7-year old Jack Loiselle, whose family received DCF assistance for several months before authorities found Jack beaten and starved into a coma by his violent offender junkie dad.
When 40 children died last year while in State care, the Massachusetts Office of the Child Advocate released an annual report which played these deaths off as if they were just business as usual. Maybe if we increase the budget for the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families so they can hire more [badly supervised and trained] social workers, the problem will go away?
In response, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker allocated an additional $35.5 million to DCF, but he really didn’t lift the hood on the car to find out why the DCF vehicle is broken. That would have required an audit of DCF’s books to find out where their money actually goes, not just asking the same people who created the problem how much ransom they require to fix it.
To be fair, former Governor Deval Patrick left Governor Baker with a real shit sandwich over at DCF when he left office last year. Under Patrick’s leadership, the Department starved for several years, leaving a ballooning number of dead children in the wake of former DCF Commissioner Olga Roche’s embattled resignation.
When it comes to giving a hoot about Massachusetts’ most vulnerable kids, we only hear stories about these (mostly poor and not white) kids when they commit crimes and/or turn up dead. The evidence tends to show the general public probably doesn’t have a clue how deadly the world is for American children who receive care from the State. That’s partly because the Juvenile Courts and the Department’s records not open to the public, but also because OCA, the State’s child welfare watchdog, appears to be asleep at the wheel.
The Governor and the Legislature have every reason to feel nervous (if in fact) they depend on OCA to give them a clear picture of child fatality and abuse stats for Massachusetts. The fact is that OCA itself might not actually know how many kids are in State care.
Perhaps no one is counting how many kids go missing.
The Office of the Child Advocate-Or DCF Advocate?
“Our mission is to improve the safety, health, and well-being of Massachusetts children by pro- moting positive change in public policy and practice. We further our mission by focusing on our core values: information, collaboration, and accountability.” -2015 OCA Annual Report
It’s a real problem that the FY 2015 OCA report doesn’t list up front the total number of kids on the State’s rolls receiving services from the Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services (which includes the Department of Children and Families, Dept. of Youth Services, etc.). In fact, I had to turn to a recent report issued by Massachusetts State Auditor Suzanne Bump to discover that number.
From July 1, 2010 through September 30, 2012, Bump’s office found that:
“…there were an average of more than 7,000 children under the age of 18 in foster care across Massachusetts at any one time and a total of more than 40,000 children served by the department. During fiscal year 2012, DCF administered approximately $753 million, of which federal funds totaled approximately $16 million.”
According to OCA’s FY2015 annual report, “the child mortality rate measures deaths of children ages 0 – 17 per 100,000. Massachusetts’ infant mortality and child mortality rates are among the lowest in the nation.”
2011-12 Average Annual Child Mortality Rates provided by OCA:
Massachusetts: 33.8 per 100,000 persons
National: 51.2 per 100,000 persons
Wow, Massachusetts is really on fiyah (translation: fire) when you look at it that way, except for the fact that 2 important figures are missing from the OCA report; the total number of kids in State care as compared to how many of the children who died during that same period who were under State care at the time.
There were 38 deaths per 40,000 kids in the Department’s care during that time.
OUCH.
Put in perspective, the above-referenced stats show that kids receiving services from the State are more than twice as likely to die than those in the general public who do not.
But don’t thank OCA for that information because you won’t find it neatly spelled out in OCA’s report. Governor Baker and legislators can thank the New England Center for Investigative Reporting who spent several months and nearly $4,500 getting those figures from the Department.
In fact, no one really knows how bad things have gotten for the Department.
Bump’s office only conducted a very limited partial audit of DCF’s records, and she prefaced her report with the following disclaimer statement:
“The findings of our audit identified a lack of collaboration between agencies, weak policies and procedures, and unreliable or outdated data.”
Well that’s a real vote of confidence from Bump’s office that OCA and DCF can take to the bank.
Shameful considering that Judge Gail Grainger has been the head of OCA for the past seven years; before that Grainger sat on the bench in Juvenile Court for 13 years. Grainger probably has a total of 45+ years of education, training, and experience leading up to the 2015 report she inked for the legislature.
If State Auditor Suzanne Bump Can Count DCF Kids, Why Can’t OCA and DCF?
According to OCA, accounting for the care of the State’s most vulnerable children is OCA’s primary mission:
“The OCA is responsible for reporting annually to the governor, legislative leaders, and the public on the activities of our office. In addition, Massachusetts has a duty under the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) to disclose to the public information about child abuse or neglect resulting in a child fatality or near fatality.”
If you read OCA’s reports, you get the impression there may be some snafus. 40% of kids in DCF care are on psychotropic drugs, and so it’s no wonder there were a few children who committed suicide or died under unsavory circumstances. So unfortunate, right?
On the other hand, DCF itself admits that hundreds of kids may be missing off the Department’s rolls, and there is good reason to believe that no one is actually looking for them.
