Author: Super User

August 6, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

There’s a lot to this article (Good Men Project, 7/28/18). Much of the anguish fathers feel on losing huge swaths of time with their children following divorce comes through loudly and clearly. Those raw emotions are there in every line.

But there’s more, and that’s what I want to focus on.

The writer, John McElhenney first learned that his wife was leaving him after she’d already consulted a lawyer. Needless to say, things didn’t go well for John.

In my case, I lost the house; I lost 70% of the time with my kids; I was given a $1,350 a month child support payment (payment doesn’t vary or pause if I’m employed or not.); I was given the non-custodial parent role (which doesn’t mean much until you get behind, for any reason, on your child support payments; and I had to health insurance for the kids (job or no job).

So, based on his earnings when he was earning, McElhenney was saddled with a child support bill he could barely pay when employed but that was out of the question when he wasn’t. Of course the court didn’t care what he actually earned, only what he could earn. As night follows day, McElhenney found himself in arrears.

If the dad cannot make the scheduled payments all kinds of hell kick in. In my case, their mom sent her complaint to the state of Texas and the Attorney General’s office began to harass and condemn me. Here’s what that looks like. About 2 – 3 times a year, they freeze my bank accounts. I call them. They ask how much money is in the accounts. (As if they don’t know.) Then they take 50% of everything I have. And in the course of the next few days, my banks will unfreeze the rest of the money. Effectively, I am left with zero dollars. While the shakedown is taking place, I have no money. Rent and car payments bounce. Even insurance policies go into jeopardy. This is how it is.

Does that make sense? Does it make sense for the child to see her father barely clinging to the ragged edge of solvency? When the child is with him does it make sense that he has no money with which to feed her, care for her, take her to a movie, etc.? Does it make sense that, if she needs medical care he doesn’t have the money to provide it? Does that lift him up in her eyes? In his?

When my employment got wonky for a few months, she didn’t think about the consequences on my life. She merely filed with the AG and expected to be paid on time. So, this happened while I was renegotiating my mortgage with Wells Fargo. And she knew this was happening. She filed anyway. I lost my refi options with Wells Fargo and had to sell my house days before foreclosure.

We may as well call that “weaponizing” child support. The custodial parent has the immense power of the state at her beck and call. The Attorney General’s Office will swing into action against a parent in arrears on support any time it’s asked. And if the custodial parent chooses to make that request at just the time when the AG’s action will mean the loss of her ex’s abode, well so be it. She has the power and that’s how she chose to use it.

Was McElhenney’s loss of his house good for the child? No, but the “best interests of the child” standard apparently is a mantra to be intoned by the judge when issuing orders, not for what comes later, not for the results of those orders.

Could I ever imagine doing something so destructive to her? With the potential (the certainty) of hurting my kids? No. I still can’t imagine it.

Did it hurt my kids when their dad lost his house and had to move in with his mother? Did it bring me down in their eyes as a success when I lost everything? Did my son have a harder time bragging about me and my entrepreneurial spirit? Did my ex-wife care?

I suppose caring is for chumps. It’s certainly nothing a person wielding power need concern themselves about. ‘Twas ever thus. Parenthetically, that is why we no longer allow monarchs to rule us. History teaches much and one of its indelible lessons is that when we give power to anyone, that person may abuse it. He/she may not, but the risk is inherently there.

Parents in family courts re-teach the lesson daily. McElhenney’s wife did.

Despite what we hear, child support law has little to do with supporting children. If it did, our child support calculations would be entirely different from what they are. They’d recognize the fact that, when the child is with the non-custodial parent, he bears some of the expense of care. They’d also dispense with imputed income and base orders on what the parent actually earns. They’d also make pursuing downward modifications based on changed circumstances far easier and less expensive than is the current practice. If a man loses his job, he can’t pay support, but he also can’t afford to go to court to get his payments lowered. That creates arrears. And of course interests on arrears should be far less than the current going rate that can be as high as 6% per annum.

I could go on and on about how child support law needs to change, but perhaps the most important way is that non-custodial parents need to be able to avail themselves of the same state power that custodial parents enjoy. They need to be able to call a state-paid lawyer to enforce their visitation rights, but they can’t. The federal government budgets billions for child support enforcement, but barely anything for visitation enforcement.

The great irony of that is that, as Sanford Braver showed 20 years ago, fathers who get to see their kids without interference or harassment are far more likely to pay what they owe than are other dads. So enforcing visitation would result in greater collections of child support. Given that, you’d think the feds would throw their full weight behind visitation enforcement, but of course they don’t.

Make sense?

August 5, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

I’ve written often about unsubstantiated claims of child abuse or neglect made to children’s welfare agencies around the country. By 2015, the Administration for Children and Families reported that, of about 3.2 million reports of suspected abuse or neglect received by state agencies, fewer than 700,000 were substantiated. About 80% were not.

And of course I’ve said time and again that, since CPS is an organ of state power, all of our constitutional rights apply to it and caseworkers’ actions. But I don’t think I’ve ever written about the use of the power of those agencies to anonymously harass parents.

