allegations.

One of the people who sends e-mails to her is Dennis Grandinetti, who has been fighting the state since his nine children were taken away in 2001 after a nine-hour police standoff at his former home in Lehigh. Grandinetti said he had called for state troopers to help him with a prowler, but when Webster County sheriff's deputies arrived instead, he refused to deal with them because they'd broken his trust in the past. Grandinetti, who has since had some of his children returned, said he thinks social workers too often decide to take away a child, then "some judge rubber-stamps it." "You pay a big price, and your kids pay a big price," he said. A swing set and box of toys still wait for Donald Cowen's grandchildren, ages 2, 5, and 7. The kids were taken in May 2003 from his daughter, Tara Bloom, because of problems in her home. Cowen, who makes sour cream at Wells' Dairy in LeMars, said he wanted to care for the three kids, but no one asked him. He was going through a divorce at the time. "I doubt they'll ever be back," he said. Kary Kurtz of Waterloo knows that pain. She said she was arrested for arguing with a social worker and police officer who came to take away her grandchildren in August 2003. Kurtz says her daughter remarried and no longer drinks or uses drugs, but the children still are up for adoption.

Downs can identify with the families. Her grandchild was taken away from his parents when money troubles led to drugs and domestic violence in January 1993. Her grandson ended up in several foster homes and on "a regimen of medications that would knock down an elephant," she said. "I didn't recognize the child that came out of that nightmare," Downs said. "He just wasn't the same anymore." Downs knows the child's parents weren't faultless, but she also blames the system.

Public opinion has been a pendulum. In the late 1990s, there was an outcry over parents being wrongly accused of child abuse. Reaction swung the other way after 2-year-old Shelby Duis of Spirit Lake was beaten to death in 2000, despite repeated reports to state workers that she was being abused. Gov. Tom Vilsack announced a new child protection policy dubbed, "When there is a doubt, work to pull the child out," but state officials never recommended the removal of every child suspected of being abused. "(Some advocates) come from the position that all out-of-home placements are bad," Munns said. "Others are quick to criticize child-welfare systems for failure to remove kids soon enough. Both points are valid. Iowa tries to strike a balance that is in tune with best practice."

Jennifer Jacobs
17 February 2005

http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050217/NEWS10/502170404/1001&lead=1

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