How Could You? Hall of Shame-Foster Youth & Massachusetts MENTOR UPDATED
This will be an archive of heinous actions by those involved in child welfare, foster care and adoption. We forewarn you that these are deeply disturbing stories that may involve sex abuse, murder, kidnapping and other horrendous actions.
MENTOR is the organization behind the placement for the child with uncle/nephew Merritt/Bayne in Maryland. See that case here. MENTOR is behind Alexandria Hill Texas case.
Now,”an 11-year-old autistic Middleboro boy’s claim that he was sexually assaulted by another youth inside his foster home was dismissed as “consensual” sex by child welfare officials charged with protecting him, in a stunning case the boy’s family and school officials charge was plagued by missteps by the embattled Department of Children and Families.
“I want DCF to be held accountable,” said the boy’s biological father, whose name the Herald is withholding so as not to identify his now 16-year-old son. “It was hard to think that nobody did their job … or that they all failed miserably and my son had to pay the ultimate price for that — losing his innocence. It will affect him for the rest of his life.”
The case — one of several on the radar of lawmakers preparing to haul in DCF officials for questioning on agency failures on Thursday — is detailed in competing narratives of the autistic boy and officials at DCF and Massachusetts MENTOR, a state contractor hired to oversee the foster home, who brushed it off as a “consensual and experimental” encounter.
The allegations in the 2009 case are outlined in a raft of reports, letters and other documents kept by the boy’s biological father and provided to the Herald.
The father and school officials also maintain that the autistic boy may have been taken back to the foster home just days after the alleged incident.
Further, DCF officials were more motivated to cut costs when they decided to move the boy from residential treatment to foster care where the alleged incident occurred, according to a former social worker.
A school official, in a fiery letter to then-DCF Commissioner Angelo McClain, called it “one of the most abhorrent situations I have encountered in my career.”
“The alleged sexual abuse of an 11-year-old boy has been completely minimized in this case,” said John C. Randall, president and CEO of Amego Inc., the school and residential treatment center the boy was attending. He said DCF staff “did not respond properly, but exacerbated the situation” by emphasizing their rocky history with the boy’s biological father, not the incident at hand.
“I am a calm, rational and direct person who was completely frustrated in my communications with your staff,” Randall wrote. “I can’t imagine where I would have been emotionally if it had been my son involved in this case.”
According to DCF investigative reports, police reports and letters, the boy — then 11 but with the cognitive ability of a 5- or 6-year-old, his father told police — was allegedly sexually assaulted by another youth in the foster home while the parents slept during the early morning hours of May 2, 2009.
Officials at Massachusetts MENTOR, a state contractor that supervised the foster care, said they immediately removed the 11-year-old from the home, but they didn’t take him to the hospital because both boys initially said the incident entailed only touching and rubbing — actions officials described as “consensual and experimental.”
But two days later, the boy told a teacher at Amego he was “harassed” into sexual contact, prompting school officials to rush him to a hospital to be examined.
Both the autistic boy and the other youth described the contact as sexual in nature — and that it had happened three to four times — but DCF investigators, in wrapping their probe, indicated it was consensual, writing in a report that “the boys took proactive steps to avoid parental detection.”
DCF investigators never interviewed either of the boys, citing a potential criminal case, and said doctors found no evidence of “tears or bruising” on the autistic boy, though, as one social worker pointed out in the probe, the examination didn’t come until days afterward, according to an investigation report.
“The children were opportunistic regarding their actions,” investigators wrote in June 2009, when they also found the foster parents’ supervision to be “appropriate.”
Paul Cataldo, executive director of Massachusetts MENTOR, said in a statement that the agency has worked with the foster home since 2001, and the parents have provided a “warm, loving home for more than 20 children in need.” He said in all abuse cases, MENTOR follows DCF protocol, including “seeking medical attention for the child involved, as appropriate based on the facts of the case,” and that new protocols were put on the home as a result.
