Winkler knew her sister helped support herself by fostering children for Texas Mentor, a private agency that finds homes for children who have been removed from their parents' custody. She had taken in an infant and a two-year-old girl named Alexandria Hill. Texas Mentor paid the Smalls $44.30 a day to care for both kids. The company earned $34.74 daily on top of that to monitor the Smalls. Winkler thought Sherill was in it for the money.
That July day, Winkler walked into the living room to find Alexandria standing, facing the wall, in a dark room everyone called the man cave. With blond hair and blue eyes, Alexandria stood 32 inches tall and weighed just 30 pounds. She liked kitties and the color purple. Alexandria turned around and smiled at Winkler.
"Hi, Alex," Winkler said.
"No, you turn around," Sherill Small barked at the girl.
A squat woman with stringy brown hair and a prominent mole on her cheek, Small seemed on edge. She told Winkler that Alexandria had been getting in trouble all day. Among her offenses: waking up before Small and taking some food and water from the kitchen.
Winkler stayed at Small's house for two hours that afternoon. Two-year-old Alexandria stood in timeout in that dark room the whole time, she said.
At about a quarter to seven that evening, Clemon Small woke from a nap and left for a meeting at a nearby restaurant, leaving Sherill alone with Alexandria and the infant. About 15 minutes later, Sherill dialed his number, then 911.
First at the scene was Ward Roddam, the chief of the Rockdale Volunteer Fire Department, who was so surprised to find no one in the front yard waving him down that he called dispatch to make sure he had the right address. Inside, he encountered what he would describe as one of the strangest scenes in his 25-year career: Alexandria's limp body lay on the floor while Clemon sat on the couch and Sherill talked to 911. Roddam found mucus on Alexandria's mouth, suggesting that CPR, which foster parents are trained to administer, had never been attempted.
On the witness stand 15 months later, Roddam was asked if the Smalls seemed panicked. "'Panic' does not describe it at all," he said. They seemed "very calm."
WHAT HAPPENED IN Rockdale that night would be the subject of a weeklong trial in the fall of 2014, focusing on the care of Alexandria. But it also opened a window into the vast and opaque world of private foster care agencies—for-profit companies and nonprofit organizations that are increasingly taking on the role of monitoring the nation's most vulnerable children. The agency involved in Small's case was the Lone Star branch of the Mentor Network, a $1.2 billion company headquartered in Boston that specializes in finding caretakers, or "mentors," for a range of populations, from adults with brain injuries to foster children. With 4,000 children in its care in 14 states, Mentor is one of the largest players in the business of private foster care, a fragmented industry of mostly local and regional providers that collect hundreds of millions in tax dollars annually while receiving little scrutiny from government authorities.
Squeezed by high caseloads and tight budgets, state and local child welfare agencies are increasingly leaving the task of recruiting, screening, training, and monitoring foster parents to these private agencies. In many places, this arrangement has created a troubling reality in which the government can seize your children, but then outsource the duty of keeping them safe—and duck responsibility when something goes wrong.
Nationally, no one tracks how many children are in private foster homes, or how these homes perform compared to those vetted directly by the government. As part of an 18-month investigation, I asked every state whether it at least knew how many children in its foster system had been placed in privately screened homes. Very few could tell me. For the eight states that did, the total came to at least 72,000 children in 2011. Not one of the states had a statistically valid dataset comparing costs, or rates of abuse or neglect, in privately versus publicly vetted homes.
"It's troubling," says Christina Riehl, senior staff attorney for the Children's Advocacy Institute at the University of San Diego School of Law. "There are so many places where the government puts money to fix a problem without adequately checking to see if the money is actually fixing the problem." Good data would make the system more accountable, Riehl says, but "data is a low priority because it's difficult. How do you measure child safety?"
Mentor and other private foster care agencies say they are committed to children's well-being, and that nothing can prevent the occasional tragic incident. But in my investigation, I found evidence of widespread problems in the industry—failed monitoring, missed warning signs, and, in some cases, horrific abuse. In Los Angeles, a two-year-old girl was beaten to death by her foster mother, who was cleared by a private agency despite a criminal record and seven prior child abuse and neglect complaints filed against her. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, prosecutors alleged that foster parents screened by a private agency beat their foster son so badly that he suffered brain damage and went blind. (A grand jury refused to return an indictment in the case.)
In Chattanooga, Tennessee, a foster father vetted by a private agency induced his 16-year-old foster daughter to have sex with him and a neighbor. In Riverview, Florida, a 10-year-old girl with autism drowned in a pond behind a foster home. The private agency that inspected the home had previously identified the pond as a safety hazard but had not required a fence. In Duluth, Minnesota, a private agency failed to discover that a foster mother's adult son had moved back into her home. The son, who had a criminal record for burglary that would have disqualified him from being around foster children, went on to sexually abuse a 10-year-old foster girl. In Texas, at least nine children living in private agency homes died of abuse or neglect between 2011 and 2013.
Roland Zullo, a researcher at the University of Michigan who has studied foster care privatization, believes tragedies like these may be linked to the financial incentives of the industry, which he says are not aligned with child welfare. "This is just the kind of service where the market approach doesn't work," he says.
