Washington Audit Finds 11 Sex Offenders Lived in Foster Homes Between ’02 and ’12

This does not help Rally’s perception of child welfare in Washington. A total of 28 sex offenders lived in state-regulated or unregulated homes that include in-home child care and unregulated child care homes (those children served by the Working Connections program administered by DSHS’s Economic Services Administration which helps eligible families pay for child care while parents work or attend job training and educational programs.)

“The audit’s purpose was to see if Washington’s sex offender databases could be used to help monitor state-regulated facilities with children.”

“The 28 sex offenders were living in foster homes unreported by the providers. [The author is including 17 in other child care settings along with the 11 from foster care.] The audit cross-checked sex offender addresses with the addresses of child care providers to find the 28 on both.

In addition, a janitor at Garfield High School in Seattle, checked with a clear slate in 2000, but then convicted of voyeurism in 2002, wasn’t called to the attention of the school district until nine years later in 2011, according to the report and Mindy Chambers, spokeswoman for the Washington State Auditor’s Office. The school district put the janitor on leave as soon as it found out, and fired him shortly afterwards, the report said.

When the state legislature began appropriating $5 million annually to law agencies to verify the addresses of registered sex offenders, an audit that year found 1,400 offenders, or about eight percent of registered offenders statewide, not at their recorded addresses, resulting in 835 arrests for failing to register properly. In 2010, law officers found 814 offenders not living at their registered addresses, resulting in 487 arrests, the audit said. The 2012 audit looked for sex offenders at foster child care facilities.

In one case, a sex offender returned to live in his former foster home, which housed six foster children. Upon finding on his presence because of the audit, the Washington Department of Social and Health Services closed down the home and is working on revoking the owner’s foster care license. [What the bleep is there to work on here?]In another case, a sex offender went to live with his mother, who was also a foster caregiver. DSHS stopped sending financial subsidies to her home, the audit said.

The 2012 audit found 13 sex offenders living in state-regulated foster homes and another 15 living in significantly less-regulated foster homes that received state money. The almost unregulated homes are when child is cared for in a family member’s home, a 2010 state audit said. The Washington Department of Early Learning paid nearly 19,000 providers that year with 7,400 licensed or certified by that department. The other 11,600 were exempt from licensing  requirements, the 2010 audit said.”

“DSHS and DEL reacted quickly to each instance of a sex offender found in a foster home, the recent audit report said. But the state could not remove children or revoke a care-giving license in three cases.

In one instance, two sex offenders grew too old to stay in their foster home. After that was discovered, those foster parents agreed not to allow overaged residents who are also sex offenders to stay at their home. In the second case, a sex offender lived in a foster home and then married the adoptive mother of a child at the same foster home. A DSHS investigation concluded the child’s safety was not in jeopardy, and the state has no authority to remove a child without such an indication. In the third case, a sex offender is living in a foster home in which a foster child was adopted by the host family. A DSHS investigation  concluded the child’s safety was not in danger, and the agency has no authority  to remove a child from an adoptive family without that indication, the audit report said.”

State finds gaps in sex offender screening at foster homes

[Social Capital Review 8/8/12 by John Stang]

The report can be read in this 26-page pdf here. It appears that one solution will be to conduct quarterly cross-checks against the sex offender database.

Some excerpts:

Page 4 highlights the lying: “In 25 of the 28 cases, agency records indicated children were in care while sex offenders lived in the home.

• In 9 of the 28 cases, sex offenders lived undetected in providers’ homes at the time of our audit.

• In 24 of the 28 cases, sex offenders went undetected because providers failed to inform agencies offenders lived in their homes. The remaining four cases involved the subsidized care program, Working Connections. In these cases,offenders did not receive background checks and were able to live in the home because administrative rules did not address situations where the child and provider share a home.”

Page 13: 7 were living in licensed foster care  including 1 group home and 1 pre-adoptive home. Five of those homes had children present.

4 were living in kinship care foster care homes including 1 pre-adoptive home. All four of those homes had children present.

REFORM Puzzle Pieces