After taking in more than 70 foster children over 40 years, the Nikolaisens fell in love again.

Tyrese, a preemie born with cocaine in his blood, learned to sit up, crawl, then run in their Issaquah home. Two years went by before they asked their state social worker what they considered an innocent question: When we adopt, can we rename him Tyler?

Tyrese is half black, so his case was handled by an experimental child-welfare office responsible for African-American kids in King County. The Nikolaisens' question ignited racial tensions in a way they'd never expected.

How can a white couple raise a strong African-American boy? their caseworker asked. She wanted to send Tyrese back to his troubled home.

Isn't Tyrese also half white? the Nikolaisens countered, fearful that he would be returned to a dangerous situation.

The agency making the recommendation, the Office of African-American Children's Services (OAACS), was created to keep black children with their families and out of foster care. But six years later, the way the office carries out its mission remains deeply controversial.

In King County and the rest of the nation, black children enter foster care at rates vastly disproportionate to the black population, and once there, wait far longer to be adopted than white kids. The causes are hotly debated in think tanks, but Washington is the only state with an office dedicated to reversing the trend. OAACS is considered a potential model by child-welfare systems in Chicago, Wyoming and Texas.

Jackie Buchanan, the state's child-welfare director for King County, said OAACS should never make decisions solely based on race. But she and others in Seattle's African-American community say the office is badly needed to overcome the "institutional racism" of the child-welfare system.

"When a decision is made in other offices that is not popular, or one that people don't agree with, it's a question of social-work practice," said Buchanan, a former foster child herself. "In OAACS, it becomes a question of race."

The Nikolaisens eventually were allowed to adopt last year, but only after enlisting State Rep. Al O'Brien, D-Mountlake Terrace, to press their case with the Department of Social and Health Services' (DSHS) Olympia headquarters. They decided against changing Tyrese's name.

The Nikolaisens and O'Brien aren't the only ones concerned about OAACS. A recent DSHS audit found lapses in the office's work. There is widespread grumbling among social workers — inside and outside of DSHS, black and white — as well as court-appointed child advocates. And some foster parents, most of them white, say they won't accept children placed by OAACS.

"I think what that office does borders on illegal," said O'Brien, who has intervened in three other cases. "They seem to make decisions based on race, not on the best interests of the child."

A new approach

There is no sign marking OAACS' office off Martin Luther King Jr. Way in South Seattle, and it has operated off the public radar in part because it has not had a high-profile child fatality. It has nearly 800 open cases, involving children from birth to age 11.

Like other child-welfare offices, it first looks to put abused or neglected children with relatives. And once a biological parent can prove capable of good parenting, state law requires DSHS to send that person's child home. OAACS performs both of those services more than some other child-welfare offices around the state, which Buchanan attributes to the OAACS office's expertise in African-American parenting styles and its close ties to treatment providers who cater to the black community.

The most unique aspect of OAACS is the way it assesses risks to a child's safety. Instead of focusing on negatives — such as a parent's criminal record or a relative's mental illness — the office uses a "strength-based" assessment that puts a premium on extended family and emphasizes social services that could allow a child to stay at home.

Before OAACS was founded, "we couldn't place kids with relatives because they had some sort of history," said Buchanan. "We thought we were doing a good thing, but it wasn't working well with children and families of color."

Child-welfare cases involving Native Americans are also assigned to specialized units. But those units are mandated by the federal Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, while OAACS is a voluntary experiment.

The OAACS emphasis on keeping children with their relatives is a big reason the office has broad support among black leaders, said James Kelly, head of Seattle's Urban League and a former Child Protective Services (CPS) social worker.

He said he was raised in just such a situation — a collection of aunts, cousins and neighbors — after his mother's death.

"We all might have been three or four to a bed, but all that love and nurturing was there," he said. "That was a little different standard than what the state might require, and that makes it tougher" for DSHS to find African Americans willing to take black children who would otherwise end up in foster care.

A "professional bias"

Buchanan's predecessor, Joe Bell, was also convinced that the traditional way of assessing risks in African-American families was too rigid, and he wanted an explanation. A higher rate of child abuse or neglect among African-Americans? No, according to a series of federally sponsored studies. Poverty may be a partial cause, but it alone can't explain disproportionality, said Bell.

His conclusion: "a professional bias throughout the child-welfare system."

That theory isn't universally accepted by researchers, said Rob Geen of the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. Poverty, combined with "heightened surveillance" by social services that must report suspected child abuse, are believed to be causes, he said.