The bottom line for private foster care agencies—whether large, for-profit corporations or small, local nonprofits—is tied to the number of foster parents on their roster, and thus their ability to place children quickly. Given that every foster parent represents potential revenue, Zullo says, an agency may be more likely to overlook sketchy personal histories or potential safety hazards. There's little incentive, he adds, to seek out reasons to reject a family, to investigate problems after children are placed, or to do anything else that could result in a child leaving the agency's program. And as tough as the margins are for nonprofit agencies, the perverse incentives are exacerbated at for-profit agencies that need to make money for owners or shareholders.
"What happens," Zullo says, "is the lives of these children become commodities."
ALEXANDRIA'S GRANDMOTHER, DIANN HILL, has graying hair and a world-weary way about her. Over plates of fried catfish and okra at a diner in Lexington, Texas, she told me how her granddaughter ended up in foster care.
It was November 2012, three months after Alexandria and her parents—Diann's son, Joshua Hill, and his girlfriend, Mary Sweeney—moved from Florida to Austin to be closer to Joshua's family. Mary and Joshua, both in their early 20s, had problems. Mary suffered from grand mal seizures that prevented her from being alone with Alexandria. Joshua, who according to state records had served time behind bars as a juvenile, struggled with anger issues. They argued over their daughter. They smoked pot. Child protection got involved after receiving a couple of calls about Mary and Joshua, including a report that Joshua nearly dropped Alexandria down a flight of stairs (an incident Joshua denies). "Mary and Josh weren't perfect," Diann said. "They popped dirty for marijuana. No other drugs. Just marijuana. It's not like they were getting Alex high, smoking in front of her. They waited until she went to bed; she was safe in the crib. They didn't leave her alone in the house. She was never sick a day in her life. They fought. What couple doesn't fight?"
In early November, Joshua told child protection he was going to move, with Alexandria, into his parents' home near Lexington, a plan the agency approved. But he didn't follow through; he and Mary remained in Austin while Alexandria lived with his parents. The state didn't like this arrangement, in part because Joshua's dad had been convicted in the 1990s for having sex with Diann's then-16-year-old daughter from a previous relationship. (Diann says she called the police on him and divorced him while he was serving time, but later remarried him.)
In late November 2012, a state investigator signed an affidavit requesting foster care for Alexandria, citing "serious safety concerns" about Mary and Joshua's "limited parenting skills." Alexandria was placed with a foster family. But Joshua complained about the girl's care in January 2013, according to Diann, and she was transferred to Sherill and Clemon Small.
By this time, there had already been warning signs about Sherill's capability as a foster parent. She'd reported to the company that she was stressed out by fostering children, something that might have set off alarms for someone familiar with her background.
She had told her Mentor screener that she had been a foster child herself, entering the system at age two, when her mother could no longer provide for her and six siblings, and that her experiences had been "good and bad." Once, a foster parent made her sit outside in the dark on a cold Missouri night for punishment.
Mentor's assessment also revealed that Sherill didn't raise one of her three daughters, Jennie Langley. Instead, the assessment said that Jennie was raised by her paternal grandmother and that Sherill had a "despondent" relationship with her daughter. The Mentor screener explained this by noting that Jennie was a defiant child who as an adult didn't approve of Sherill marrying a black man. The assessment says that Mentor officials spoke with Sherill's other daughters but gives no indication that Jennie or her grandparents were ever contacted. (Mentor later said it tried to contact Jennie, but was unsuccessful.)
I tracked down Jennie Langley in rural southeastern Texas. Leroy Langley, her grandfather, answered the phone. Leroy said that he and his wife had formally adopted Jennie when she was about seven. In fact, he said, they once had custody of all three of Sherill's daughters because Sherill was "wild, a street woman." One of Sherill's sisters and a daughter confirmed the story to me, saying that the daughters lived with the Langleys for several years in the mid-1980s.
It took me just a few phone calls to get this information. There's no indication that Mentor went to the same effort.
AMERICANS HAVE BEEN HORRIFIED by the foster care system for as long as there's been foster care—about a century and a half. In the 1850s, the abolitionist Charles Loring Brace founded the Children's Aid Society of New York, which began removing poor and neglected children from the city and shipping them, by train, to new homes in rural communities. Before long, critics of the "orphan trains" were accusing the society of recklessly placing little thieves and liars into good, upstanding homes. Child protection in general remained in the hands of private charitable organizations for decades, although state legislatures sometimes allocated them money. But in the late 1800s and early 1900s, states began to take the lead, and by the middle of the 20th century, foster care had become entirely a government function.
Today, some 250,000 American children enter this struggling system each year, and child welfare agencies are in perpetual need of more foster parents to handle the influx. Against this backdrop, the private sector's promise of more-efficient services at a lower cost has been hard to resist. A couple of states (Kansas and Florida) are entirely dependent on private foster care agencies. Texas, where 90 percent of foster children are housed in private agency homes, is seeking to privatize the rest of the system—even as child advocates warn that quality of care is slipping. "Texas has chronically underfunded the child protection system," said Ashley Harris, a former CPS caseworker who now works for the advocacy group Texans Care for Children. "I don't think we can expand privatization until some of these basic issues are addressed."