In 2014, DCF Commissioner Olga Roche told WBUR in 2014 that 100 kids were missing from State care. Later in the interview, Roche’s Aide says 113 and corrects her. Then in the end Roche says the real number is “closer to 129” but she’ll get back to WBUR.
WHOA.
129 kids missing from DCF care? That’s nuts.
Can you, as a parent imagine what would happen if even ONE of your kids went missing and you failed to report it to the authorities? An Amber Alert would probably go out. If the authorities did find your kid, DCF could have grounds to file a care and protection action against you in Juvenile Court and have you declared an unfit parent. You might never see that kid again.
So I bet OCA is all over that 129 missing kids figure, right?
Not really.
A year later, OCA’s annual report completely omitted any reference to specific statistics regarding kids missing from State care. Well, except for a brief mention on page 19 of which insinuates that less than 14 children ran away that year. I don’t even know how Grainger’s office came up with that number of runaways and missing kids except to say she probably didn’t cross reference it with DCF leaders, reports to local police departments, or NCMEC. Also doesn’t seem like OCA bothered to ask the Judiciary how many CHINS warrants were issued for missing kids last year, as 129 seems like a pretty low statewide number for the general population (never mind the Department’s high risk rolls.)
But there were probably 129 Amber Alerts for missing foster kids last year, right?
Not so much.
Not only are OCA’s figures on missing kids probably complete horse shit according to DCF, but the way Roche was talking to WBUR, kids go missing all the time and it doesn’t get reported to authorities. All the children’s captors have to do to thwart the system is have their child victims call their social worker(s).
“They let them know that they’re OK, they are safe, they are with friends,” Roche told WBUR. “Sometimes they run away for a couple of weeks. Sometimes they run away for a couple of days. While we don’t know specifically the address, they let us know that they’re OK.”
No offense to the foster kid’s friends, but WHOA.
Is anyone besides me worried that these missing kids might be ripe for exploitation?How exactly does the Department imagine that a foster kid on the lam with no money, no parents, no education, no meaningful employment experience or training support themselves?
Here’s a parody of how I imagine that “check in call” between a missing child and DCF probably goes:
Dismissing the kids’ plight out of hand is a pretty radical position for a State agency to take with regards to missing and exploited children, most of whom come from high risk backgrounds. Roche also told WBUR that Massachusetts might not know which or how many foster kids are missing, but these kids are probably not worth chasing after:
“The majority, also, I wanted to say, these are 17-year-old kiddos,” Roche said. “Unfortunately we are not able to lock them up or restrain them or put them into facilities that are locked facilities, so sometimes when they are dealing with a trauma issue they just decide, ‘I can’t cope with this situation anymore,’ and they decide to run away from the facility.”
Let me get this straight.
The State removes children from their parents because their parents have abused and harmed them, then uses the harm complained of to indemnify the State when the State itself places kids in jeopardy? The State actually blames the kids for the sins of the adults who failed them?
Am I the only one who remembers that incident where a few weeks ago where an internal investigation found a “blatant lack of oversight by DCF” with regards to the licensure of a foster home where one toddler died of heat stroke covered in bruises while another was badly injured?
Or how about last year when the Suffolk County DA indicted eight youth workers for allegedly abusing kids in State custody? You think those youth workers might have something to hide if kids go missing from their care?
And this is not my imagination running wild here folks. This year authorities discovered that the Department mislabeled at least one teenage girl a “runaway,” but that she was actually a sexually exploited child who was being sold out of a Raynham hotel by her homeless pimp. The Raychem Daily call reported that during the sting at the Quality Inn, police also found heroin, hallucinogenic mushrooms, needles and ammunition among the pimp’s possessions.
Raynam Police Chief James Donovan told the Raynham Call that what made it worse was that Fall River detectives told him that they were encountering cases in which victims were even younger, in their early teens, and that their parents were unaware of their activities.
It wasn’t the first time something like this happened. In 2007, Boston Magazine published a fantastic expose on how Massachusetts authorities dropped the ball on a Boston area under-age prostitution ring which also used kids in the Department’s care.
I assume that when the Detectives say “parents” they are including the Department? Because for this poor girl in Raynham, Lord only knows what tragic reasons the State had for deeming her parents unfit and placing her in the Department’s care. You can rest assured that the State’s cavalier towards missing and exploited kids does not extend to parents based on the fact that there are so damn many of them in State care.
Forgive me for saying so, and surely the FBI and Attorney General know best whether some of the billing practices outlined here may constitutes criminal fraud, but does DCF’s business plan remind anyone else of a big old pump and dump, get it while you can, ponzi scheme funded by taxpayers?
Maybe if the AG treated foster homes that bill the State for the services they don’t provide the kids the same way she does inmates who collect unemployment from jail, things would be different.
The No Shill Zone 
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