Well, Lenore Skenazy has done just that (Reason, 8/3/18).

It seems that the door man for New Yorker Sean King’s apartment building contacted him one day to inform him that a woman was downstairs demanding to see his children.

blockquote>As King explained in a series of tweets about the encounter, the woman, “demanded to see three of my children. She called them by name. And said that she had to see them immediately.”

… She explained that she worked for New York Child Services, and was responding to a formal complaint contending that King and his wife had abandoned the children and allowed them to do drugs.

To his credit, King told her to “get lost,” but she refused. Of course she did. When CPS receives a credible report of child abuse or neglect, they’re required by law to investigate.

King insisted the investigator connect him to her supervisor, and then explained to the supervisor that somebody—an anonymous critic of King’s writings, probably—had played a “cruel prank” on him and his family. Someone was wasting everyone’s time. But the supervisor didn’t care.

Again, caseworker or supervisor, it’s not in her job description to “care.” It’s in her job description to investigate. Yes, the report was anonymous and no, there was nothing to corroborate the claims. The report could have been made by anyone for any reason. It could have been true and accurate or, as seems likely in King’s case, entirely made up. Such is the system that’s been set up to “protect” children.

I placed the word protect in quotation marks because the aforementioned system is, in many ways, the enemy of child protection. As I’ve written before, how much caseworker time is wasted in dealing with the 2.6 million reports that turn out to be unnecessary to keep kids safe? In King’s case, a caseworker who likely had far too many real cases in her in-box plus one supervisor spent time running after a non-case.

Essentially every state in the nation has a child welfare agency that’s understaffed, underpaid and overworked. So what do we do? We at every turn encourage the public and mandated reporters (police, doctors, teachers, etc.) to make allegations of abuse or neglect to CPS, irrespective of the reality of the situation. Unsurprisingly, kids who are in danger often find themselves overlooked by the very people whose job it is to help them.

But King’s case reveals a new dimension to the problem. Since, in many states, anonymous reporting is permitted, a report to CPS can be used as a weapon to harass. King will never know who phoned in the complaint against him and his wife. So the usual power we give to those who’ve been libeled, slandered, defamed, etc., is useless. You can’t sue who you don’t know. In short, King’s harasser was handed a free shot, and potentially not just one. Since the claimant is anonymous, there’s no reason he/she can’t do the same thing again and again.

[Martin Guggenheim, an NYU Law professor specializing in child welfare] has heard of angry exes who call CPS repeatedly, knowing that each call triggers another investigation. “I once complained to the agency for being utterly insensitive to this problem and asked them to figure out a way to get some sense of whether a caller has made multiple reports that have proven to be unfounded, so that you not only save your own resources but save the parents from the horrible experience of being investigated countless times,” he says. “And the agency said we have to do it this way. We have no choice.”

They’re right. They don’t have a choice. They have to investigate claims of abuse or neglect. This is what our system demands. It’s a result of a zeitgeist, spawned by an overenthusiastic press and nurtured by governments that miss no opportunity to expand their power at the expense of the family, that seems to invariably “err on the side of” greater intrusion into parental decision-making. That something horrible may have occurred is the claim that trumps all efforts toward reasonable policies.

Yes, something terrible may have happened. But CPS is an arm of the state and parents, children and other individuals have rights vis-à-vis the state. That needs to mean something; if it doesn’t it means nothing. And by the way, it’s not as if CPS actually prevents that “something terrible” from happening. All too often it does anyway, even with the intrusive system we have. If CPS’s actions were reviewable by the press and the public, we’d doubtless see just how often the state fails in its task of protecting kids.

So what we have is a system that’s supposed to protect kids, but can, at any time for any reason or no reason, bring a caseworker to their door armed with the power to shanghai them off to parts unknown to live with unfamiliar people in unfamiliar surroundings and never know when or if they’ll make it back to home and family.

Meanwhile Skenazy offers some truly disturbing information on false claims of abuse.

Over the course of their childhood, about 37 percent of American kids will receive a visit from CPS, according to a study published in the American Journal of Public Health. And if they’re African American, the rate is 53 percent.

That’s right: More than half of all African American children will be investigated.

And every time that happens, parents and kids alike are terrified of what might happen, of the awful power of the state that’s just knocked on their door demanding entry.

August 3, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

The ever excellent Dianna Thompson is using her status as Executive Director of Family Reunion to go to bat for shared parenting (Family Reunion). Thompson has for many years been one of the staunchest proponents of family court reform. Put simply, she knows whereof she speaks. Everyone who cares about the impact family courts have on children should take heed.

Children are born with two parents. Children want, love and need both. No child should be separated from a parent or reduced to a mere visitor to a parent unless the court finds an important reason (e.g., child abuse).) And yet courts, out of mere expedience, allow judges to pick a winner and a loser in child custody arrangements.  By doing so, it only guarantees that the child will be the loser, because that child walked into court with two parents and walked out with only one.

