State makes a deal to fix foster care

By Jonathan Martin
Seattle Times staff reporter

MIKE SIEGEL / THE SEATTLE TIMES Amie Anderson endured 34 foster homes, something she hopes her son will never know.

E-mail this article Print this article Search archive Most read articles Most e-mailed articles

Related stories Archive: State justices declare rights of foster kids; new hope for better care

In the mediated settlement, the Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) agreed to create an independent panel of experts to guard against children pinballing from foster home to foster home.

The outside oversight is unprecedented in a system responsible for 10,300 lives on any given day. It averts a trial and the potential of direct judicial oversight required in similar lawsuits around the country.

If DSHS doesn't comply with the panel's recommendations, the children's attorneys can take the agency back to court.

Though no dollar figure is attached, the settlement essentially mirrors an existing DSHS reform plan that would cost $50 million, making it one of the largest lawsuit settlements in state history. State lawmakers yesterday said they disliked being forced to budget that money and promised to closely examine the deal.

DSHS' internal reform plan was drafted earlier this year after the agency was in the bottom third of states by the federal Department of Health and Human Services. DSHS' new child-welfare director, Uma Ahluwalia, sat in on most of the settlement talks and was credited with ending her agency's long-standing resistance to settling the suit.

Settlement agreement Find the settlement agreement online at: www1.dshs.wa.gov/word/EA/080504Braam.doc

The state's practice of repeatedly moving foster children prompted Bellingham lawyer Tim Farris to sue DSHS in 1998 on behalf of 13 children who cumulatively had been moved 208 times. The DSHS previously paid those children $1.3 million. The suit was later changed to class-action status on behalf of at least 3,500 foster children, each of whom had been moved at least three times, and gained backing from the state's largest child-advocacy group, the Children's Alliance. At that point, the intent of the suit became reforming the system.

Amie Anderson was one of Farris' initial clients. After being taken from her parents as a toddler, she endured 20 elementary and middle schools, 19 therapists and 34 different placements that included a variety of foster parents ranging from Christians to atheists.

Fixing foster care Jessica Braam vs. State of Washington The agreement requires the state child-welfare agency to: • Reduce multiple foster placements, holding team meetings for children with three or more placements and notifying a child's legal representative before any move. • Improve mental-health care. Foster children must get a physical and mental-health screening within 30 days and be periodically rechecked. • Support foster parents by giving them results of all health screenings and access to an after-hours support line and respite care. • Improve child safety by requiring social workers to visit every 30 days (instead of 90). Children will not be made to sleep in state offices, adult psychiatric or detox centers or adult homes, and they won't be placed in homes with sexually aggressive youths unless the foster parent has special training. • Keep siblings together if at all possible and recruit foster homes willing to take them. • Improve care for adolescents. Source: Settlement

"All my life, I haven't really had an identity," Anderson said yesterday. She is now a 22-year-old married mother. "My suitcase was always packed."

Farris, who will receive part of $1.8 million in attorneys fees, said he was pleased by the deal.

Secret deal took 2 months

Farris, assisted by two nonprofit law firms, won at trial in 2001, prompting a Whatcom County Superior Court judge to put the foster-care system under his oversight. But the state Supreme Court overturned that landmark order earlier this year, sending the case back for a new trial scheduled for September.

The settlement was hammered out in secret over two months. It allows the monitoring panel to set benchmarks for DSHS to hit in six areas, including better mental-health care for children and more support for foster parents.

Such panels are an increasingly common practice in similar lawsuits around the county and a solution that allows experts, rather than attorneys, to craft reforms, Farris said.

The panel will include a child-welfare official from another state, a researcher, a mental-health expert and two others. "This is not just a handshake and light promise," said Bill Grimm, an attorney with the nonprofit National Center for Youth Law, which was part of the case with Columbia Legal Services. The case has cost DSHS at least $1 million to fight, and DSHS Secretary Dennis Braddock said a second trial would have cost a similar amount.

"It certainly adds a monitoring role with this panel, but we believe if that panel and the plaintiffs are working in a constructive way with us, it could be beneficial in achieving our goals," he said.

Similar suits nationwide

Washington isn't alone in being sued over its poor foster-care system. There are about 15 similar lawsuits around the country, many echoing Farris' complaint of children being yanked from one home to another, said Marcia Lowry, executive director of the New York-based legal advocacy group Children's Rights.

To Tom Morton, president of the Child Welfare Institute in Duluth, Ga., such class-action lawsuits are "an opportunity to create a new vision."

The mediators in Washington's suit also helped settle a suit in New Jersey. There, the panel rejected the state's initial plan, and the New Jersey agency is working on a more acceptable plan.

"The key to these agreements, in my view, is whether or not they are enforceable in court," Lowry said. Otherwise, "you often wind up with nothing but another set of promises."

State lawmakers react

DSHS briefed key lawmakers of the deal Friday. Sen. Val Stevens, R-Arlington, who chairs the Senate's children's services committee, said it was disturbing that such changes had to happen in court, citing one settlement provision that encouraged siblings be placed in the same foster home.

"My reaction was, 'You mean this isn't already being done?' " she said. "It is common sense." The chief budget-writer in the Senate, Joe Zarelli, said the $50 million price tag was a shocker, given current projected budget shortfalls of $500 to $700 million next biennium.

"This is not a couple of million. It will have a big impact," said Zarelli, R-Ridgefield. "But kids have to be a priority of the government. It certainly would be a priority for me in budgeting."

Rep. Ruth Kagi, chairwoman of the House children's services committee, liked the pledge to better help foster parents. But she questioned the role of the monitoring panel. "The Legislature sets policy," said Kagi, D-Seattle.

Broken promises

For foster parent Mary Perry-Hardin, it's not how much money is spent but how wisely. In the early 1990s, she took in four siblings as foster children, later adopting them with a promise from DSHS to help.

None of the children arrived with fewer than a dozen foster placements; one girl had gone to 35 foster homes, group homes and institutions. DSHS declined to pay for a $40,000-a-year treatment center in Utah for her but then paid to keep her for six months in a hospital's mental-health ward at a cost of $30,000 a month.

Frustrated with what she felt was a broken promise by DSHS, she and her husband hired Farris, spurring the lawsuit that was settled. "We had no idea the damage" caused by the multiple placements, Perry-Hardin said yesterday.

"There was so much lack of trust. If you'd tell them to do one thing, they'd do another."

She hopes the settlement will force a culture change in DSHS. "If you don't meet the needs of the child, they will just blow out of the [foster care] placement and go to another, adding one more layer of mistrust."

Staff writer Maureen O'Hagan contributed to this report.

Jonathan Martin: 206-464-2605 or jonathanmartin@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

E-mail this article

Print this article

Search archive

More local news headlines...