Some hail effects of 2003 reform effort, but victims' lawyers question progress
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Xavier Jones, a 21-month-old boy that died after he swallowed a bottle of methadone that belonged to a relative living in his foster home. The state paid $800,000 to Jones' family.TRENTON — Nate was 8 years old when he first accused his foster mother of abusing him. But it took several complaints over a number of years before state child-welfare investigators could prove she was abusive and move him to another foster family.
Then the boy was abused again in another foster home — this time by his foster mother’s son.
“He was taken from his mother at a very young age. He was in 22 different places over the course of his life,” said attorney Joel Garber of Voorhees, who represented the boy and his adoptive family in a lawsuit against the Division of Youth and Family Services. “This kid has been through it all.”
Nate, now 17 and living in Colorado with his adoptive family, received $1.2 million last year from the state to settle the suit.
It was part of the nearly $7 million New Jersey paid out last year to settle lawsuits brought on behalf of three foster children harmed in a system created to protect them, according to information from the state Attorney General’s office. The state admitted no wrongdoing.
The foster care lawsuits represent 15 percent of the $51.7 million the state paid out in 317 suits last year. But attorneys and child advocates say these lawsuits are among the most tragic because DYFS acts as the de facto parent when children are removed from abusive or neglectful homes. The agency is responsible for screening, training and monitoring foster parents.
The lawsuits were paid after New Jersey spent more than $1 billion beginning in 2003 to overhaul its child-welfare system under the supervision of a federal judge.
With DYFS supervising more than 7,000 children living in licensed foster and group homes, advocates and attorneys say it would be unfair to use any one case to indict an entire system. But they also say these cases should raise red flags — and be used to correct flaws.
“DYFS, like everything else, is run by human beings and everyone makes mistakes. The problem is when they make a mistake it’s a devastating mistake because they are dealing with extremely important issues,” said attorney Jeffrey Advokat of Morristown, who represented another boy sexually abused by his foster parents in Hudson County from 1996 to 1998. The state settled that case for $4.5 million last May.
“While these are individual cases, I would hope that DYFS is looking at them — as they should for all child death and serious injury cases … to identify any problems in practice that must be fixed to prevent similar cases in the future,” said Cecilia Zalkind, executive director of Advocates for Children of New Jersey.
At least one of the three victims endured abuse before the 2003 court order. But another case that settled last year — the June 7, 2006, death of 21-month-old Xavier Jones, who swallowed a bottle of methadone that belonged to a relative living in the foster home — occurred afterward. The state has already publicly acknowledged mistakes in that case.
The state paid $800,000 to Xavier Jones’s family. The family’s attorney did not return calls seeking comment.
According to a 2007 report by the now-defunct Office of the Child Advocate, DYFS failed to regularly communicate with Xavier’s foster mother. She made repeated requests to have children removed because she couldn’t handle their care, to which DYFS “did not always respond,” the report said.
In a response statement on its website, the department said Xavier’s caseworker supervised too many children. The state closed the foster home, and also pledged to “re-emphasize in our training for prospective and ongoing resource parents the need for proper medication storage.”
Lauren Kidd, spokeswoman for DYFS’ parent agency, the Department of Children and Families, declined to discuss any specific cases. But in general, Kidd said, “Changes have begun to take hold since the reform.” The department “has been able to recruit and license more foster parents and focus on appropriate, timely and thorough investigations.”
Judith Meltzer, the court-appointed monitor of New Jersey’s reform effort, praised DYFS for recruiting 7,000 new foster parents since 2005, and for completing the vast majority of abuse investigations in foster care within 60 days.
But Zalkind said these cases call into question the adequacy of foster-care abuse investigations.
“What concerns me is that system problems that put kids at risk in the past have presumably been addressed (by the reforms),” Zalkind said. “With all these positive changes, why are there cases in which the basic safety of children in (foster care) placement — to be free from abuse or neglect — is still at risk?”
Allegations of abuse and neglect in foster homes, schools and other institutions are investigated by a different team than the employees who investigate complaints against a child’s parents. This team, the Institutional Abuse Investigations Unit, has delved into more than 3,000 allegations a year, with one-third of them against foster families, Kidd said.
The percent of allegations confirmed against foster parents or caregivers in other “institutional” settings — such as day care centers, camps and schools — is very low. In 2009, the unit confirmed 2.75 percent of all allegations, down from 7.6 percent in 2006.
Overall, the rate of substantiated abuse and neglect is 0.14 percent in New Jersey, Kidd said. That’s nearly three times lower than the national average of 0.5 percent, according to Fred Wulczyn, a research fellow at Chapin Hall, a child-welfare think tank in Chicago.
While Advokat said he feels there has been some improvement in the foster care situation, there clearly is more work to be done.
Garber, the attorney for Nate and his adoptive family, is not as optimistic about DYFS’ progress. He said the lawsuit “woke me up to how the system doesn’t work. … In foster homes, it’s too hard to police what’s going on.”