Bingo. The child walked into court with two parents to whom it was strongly attached and walked out with just one. This makes sense? And how did that come about? Thompson’s right again; the judge had to pick a winner and a loser.

That’s something I’ve discussed many times, but it still amazes me. Particularly in states that have adopted laundry lists of factors judges are required to consider in deciding custody, the absurdity of family court becomes all too clear. In those states, judges are required to explain which factors favor Mom, which favor Dad and which favor neither. I’ve seen countless cases in which, the overwhelming number of factors are ruled a draw with one or two favoring one parent or the other.

In a sane system, that would result in shared parenting. After all, on perhaps 14 of 16 factors, the parents are indistinguishable. How can that result in anything but a roughly equal division of parenting time, particularly since the children are bonded equally to each parent?

But those factors aren’t there to produce equal or nearly equal parenting arrangements; they’re there to pick a winner and a loser, as Thompson points out. So if there’s a tie on 14 factors and Mom wins on one, then little Andy or Jenny effectively no longer has a dad. If the Red Sox beat the Yankees 2–1, then a game goes into their win column and one goes in the Yankees’ lost column. That’s a good way to determine who’s the better team. It’s a lousy way to ensure children’s best interests, but courts throughout the English-speaking world and beyond do it anyway.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 19.7 million children, more than 1 in 4, live without a father in the home. One may ask where have all the fathers gone? Those who have gone through, or witnessed, the family court process know the answer all too well.  Fathers have been placed right where the courts put them: locked out of their children’s lives with limited access and parenting time.

Government policies addressing father absence have not been effective because these policies are often based on the concept that fatherlessness is due to fathers willingly abandoning their children. The truth maintains that it’s rather the family courts that are the true cause of fathers no longer being an integral part of their children’s lives.  

Yes, about one in every three children in the United States lives without his/her father and has little-to-no contact with him. By any stretch of the imagination, that’s a recipe for disaster and it shows every day in data on crime, suicide, addiction, education, poor mental health and others. “He who troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind.”

And yes, office-holders and seekers are ever ready to pin the blame where it doesn’t belong, i.e. on fathers. Enter the myth of the “deadbeat dad.” He’s the one who doesn’t care about his kids, who’d rather ignore them and their needs in order to feed his juvenile pastimes. The trouble with the deadbeat dad is that, the closer we look at actual dads, the fewer deadbeats we see. At least since Sanford Braver’s 1998 book, Divorced Dads, we’ve known that fathers are passionately attached both to their children and to their self-concept as fathers. Dads routinely see parenthood as their highest calling.

Are there deadbeats out there in the world? Of course there are. There are also people who believe in the Tooth Fairy, but we don’t construct domestic policy based on them. The simple fact is that if a parent – father or mother – decides to be irresponsible toward their children, there’s little we can do to force them to behave differently. So why build family policy around deadbeat dads who in the first place are quite rare and who in any event won’t be changed by the laws we pass? Why not base policy on the far more common dads who desperately desire an active role in their kids’ lives and whose children need them?

The answer to those two questions is twofold. First, politicians love to place the problem at the feet of fathers. Second, doing so absolves the office-holder/seeker of doing anything constructive to address the problem while also trumpeting to the world (or at least the voters) his/her oh-so-passionate adherence to “family values.”

When Barack Obama first came into office, I had occasion to visit the White House website. Sure enough, there was a page devoted to children’s need for fathers. But just as surely, there wasn’t a peep about family courts and the enormous part they play in separating children from fathers. If fathers were just – you know – better people, then all would be well, the page seemed to say.

Ironically though, it contained a link to Susan Stewart’s study of divorced dads. Stewart was clarity itself. She called divorced fathers “Disneyland Dads,” because both they and their children knew to a certainty that they’d become little more than occasional entertainers of their sons and daughters. The real parent? That was Mom and everyone knew it. And of course, their status so diminished, those Disneyland Dads gradually receded from importance in their children’s lives and grew less and less engaged. In that way, children lose their fathers through the good offices of family courts.

Did Obama even notice?

But enough of me. Thompson should have the last word.

Instead of continuing to fund the billion dollar divorce industry at the expense of children and families … let us unite groups, organizations, and individuals in every state who want to work together in supporting shared parenting legislation. 

Let’s make sure that children suffer as little as possible as a result of the parents’ decision to divorce or separate. The movement for a presumption of shared parenting is just and is a true reflection of the best interests of the child. Through the intense media coverage of immigration cases, we can help others understand that the same injuries happen in family law courts where secrecy and a lack of media coverage have limited public awareness and slowed the movement for reform. 

Children and families need our help. The logic behind shared parenting is hard to dispute. The agony must end. 

So become aware. Take action. Learn more. Join the movement.