Private foster care agencies generally eschew media scrutiny, but I found one in Sacramento, California, that was willing to give me an inside view. Positive Option Family Services, a small nonprofit with just 15 employees, is based on the east side of town in a strip mall with stained carpets and scuffed walls. I was somewhat surprised that the agency's CEO, Jody Kovill, let me hang around the office, because Positive Option has a checkered record: Since 2008, two children in its care have died, one of appendicitis and the other in a mysterious house fire. The agency oversees only about 70 children, yet state investigators have found more than 190 deficiencies in its operations since 2009, including several failures to screen the criminal records of adults with access to foster children. In May 2013, the state threatened legal action if the agency didn't clean up its act (though no charges were brought).
Positive Option staffers frequently grumbled about their treatment at the hands of county regulators. But other than that I found them to be affable, earnest people who seemed genuinely concerned about the welfare of foster children. Every month, Positive Option hosts a two-hour continuing education class for foster parents in a room with crayon-streaked tables and secondhand chairs. I attended several over a period of months, and each time I was struck by the reunionlike atmosphere, where foster parents hugged their hellos and agency social workers were on a friendly, first-name basis with everyone.
Kovill, the cofounder, is an energetic 82-year-old with a white beard who continues to manage the organization on a day-to-day basis. Kovill feels a special kinship with the foster children he serves: He says he was abandoned by his father when he was about seven and given to a shoemaker as a laborer. "Foster care is a good system," Kovill said. "I wish it had been there when I was a kid." (Kovill told me he changed his name long ago to break from the family that abandoned him. He wouldn't tell me what his old name was.)
Kovill told me the margins are tight in private foster care, especially if child welfare is your top priority. He said he once had to sell land he owned in Arizona to keep Positive Option, which has annual revenues of about $1.2 million, afloat. Some of his employees report taking 10 percent pay cuts several years ago for the same reason, cuts that remain in effect today. "I'm still a businessman, and I still try to stay in the black as best I can," Kovill told me one day in the cramped office he shares with his wife, Luan, who works at the agency for free. "But if it meant a car seat for a baby, if it meant diapers for a baby, if it meant safety for a child, the bottom line is gone."
Kovill took responsibility for Positive Option's problems, saying they came about in part because he was distracted by the agency's financial struggles during the recession. "I just trusted everybody to do what I do—I work hard," Kovill said, referring to some former employees he eventually fired. "I figured they did too. Well, you can't do that."
The state of California pays private foster care agencies like Positive Option a monthly fee for each child in one of their homes. That fee ran from $1,714 to $1,977 (depending on age) per child per month in fiscal year 2013. Under state regulations, roughly half of that money is required to go directly to foster parents, but agencies can elect to give more; Positive Option, for example, rewards outstanding foster parents with more money. Whatever is left over after paying the foster parents goes to the agencies—up to $968 per child per month. In 2013, California paid a total of $308 million to private foster care agencies.
JOSHUA HILL SAYS he knew Alexandria wasn't going to make it the moment he laid eyes on her in the hospital. She was hooked up to a ventilator, tubes snaking from every part of her body, a brace on her neck. "There's no way she was going to wake up from that," he said. "Her eyes were swollen. There was no chance."
It was Halloween when we met at a park in Lexington, Texas, near where his parents live. As we talked, children roamed the small town's main streets, trick-or-treating in the late afternoon light. Joshua wore an olive Army T-shirt over camo pants, a backward cap concealing his long hair, his long, wispy goatee bobbing up and down as he spoke. He and Alexandria's mother had signed a settlement with Mentor, the terms of which he was not allowed to disclose. But the 25-year-old, who made ends meet delivering pizzas for Domino's when Alexandria was in foster care, pulled up in a late-model Scion tC with a throaty engine and told me he owns property just outside of town.
Joshua said he got the call at around 9:30 p.m., which would have been about two and a half hours after Small dialed 911. "They just said it was something with Alex," he said. "She had an accident. That's all they would say." Joshua was broke, and the hospital was an hour away, but a friend gave him $40 for gas. "I bought a pack of cigarettes and hauled ass," he said.
Joshua showed little emotion when we talked, until he described seeing his daughter in the hospital. Then his voice dropped and his eyes grew wet. "I asked the doctor flat out: 'Is there any chance at all that she could wake up even a little bit?' He said no. There was too much damage inside of her."
Alexandria was kept on life support until July 31 so her mother's family could drive in from Florida to say goodbye. After the plug was pulled, a doctor allowed Alexandria's mother to hold her for 15 minutes before declaring her dead. A subsequent autopsy found the little girl had bruising on her right cheek, left ear, left knee, right ankle, chin, back, and buttocks; multiple blunt-force injuries to her head; subdural hemorrhaging; and two tears in her liver. A third of her blood was found pooled in her abdomen.
Sherill Small was indicted for capital murder—but it was far from a clear-cut case. Small was the only person who really knew what happened, and she claimed it was just a terrible accident.
Original Article
Source: motherjones.com/
Author: Brian Joseph
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