"Some think [disproportionality] is explained by sheer racism, and others think it's a variety of factors in addition to racism," he said. "The explanations are currently being debated."

Bell doesn't attribute the bias to racism. Black social workers bring black children into foster care at the same rate as their white peers, he found.

With approval by then-Gov. Gary Locke and Bell's supervisors, the office started as an experiment, a unit of 20 social workers covering eight ZIP codes in South Central Seattle. It expanded to cover all of King County in 2003, tripling in size. "The jury is still out on the unit," said Bell. "The jury is still out on whether it can operate in a society that wants to operate on old biases. That the unit has survived thus far is a minor miracle, to be honest."

"Risk for tragedy is huge"

Critics of OAACS say questions of race obscure a deeper problem: The office simply doesn't work well.

An internal DSHS case review, released in April, found significant problems with OAACS child-abuse investigations. In two-thirds of cases, there was no evidence that a full investigation had been done; in one case, the victim and the accused hadn't been contacted two months after the complaint was filed.

Once in state custody, more than half of the OAACS' children had not seen their social workers in the past 90 days, as required. In one case, a child had attempted suicide three times but had not received mental-health care, according to the review.

Similar reviews of other King County child-welfare offices also found problems, but not nearly to the extent of those in OAACS.

The lack of 90-day visits is alarming because similar lapses were found in the three most-recent high-profile deaths of children under DSHS oversight, said Mary Meinig, the state's ombudsman for children and families.

"There should absolutely be 100 percent compliance with that," said Meinig. "If the social worker isn't showing up, it limits the number of people the child can tell of unsafe things occurring."

Linda Katz, head of King County's Court Appointed Special Advocates program, was an early supporter of OAACS, serving on its original advisory board. But she has grown increasingly concerned, watching how the office operates.

"If social workers are not actively working their cases, the risk for tragedy is huge," she said.

She feared her criticism could be attributed to racism, but suggested DSHS' Olympia headquarters "either needs to make a decision of how to make this a high-quality unit or they need to reverse course," said Katz.

During a recent visit to OAACS, Cheryl Stephani, head of DSHS' Children's Administration, said she saw a dedicated staff working hard to fix problems spotlighted in the audit.

"This is obviously something we want to keep watching," she said. "There is a plan in place for them to improve, and they're being held accountable for it."

High turnover

Mareon Henderson is OAACS' sixth administrator in as many years, and all but three of his 16 CPS investigators have no more than two years' experience. About two-thirds of his staff is African American, a ratio not found in any of the 38 other child-welfare offices around the state.

Turnover has been so rapid that social workers got overburdened and didn't have time to do their work, causing the problems found by the case review, Henderson said. "It took basically two years, until end of [last year], to stabilize the office. I'd say we've been stable since February."

When OAACS first opened, it was believed that the office would hire only African Americans, said Zynovia Hetherington, who worked for OAACS for two years.

"There was that myth out there, and the agency laid an unstable foundation among other offices and workers," said Hetherington, who now heads a child-welfare training center in the University of Washington's social-work school. "Excellent social workers didn't come over."

Hetherington hopes the office will survive its troubles. "This is the first real valiant effort in the state to address disproportionality," she said. "To say, 'Let's just throw it out,' would be a very reactive thing to do that, rather than to work out the problems."

Sending Tyrese home

If OAACS had accomplished its goal of reuniting Tyrese Nikolaisen with his biological mother, he would have been an example of the office's mission of reversing disproportionality.

The boy's mother had lost custody of her previous six children, but she resurfaced as the state was preparing to terminate her parental rights for Tyrese. According to court documents in Tyrese's dependency case, she pledged to get drug treatment and appeared in court with an African-American man who said he was the father of Tyrese's younger brother.

Tyrese's OAACS social worker strongly supported a plan to give the boy and his brother to their mother and the man — so much so that the caseworker overestimated the woman's stability, ignoring positive drug tests and the man's concerns about the arrangement, according to the documents.

The Nikolaisens learned of the problems but then were given a five-day notice that Tyrese would be sent home permanently. They hired a lawyer and called O'Brien, who served with Jerry Nikolaisen on the Seattle police force.

When asked about the case, Buchanan said she overruled OAACS' plan and transferred the case to another DSHS office because the caseworker's relationship with the Nikolaisens had become toxic. The Nikolaisens were the only family to complain, she said, that race was the deciding factor in placing a child.

A couple of weeks ago, the Nikolaisens got an emergency call from DSHS asking if they would take three foster children for the night. "I never asked what color they were," Thereasa Nikolaisen said. "It doesn't matter. Either you love the child or you don't."

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