August 2, 2018 By Donald C. Hubin, Ph.D., Chair, Ohio Executive Committee and Member, National Board of Directors

Ohio has recently enacted into law the most extensive changes in its child support laws in over a quarter of a century. Ohio news media is filled with stories highlighting the changes. As the leader of the Ohio Chapter of NPO, a member of the 2005 Ohio Child Support Guidelines Advisory Committee, and a member of the 2001 Ohio Child Support Shareholders Committee, I have had more than a passing interest in this legislation.

From the time the legislation was first introduced in the form of Senate Bill 125, and throughout the legislative review process, Ohio NPO has analyzed the legislation, pointed out both positive and negative features of it, and taken a stand on its passage. For details of NPO’s position on this legislation, see the links at the bottom of this post. Here, I want to highlight just a few of the changes to Ohio child support laws that are coming and why NPO gives the legislation a very mixed review.


The Good

First, this new legislation for the first time creates an appropriate self-sufficiency reserve, which attempts to ensure that child support obligations do not make it impossible for low-income obligors to support themselves. Imposing impossible child support obligations on parents does not benefit children; instead, it results in obligors defaulting on their child support obligations and not providing any support for their children. NPO has long supported reasonable self-support reserves. Finally, Ohio’s Office of Child Support and Ohio’s legislature have recognized that imposing impossible child support obligations is short-sighted and counter-productive.

Second, and relatedly, the new legislation create more reasonable child support obligations for those who are lower-income but above the point at which the self-sufficiency reserve kicks in. This, too, is a welcome change.

Finally, the bill puts a cap on an obligor’s responsibility to pay for child care, preventing the custodial parent from selecting child care that is far above the median cost and imposing these excessive costs on the child support obligor.

The Bad

Not surprisingly the new legislation raises the child support tables. Some people, apparently even some legislators, seem to believe that child support tables should rise with inflation. We frequently hear claims like: “The child support tables in Ohio haven’t been raised since 1992 and you know how much more it costs to raise a child now than it did then.” This is poppycock! The child support tables are based on the parents’ income. When inflation is high, incomes and expenses rise and parents who are earning more will pay more without the tables rising. Imagine how far someone would get with the argument that income tax tables have to be raised to reflect the increased cost of running the government!

The increases in the tables are modest compared to those recommended by the Office of Child Support in previous years. But they will result in most moderate- and higher-income child support obligors paying more.

The new legislation does, for the first time, recognize the direct child expenses of non-residential parents with a parenting time adjustment. Previously, 100% of the combined child support obligation was placed in the residential parent’s household. This new adjustment is intended to reduce the obligor’s child support obligation to reflect their direct expenses on the children.

Because NPO advocates for shared parenting and parenting time adjustments promote shared parenting, one might expect to see this important element of the bill under “The Good” heading. Unfortunately, the legislature has chosen to enact a version of a parenting time adjustment that is inadequate and unfair. It’s inadequate because it explicitly refuses to recognize many of the expenses that non-residential parents have on the children. The food they provide while the children are in their care counts, but the extra room in their house, the extra furniture, toys, computer for homework, and so forth, do not count. It’s unfair because it treats all of the child support recipient’s expenses on children as a shared obligation while treating the most significant direct child-related expenses of the obligor as solely that parent’s responsibility.

Combined with the increases in the child support tables, the parenting time adjustment will not result in lower child support payments for many parents, even those with very significant direct expenses on their children. So, while parenting time adjustments, in general, are a good thing, the parenting time adjustment in Ohio’s new legislation is not!

In fact, the new legislation contains not just one, but two, parenting time adjustments: one to handle “standard parenting time” and one that kicks in when obligors have the children in their care at least 147 overnights (approximately 40% of the overnights) per year. The standard parenting time adjustment is inadequate; the extended parenting time adjustment is vague and misleading. It simply directs the court to “consider a substantial deviation” in child support when the obligor has the children at least 147 overnights per year and, if the court chooses not to grant such a deviation, to explain why it did not. What it doesn’t do is define ‘substantial deviation’. The legislators left it to the judges to determine what that was, even though the judges explicitly asked the legislators to give more guidance on this.

Well-designed parenting time adjustments kick in gradually, avoiding “cliff-effects”. As you might suspect from what has already been said, Ohio’s legislation is not well designed. Obligors who have their children for fewer than 90 overnights a year, are not entitled to the standard parenting time adjustment; those with more overnights are. Obligors with fewer than 147 overnights per year are not entitled to special consideration of a “substantial deviation”; those with more are. If you want a recipe for lawyers to fight hard over insignificant differences in parenting time, you could hardly do better than this. When presented with a proposed schedule, good attorneys advocating for their client’s interests will, first of all, count the overnights. And, courts will be confronted with arguments over parenting schedules that are very similar except that one is slightly over the threshold and the other is slightly below it..

The Ugly

Okay, “The Bad” was pretty ugly. But there’s worse. Here’s how the new legislation calculates the “standard parenting time adjustment”. It assumes that children spend 30% of their time with the obligor parent. This is fictitious; county parenting time rules vary widely. Then, it estimates that 35% of the expenses of raising a child “travel with the child”. These are the only expenses of the obligor parent it considers relevant. It multiples 35% by 30% and gets 10.5%, which is rounds down to 10%. So, it concludes that a 10% reduction in child support is appropriate for standard parenting time.

