Advocate: New Jersey child welfare flawed
From George Lerner
CNN
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Kevin Ryan listens to a question during a news conference Thursday.
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NEWARK, New Jersey (CNN) -- New Jersey's child advocate called on state lawmakers Thursday to address systemic flaws in the child welfare system or risk the kinds of abuses that left four severely malnourished boys in the care of their adoptive parents for eight years.
Kevin Ryan, appointed as the state watchdog over the child welfare system, spoke after unveiling a study of the Jackson family, whose four adopted sons -- ages 9 to 19 -- were found in October 2003 emaciated and malnourished in their Collingswood, New Jersey, home. Authorities said the four sons had been starved to the point where none of them weighed more than 45 pounds.
"The story of these boys tells us that this system is broken and it has been broken for a long time, and it has to be aggressively and comprehensively overhauled," Ryan said in an interview with CNN.
The child advocate's office, along with its special counsel, Latham & Watkins, issued a series of recommendations to address the problems raised by the Jackson case.
They include:
• Conduct face-to-face visits with all children in the adoption system, as well as all members of those children's households.
• Establish medical care to monitor and track the health of foster children.
• Improve coordination between child welfare offices and make sure child welfare workers are fully versed in state regulations.
• Provide a support network for families after adoption and require that all families receiving an adoption subsidy complete a medical exam for each child every year.
• Set up an auditing process to watch over the child welfare process.
Ryan placed much of the blame for the systemic failures on the state's Division of Youth and Family Services.
"What we've uncovered includes eight years of systemic dysfunction: human and system failures," he said. "We're talking about an agency whose own case workers are unclear about the policies that the agency expects them to implement. We're talking about an agency that during the past eight years has been unclear about what it expects at the highest level of administration. For example, all of the boys should have received a medical examination every single year."
Family Services became the focus of national attention in January 2003 after it was disclosed that the agency had prematurely closed the file on Faheem Williams, a 7-year-old boy found dead and stuffed in a plastic bin in a Newark basement. His two brothers, ages 4 and 7, were locked in an adjoining room. (Full story)
Ryan also said the system worked so poorly that the state could not be certain that all children in the adoption process are now safe.
"We are recommending that all children that are in the Adoption Resource Centers, all of the children designated as eligible for adoption, should be re-seen because our investigation uncovered that hundreds, if not thousands, were not seen by the Department of Health and Human Services as part of a safety assessment process and we can't be sure today that those children are, in fact, safe," he said.
Marcia Lowry, executive director of Children's Rights, a private advocacy group, welcomed the child advocate's report as a positive development, but said it is limited in scope.
"The report doesn't deal with all the problems in the child welfare system," Lowry said, "issues that go well beyond the Jackson family."
She said other concerns include the high caseload of New Jersey childcare workers and problems with the adoption process.
New Jersey's government is required to deliver a comprehensive plan to overhaul the child welfare system on February 18. Observers said state officials are working around the clock to complete the report by the deadline, but issues involving budget and management are still unresolved.
The state has 30 days to respond to Ryan's report.
