Vegas CPS Chief Resigns

“Tom Morton, who was hired five years ago by Clark County commissioners to save a Family Services Department bedeviled by foster care abuses and a neglected-child center that had turned into a warehouse for children, is leaving.”

“The county put together this list of changes during Morton’s tenure:

• Admissions to Child Haven have decreased 93 percent, to 201 in 2010 compared with 2,918 in 2006.

• Family Services has opened a child/family therapeutic visitation center, which has assisted more than 150,000 visitors since its inception in March 2008.

• Through June 30, more than 1,700 children have received medical services through the Positively Kids program, which was implemented in October. The most recent accomplishment is the opening of an on-campus medical clinic.

• Since 2006, the number of children adopted each year has increased 49 percent, to 442 children in 2010 compared with 297 children in 2006. For calendar year 2011, the department is on pace to finalize more than 630 adoptions by the end of the year.

• Since 2006, the overall number of licensed foster homes has increased 75 percent, from 685 homes to 1,200 homes today.”

Donna Coleman, founder of the Children’s Advocacy Alliance, was never happy with Morton’s hiring. In 2006, she criticized the county for hiring Morton — who had been a consultant to the county — rather than conducting a nationwide search to fill the job. In 2005, the county had retained Morton’s Child Welfare Institute to examine the deaths of 11 children in the county’s child protective services. Coleman was critical that the review did not find the county negligent in any of the deaths.

“In December 2005, an independent panel was reviewing the deaths of 79 children between 2001 and 2004 that might have been related to abuse or neglect. In 2006, the National Center for Youth Law filed a federal lawsuit alleging the county’s child welfare system endangered children. After the center’s lawsuit was rejected in federal court last year, it appealed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

In June 2010, the Clark County district attorney’s office produced 82 cases of child abuse and neglect in which it claimed it had to intervene because Family Services wasn’t protecting the children. (In December, the county issued a 235-page report that said most of the cases occurred before the 2008 adoption of new policies and procedures; more case worker training by prosecutors and police was also begun.)”

“In August 2010, a former child welfare administrator told the Sun she was forced to lie about the number of children at Child Haven to make it appear Family Services was doing a better job of placing kids in foster care. But Morton countered that moving children into foster homes was more efficient due to better policies but also because Family Services had doubled the number of foster homes over four years.”

Clark County Family Services chief resigns
[Las Vegas Sun 8/8/11 by Joe Schoenmann]

The August 2010 article can be viewed here . “Teresa Medina said she quit her $65,000-a-year job because “I was asked to falsify documents relating to the time children arrived to the center and when they were pushed out into foster care.”

“Medina said that while the department was supposed to count a child as a resident of Child Haven if he or she had been there for 24 hours, she and others were told not to count them unless they had been there for 30 hours. The result, she said, was that fewer children appeared to be staying at Child Haven than was the case.

The number of children at Child Haven has become a barometer in gauging the success of Family Services, especially after the department was threatened with lawsuits when the number reached 230 and one child died.”

The “National Center for Youth Law filed a lawsuit in federal court [in 2010] on behalf of 13 children, claiming investigations of abuse and neglect are substandard, as are medical and mental health treatment.”

Child Haven was not licensed until 2008. There has been a cap of 96 residents since that time. So a reduction in placements means they are following the law.

The number of adoptive homes or foster parents cannot be a statistic used in isolation. It is only “good” if those are the most appropriate placements for the child. States get money for each adoptive placement so they have a conflict of interest if they need to fill budget gaps by placing kids. Let’s hope that they continue to move in a direction to appropriately place kids as they still rank high for removal of children compared to other states.

REFORM Piece Puzzle