We’ve already seen why this handles parents’ expenses unfairly–all expenses of the child support recipient are treated as shared expenses, while most of the expenses of the obligor are treated as solely the responsibility of that parent. But it gets worse. Even following this (flawed) methodology, the reduction should be 10% of the combined child support obligation–the obligation of the mother and the father combined. Calculating it as a percentage of only the obligor’s portion of the child support obligation is a blatant mathematical error.

The error was pointed out repeatedly by NPO during the legislative hearings. Indeed, the very reports produced by the Office of Child Support in 2009, 2013, and 2017 all said that the adjustment should be based on the combined obligation of the two parents. But, in introducing and defending the legislation, the Office of Child Support based the calculation on just the obligors portion of the child support obligation.

When confronted with this deviation from its own methodology and previous recommendations, the only response from the Ohio Office of Child Support offered was to say that they felt that calculating it based on the combined obligation would be too much of a downward adjustment. One wonders what the point is of having a methodology and rationale in the first place if, in the end, the legislation will be based on what simply “feels right” to the bureaucrats in the Office of Child Support.

The Bottom Line

This new legislation will help some low-income non-residential parents. And, it’s likely to benefit their children because it’s likely to promote more compliance with child support obligations for these parents because it’s more realistic about what they can pay. It will be harmful to middle- and upper-income non-residential parents–especially those who are highly involved in their children’s lives and incur significant direct expenses on the children. And, by harming them financially, it will harm their children.

Perhaps the worst consequence of the passage of this legislation is that it will, in the minds of our legislators, take the parenting time adjustment issue off the table. By instituting a bad parenting time adjustment, it will undermine efforts to create an appropriate and fair parenting adjustment for the foreseeable future.

Links to detailed NPO comments on Ohio Senate Bill 125, as introduced, which is substantially similar to its companion bill in the Ohio House HB 366 and the final Ohio child support legislation signed into law by Governor Kasich in June of 2018:

●      National Parents Organization Response to SB 125

●      National Parents Organization Proposed Amendments to SB 125

●      National Parents Organization Written Testimony Opposing SB 125

●      National Parents Organization Oral Testimony Opposing SB 125

Don Hubin is the Director for the Center for Ethics and Human Values at the Ohio State University. He is a Member of the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors at National Parents Organization and the Chair of the Ohio Affiliate.

August 1, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Under the too-watchful eye of Governor Paul LePage, the Maine system of child protection has gone from one of the nation’s best to one that typifies the dysfunction of child welfare agencies generally (Bangor Daily News, 7/29/18). That appears to have come in response to the deaths of two children at the hands of their parents. As I said last time, tragic cases frequently result in ill-thought-out changes to CPS agencies and Maine is no exception.

Current policy de-emphasizes family reunification and makes temporary placement with children’s blood relatives more difficult. The result of all that is more kids being taken from families, more kids in foster care, higher caseworker turnover, too few foster parents and a reliance on the infinitely malleable term “best interests of the child.”

As for the term “child’s best interest” now governing Maine’s approach to child welfare, “everyone comes up with a rationale for why their way of doing things is in the best interest of the child,” said Jim Beougher, who spent four decades working in child welfare, including seven years as director of Maine’s Office of Child and Family Services, from 2004 to 2011.

The move toward BIC and away from family reunification means more kids taken from parents and placed in foster care.

Another result is an agency that’s more likely to remove children from their parents’ homes and place them in foster care.

“The pendulum is definitely swinging toward being more cautious: better to err on the side of, we don’t want to be responsible if something happens, so we’re going to take the quick step so that we can say, if something does happen, ‘We tried,’” said the caseworker.

I’ve written about that attitude many times. The rationale is defensive: “If something does happen, ‘We tried.” That’s not about children, but about CPS doing CYA. It’s about being able to tell the press, “We tried.” Former director of Maine’s Office of Child and Family Services Jim Beougher understands completely.

Over the course of his child welfare career, Beougher said, he saw child welfare agencies across the country react to high-profile tragedies in unhelpful ways.

“If a system becomes so afraid of making a mistake and the management structure doesn’t account for that, the system can become overwhelmed with investigating reports that aren’t appropriate, removing children who don’t need to be removed, placing children in settings that don’t meet their needs. And systemic tragedies unfold that way,” Beougher said.

What’s best for kids is usually keeping them with their parents as much as possible. That’s because for a child to be taken from its home and parents is itself terribly traumatic.

“How are we doing a good job for these kids, that we’ve removed them from their parents, they’re traumatized, they’re scared, and then we plop them in a hotel? How is that best for them?” the caseworker said. “And then when we find a placement, it’s not necessarily even a permanent placement, and we’re bouncing them around from respite home to respite home to respite home, trying to find a placement for them.”

