Michigan still struggles with abuse and neglect of foster children
While Michigan has improved its handling of child welfare issues for foster children, the state still has work to do, according to a semi-annual report from the Federal Courts Oversight Office.
Judge Nancy Edmunds of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan on Tuesday praised the “tremendous progress” the state has made in improving child welfare for foster children, according to a news release from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. In January, Edmunds reduced the number of focus areas for the state, allowing it to stop monitoring in 33 areas and move to structural and policy monitoring in 11 areas.
But even as Edmunds praised the state, it met or exceeded performance standards in only six of 28 areas monitored, according to the latest report from federal inspectors, released Tuesday. The report is part of a 2008 settlement stemming from a lawsuit filed by Children’s Rights, which claimed foster children were not safe in Michigan.
The state has implemented several exit plans, but 16 years later it is still under federal supervision.
The latest report covers the first six months of 2023. Monitors noted improvements in the state’s progress in sending older teens out of foster care back to their parents, adopting them or placing them in guardianship, limiting adoption workers’ caseloads to no more than 15 children, and not separating siblings in foster care. The state still does not meet its goals in these areas, but this is the first time there has been an improvement.
“MDHHS remains committed to keeping families safely together,” Department Director Elizabeth Hertel said in a statement. “I am proud of the work we are doing and the progress we have made as we continue to work toward excellence in our child welfare system. We remain focused on the remaining requirements of the agreement.”
Demetrius Starling, deputy director of the MDHHS Children’s Services Administration, said the state continues to follow its Keep Kids Safe Action Agenda, the plan it implemented to improve how it handles child protection issues.
“We are working with police, judges, legislators and other partners and will not be satisfied until Michigan is the best place in America to raise children and raise families,” Starling said in a statement.
The state still has problems documenting and obtaining parental consent to take psychotropic medications. It also has problems ensuring that staff visit parents, that parents and their children can visit twice a month, and that foster homes follow action plans when the state determines there is a problem with the children’s access. About 66% of children whose family goal is reunification with their parents had visits from their parents twice a month, even though the goal is 85%.
Another area where the state needs significant improvement is in conducting investigations into abuse, neglect and improper care in foster care.
According to the report, court monitors were unable to verify the state’s performance in conducting these investigations. That’s because 32% of the 120 foster care abuse or neglect investigations the monitors reviewed were deficient. These included 32 investigations in which not enough information was collected to make a finding and six investigations in which abuse or neglect should have been found but was not.
According to the report, 437 children were involved in 459 cases of abuse or neglect. The victimization rate was 14.5 victims per 100,000 days in foster care, but the federal goal is less than 9.07 victims per 100,000 days in foster care. Michigan’s victimization rate has “steadily increased” over the past three fiscal years, from 5.55 in 2021 to 8.04 in 2022.
Until that goal is met, the state must produce a separate report analyzing data on maltreatment in foster care. The 2023 report found that abuse and neglect were most likely to occur in child care settings – including group homes, residential treatment centers, detention centers and residential homes – and among relative foster parents. Most often, it was due to inadequate supervision.
For related foster families, unauthorized visits to the biological parents and alcohol and drug use were the biggest problems, often with the biological parents, who were not allowed to leave their children unsupervised. For non-related foster parents, physical abuse was the most common.
Child Protective Services failed to investigate several cases of abuse in foster care reported to it. These included a child whose broken glasses were held together with string and tape for months and whose nose was cut by the glasses; a child who repeatedly reported feeling unsafe in a foster home and being pushed and shoved by staff; a staff member who left an 11-year-old and a 12-year-old unsupervised outside while one forced the other to perform oral sex; and a staff member who put her hands around a 9-year-old’s neck and pulled him away from a drinking fountain.
The U.S. Office of the Inspector General found that Michigan is among 16 states unable to identify multiple cases of mistreatment within a facility or across multiple facilities. The OIG found that these states did not have the information needed to recognize these patterns in residential facilities. According to the study, states are not required to collect this information, but the inability to recognize patterns hinders their ability to fix systemic problems.
Court monitors also found that the state did not properly implement action plans put in place after a child care facility was found to have violated policies or abused, neglected or improperly supervised a child.
Implementation of these plans was often delayed, ineffective, inadequate or non-existent, lacked precision, clarity and substance, and did not address risks to children, the court observers’ report said.
Despite these plans, serious violations such as physical violence, improper restraints resulting in injuries, ineffective intervention with suicidal youth and inappropriate supervision, often by the same staff, continued to occur.
“In numerous cases, there was no evidence that previous CAPs for repeated child safety violations were analyzed and revised, even after the identified risks to child safety continued to exist,” the report said. “Often, CAP review consisted only of staff interviews rather than a review of records to ensure that CAP provisions were actually being implemented.”
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