Yes, the “best interests of the child” often turn out to be exactly the opposite. Such is the upside down world of children’s welfare.

Meanwhile, the new policies discourage family reunification. They do that in part by making reunification requirements and plans hard for parents to figure out.

In order to reunify parents and children, Child Protective Services workers are now required to follow a new, more complicated reunification plan document. Instead of two pages, the new legal document is eight to nine.

“It’s so difficult to interpret,” a caseworker said. “Most of our clients have a very low level of functioning, and if we’re having a hard time interpreting it, then it’s a problem, because that’s what they follow to reunify with their children.”

The LePage Administration seems to have a very limited grasp of the situation. Very limited.

Health and Human Services Commissioner Ricker Hamilton told lawmakers earlier this month that LePage planned to propose adding 75 caseworker positions in Child Protective Services as part of forthcoming legislation to overhaul the child welfare system.

Now, I hope readers weren’t so careless as to conclude that LePage proposed adding caseworkers. He didn’t. His proposal is for caseworker positions, a stance one caseworker called “hilarious.”

One of the caseworkers interviewed by the BDN called the proposal for 75 new positions “hilarious.”

“In every single office, there are slots that are empty all the time,” she said. “So, go ahead, commissioner, give us a million lines. That’s fine, because we can’t keep the slots we have [right now] full.”

That office doesn’t fill the jobs it has open, so opening new ones doesn’t seem calculated to improve matters. Does LePage have a clue? I fear he does not and his wrong-headed policies are sending Maine down a road that leads to worse outcomes for kids, worse working conditions for caseworkers, higher caseworker turnover, and eventually, a real crisis of the type that we’ve seen in Arizona and Texas. Meanwhile, children and parents suffer.

July 30, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

If anyone thought that North Carolina was the only state failing to learn from the mistakes of Texas and Arizona regarding its child welfare policies, he/she should think again. Maine is, if anything, failing even more miserably than North Carolina, whose latest tribulations I wrote about here (Bangor Daily News, 7/29/18).

Like North Carolina, Maine has decided that the way to improve the lives of children at risk for abuse or neglect is to demand that child protection caseworkers do more with less. The reason for the change in policy is that caseworkers weren’t doing a very good job of keeping up with their caseloads, so the LePage Administration’s “fix” has been to place a greater burden on them.

The key to that is the governor’s demand that attempts at family reunification be sidelined in favor of caseworkers deciding on an ad hoc basis what is – you guessed it – in the best interests of the child. Does LePage know that, in precisely the arena of child protection, the Supreme Court of Nebraska has found that very term – best interests of the child – to be unconstitutionally vague? Does he realize that, irrespective of constitutional matters, the term is subject to countless interpretations?

On June 6, child welfare staff received a memo from Office of Child and Family Services Acting Director Kirsten Capeless and two other child welfare officials instructing them to base all decisions on “what is in the child’s best interest.” They were also told to return to “an emphasis on investigation rather than assessment” when looking into child abuse and neglect allegations.

The terms aren’t defined in the memo, which caseworkers said leaves them open to interpretation by more than 300 caseworkers and more than 60 supervisors.

So family reunification has been scrapped in favor of a standard that is no standard at all. Even constitutional scholars can’t figure out what the “best interests of the child” means and the memo from on high made no effort to define it so caseworkers wouldn’t have to guess. What could possibly go wrong?

How did the new policy come about? Not by consulting professionals in the child protection field. Apparently, that’s par for the course.

But the announcement of major changes with little explanation, and an expectation that they be swiftly implemented, is emblematic of the way things operate in the Maine agency charged with looking out for the welfare of children in potential danger from abusive parents, according to the child welfare workers who spoke with the BDN.

The changes come down frequently, following no consultation with frontline staff, the caseworkers said. They leave workers with more paperwork to complete and additional layers of approval to secure before making routine decisions, thus delaying them. Then, just as quickly as a new initiative or policy is deployed, it can end.

It comes as no surprise that the new policy likely results from a very public tragedy. Earlier this year, two children were killed, allegedly by their parents and the resulting media hubbub seems to have influenced Gov. LePage. This of course is not unusual. Bad publicity makes governmental figures want to appear pro-active, so they change policy regardless of whether it’s warranted. Texas Governor Greg Abbott did the same thing early in 2017 in response to a child’s death at the hands of a relative. Despite the fact that kinship care is preferable to foster care by strangers, Abbott all but outlawed the practice. His new rule made no sense, but he wanted the public to see him as quickly and effectively responding to a tragedy. Bad facts make bad policy. ‘Twas ever thus.

But larger caseloads and unworkable standards aren’t the only problem faced by caseworkers.

One result is a workforce struggling to keep up with a workload that has grown larger in the months following Marissa Kennedy’s and Kendall Chick’s deaths — following years during which child protective workers had already seen their workloads increase. And, as a result of department policy changes, each case Child Protective Services takes on now requires more work.

In-office paperwork now occupies far more of a caseworker’s time than before. One caseworker told the Bangor Daily News:

“There’s been a significant increase in the amount of paperwork and deskwork that we are doing now. That really detracts away from the amount of time that we can spend as workers out in the field meeting our children and working with our families.”

But what’s really going on isn’t always easy to figure out. That’s because caseworkers have been ordered to not speak with the press. That of course is part of the usual secrecy within which all child welfare agencies operate. The public is largely shielded from the facts about what those agencies are doing. Documents aren’t made public and a siege mentality tends to keep agency employees from divulging much. In Maine, they’ve gone one better and simply prohibited contact between caseworkers and the press. The quotation above was provided anonymously.

The BDN article is long and informative. I’ll write more on it next time.

July 29, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

This is about as stark and hard-hitting an article on family court reform as I’ve read (Lincoln Journal Star, 7/26/18). It’s author, Dr. Les Veskrna pulls no punches.

Veskrna of course is the one who went to court to force the Administrator of Courts in Nebraska to divulge the materials used to train the state’s judges in matters of custody and parenting time. The documents were damning. Not only did judges receive claims that outright contradicted the overwhelming weight of known science on those matters, the skullduggery that preceded that training would have humiliated more scrupulous public figures.

The state first offered shared parenting proponent Linda Nielsen the job of educating the judges. Nielsen was an excellent choice. But someone in the anti-dad crowd got wind of it and frankly lied in order to keep Nielsen from presenting and replace her with anti-shared parenting advocate Robert Emery.

Veskrna tells it like it is. He points out that three of the top constitutional lawyers in the state have recently written in the official house organ of the Nebraska State Bar Association that the “best interests of the child” standard is unconstitutional both on its face and as it’s applied. They also pointed out that, in a slightly different context, the Nebraska Supreme Court explicitly found it to be so. The distance from that decision to finding the BIC standard unconstitutional in child custody cases is vanishingly short.

Not only does that standard violate legal precepts, it violates medical/psychological ones as well.

[O]ur judges’ historic child custody practices are the exact opposite of what medical research recommends. Our judges historically disfavored the custody arrangement that research shows provides the best child outcomes – joint custody – while favoring the custody arrangement that is associated with the worst.

A single standard that violates both legal and scientific requirements – it’s hard to fail more miserably than that.

But Veskrna’s far from done. He addresses the state’s highest court head-on.

The Nebraska Supreme Court is a large part of the problem.

Indeed it is. After being forced to turn over those judicial training materials, what did the court do? Did it move to ensure better training in the future? It did not. On the contrary, it demanded the establishment of a special administrative rule that would keep such materials secret from the public from here on.

The judicial branch also lobbied repeatedly against legislative proposals that would have increased transparency in child custody cases.

As I’ve said before, efforts to simply get divorcing parents to fill out a simple one-page form describing their custody and parenting time orders were opposed by the Supreme Court and other members of the judiciary. Maintaining that information would have made it possible to actually know what judges were doing in custody cases. Researchers could then know and publicize the reality of children’s outcomes in family courts. Hard data on what is done by family court judges is a vital first step in any effort at reform, but (or perhaps because of that) the judiciary resisted. It seems that, across the board, Nebraska’s judges don’t want the people who pay their salaries to know what they’re doing. That is beyond outrageous.

Once the problems with biased judicial training were confirmed, a group of doctors and lawyers asked the Supreme Court to investigate and correct the false information that was given to our judges. The Supreme Court refused.

Family law practitioners have long known the structure of our child support guidelines can discourage joint custody, which is the custody arrangement that provides the best outcomes for children. As a result, the Nebraska Child Support Advisory Commission recommended changes to the guidelines can discourage joint custody, which is the custody arrangement that provides the best outcomes for children. As a result, the Nebraska Child Support Advisory Commission recommended changes to the guidelines that would reduce this problem, which were then sent to the Supreme Court for approval. The Supreme Court refused.

A year earlier, a group of respected family law practitioners asked the Supreme Court to adopt uniform statewide parenting time guidelines, which would also have significantly reduced these problems. The Supreme Court refused.

I call these doings strange. The very institution that, in a child welfare case, called the best interests standard unconstitutional and thereby practically begged lawyers to raise the same issue in a custody or parenting time case, doggedly resists even the most anodyne efforts at family court reform. Why would the justices open the door to reform and then stand in the way?

But no one is required to understand the inside workings of the members of the court. We’re only required to say what they publicly do. And what they do is invariably opposed to children’s true interests and those of their parents. The Court is also none too friendly to the legitimate interest the people of the state have in knowing what their elected officials are doing and how their hard-earned tax money is being spent.

Every year, defective child custody decisions hurt thousands of Nebraska children. Based on data from the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services, we estimate these decisions cost Nebraska taxpayers more than $500 million every year.

One last thing: do members of the Court imagine that, with their multiple failures to do the obvious right thing by Nebraska’s children, their multiple refusals to come clean about what judges are doing and how they’re being trained, that shared parenting stalwarts like Les Veskrna are going away? If so, they’re sadly mistaken. If they continue on this path, the embarrassments, the public shaming will only continue. If for no other reason than a sense of their own dignity, you’d think they’d change.

After 26 years, Ohio has passed a new law that will overhaul its child support system. In this article in the Toledo Blade, there is a summary of the changes to the law and interviews with those affected by these changes. 

July 27, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Another state is going down the wrong road regarding its child welfare agency (Daily Advance, 7/15/18). This time it’s North Carolina and the wrong road it’s travelling is named “do more with insufficient resources.”

It seems that the legislature passed a bill last year that sets performance standards for the Division of Social Services that’s part of the Department of Health and Human Services. It’s appropriate to get nervous when lawmakers start micromanaging services like those provided by DSS. They don’t know what they’re doing and passing a law that’s equally applicable to every DSS unit in every county in the state is presumptively a bad idea. Face it, the law they passed isn’t flexible, but not all counties are alike.

But that’s what the legislature did and now county-level DSS agencies are stuck with it. Now, DSS is tasked with child protection, foster care and adoptions out of foster care, but those are just a few of its jobs. I won’t deal with its requirement to protect the elderly, monitor child support, administer the food stamp program, etc. The legislature mandated performance standards in those areas too, but I’ll just address child welfare, foster care and related topics.

A few of the law’s new benchmarks include:

* DSS agencies will initiate 95 percent of child welfare screening reports within required time frames.

* No more than 9 percent of maltreated children will be found maltreated again after a year.

* County DSS agencies will “provide leadership” for ensuring 41 percent of children in foster care are found permanent homes within a year.

* County DSS agencies process 95 percent of child care subsidies within 30 calendar days of the application.

Of course North Carolina’s child welfare agencies are stretched too thin as it is. After all, their failure/inability to deal properly with reports of child abuse or neglect is why the legislature mandated the new standards. But demanding vastly more of agencies that are already unable to meet lower standards isn’t exactly a reliable way of improving matters. As in Texas, Arizona and elsewhere, the new law looks very much like the feigned indignation of lawmakers who know that the only real way to change things is to provide more money with which to hire more caseworkers, lower caseloads and retain experienced personnel, but refuse to do so.

It being a law passed by the state legislature, there’s nothing counties can do about it except protest, and that’s exactly what some of them are doing. Counties are required to sign an agreement saying they’ll abide by the new standards.

The county was required to approve the agreement even though Pasquotank officials disagree with it, Hammett and DSS Director Melissa Stokely told commissioners. That prompted commissioners to take the unusual step of approving the agreement but also including a “signing statement” protesting its terms — a step officials in Camden and Currituck counties have also taken with their agreements with DHHS.

Stokely told Pasquotank commissioners that “DSS agencies have been very clear to the state, to DHHS, to anybody that will listen, these (new standards) are not reasonable, and we already know there are areas we’re not going to meet.”

She continued, “We can’t meet (them), because we are dependent on people outside of our control — the court system, others, judges — to meet these mandates.”

Stokely also said her office would need more staff to “even come close” to meeting certain requirements.

Let’s see, standards that “are not reasonable” and that counties won’t “even come close” to meeting. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, not only that, but Pasquotank County commissioners said in writing that the agreement with the state they’re forced to sign is “unconscionable.”

Pasquotank commissioners appeared to suggest that, under the agreement the county was required to sign, the county’s DSS office is being set up to fail.

From here, that looks all too obvious. It seems the legislature wanted to consolidate county DSS agencies into fewer regional ones, a move counties opposed. The new standards look like lawmakers’ way of exacting revenge. Will Rogers once compared lawmaking to sausage making because it’s not a good idea to look closely at either. Such is the case in North Carolina.

What will happen when, inevitably, county DSS units don’t come up to the mark?

The agreement counties are being required to sign also provide that, if a county fails to meet the performance requirements, DHHS may require they enter into performance improvement and corrective action plans. If those plans don’t work, DHHS may cut off state and federal funding, and ultimately take over the local DSS office.

And then what? Will DHHS miraculously have more money, more caseworkers, more time, fewer cases? Of course not, so what magic bullet does DHHS have that its sub-agency, DSS, doesn’t? None. So what will change? Nothing. They’ll hire the same people to do the same jobs in the same ways. And, since those people can’t get the job done now, they won’t then either.

This is not rocket science. As Texas and Arizona have learned the hard way, protecting children from harm is a hard job that requires a certain level of manpower and funding to be done properly. If North Carolina wants to improve its child protective agency (and I see no indication that it does), it’ll do what Texas and Arizona did – hire more people, pay them more and give them reasonable caseloads.

It’ll come to exactly that in North Carolina at some point in the not-too-distant future. But for now, the legislature has to have its little tantrum, show everyone who’s boss and rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. Having done so, perhaps it’ll soon get down to actually addressing the problem of how to adequately protect the state’s kids. Perhaps.