But the boy’s father noted that in the years after the incident, his son’s behavior was marked by violent outbursts and sexualized behavior, and he had to be hospitalized in 2010 and returned to a residential program in 2011. “They called it ‘consensual’ sex … It’s pretty frightening that they thought it was OK,” the father said.
He and Randall also accused officials of letting the foster father bring the boy back into his home in the days afterward to have dinner.
Cataldo said the foster father helped shuttle the boy from his temporary home and to a school bus stop for four days until the plan was stopped given the DCF investigation.
Efforts to reach the foster father were not successful.
Local police, who first received notice of the incident four days after the alleged incident, investigated but closed their case in 2010 after the probe stalled.
DCF spokeswoman Cayenne Isaksen said, “The Department works closely with providers when issues may arise to mitigate any problems that may exist and to ensure that they can, and are, providing the optimum level of care to our children.””
DCF deems alleged assault of boy, 11, ‘consensual’ sex[Boston Herald 1/21/14 by Matt Stout and Erin Smith]
“The state contractor that placed an autistic boy in a foster home where he was allegedly sexually assaulted has raked in millions in state contracts, but has also been at the center of other high-profile abuse cases.
Massachusetts MENTOR, which screens foster homes for the Department of Children and Families, admitted fault in the 2005 death of 4-year-old Dontel Jeffers. The organization reportedly paid an undisclosed settlement to the family of the Dorchester boy after it failed to properly vet the foster mother it hired to care for him or visit the foster home before he was beaten to death. The foster mother, Corinne Stephen, was convicted in Jeffers’ death in 2007 and sentenced to eight years.
In a separate case, Mass. MENTOR agreed in 1999 to pay $700,000 to the family of an 11-year-old boy raped by a teenage foster girl sent to live in his Duxbury home, the Herald reported at the time. Agency officials had placed the troubled girl — who gave birth to the boy’s child after the alleged rape — in the home without noting a warning in her file that she had a history of sexual abuse and abusive behavior and should be kept away from young boys.
In a statement, Mass. MENTOR executive director Paul Cataldo didn’t directly address a question about the past lawsuits and whether it could shake confidence in the agency’s handling of foster homes. But he defended his nonprofit’s track record.
“For more than 30 years, Massachusetts MENTOR has been providing quality of life enhancing services to the children of the commonwealth and their families. We take our obligation to ensure the safety and well-being of the children we serve very seriously and do all we can to protect the children entrusted to our care,” Cataldo said.
The company received nearly $24 million in state taxpayer money in fiscal 2013, according to state records.
It helped lead a successful lobbying campaign to change state law in 2006 to allow for-profit agencies to act as state contractors for foster care and adoption services. It spent $31,000 on high-powered lobbyists in 2006 and another $40,000 in 2007, according to state records.”
Contractor involved in other abuse cases [Boston Herald 1/21/14 by Erin Smith and Matt Stout]
“Child welfare bosses in the Department of Children and Families Plymouth office that handled the allegations of sexual assault of an autistic 11-year-old boy were more obsessed with saving money than the well-being of children in their custody, according to a former South Shore social worker.
“Without a doubt the Plymouth office used to identify themselves as the top office in the state for saving money. We pulled kids out of residential facilities and put them in foster home placements to save the state money,” said the former worker, who asked not to be identified given the sensitivity of the case.
“The Plymouth area office was known for that. That’s what they would talk about in staff meetings, ‘We’ve got to save money.’ It was direct orders and you can’t tell them no. If they tell you, ‘This kid has to go to a foster care placement,’ you had to do it.”
The former staffer, who left the DCF in 2012 out of frustration, told the Herald that penny-pinching motivated supervisors at the Plymouth office to move the 11-year-old autistic boy from his residential school into the foster home where he allegedly suffered sexual abuse in 2009.
“I wasn’t happy about some of the decisions being made. It wasn’t what I thought social work should be,” said the former social worker, who was familiar with the case. “It was all about trying to cover yourself and not make the department look bad.”
Cayenne Isaksen, a DCF spokeswoman, declined to comment on the case, citing department policy. But, speaking generally, she said, “Decisions about where, or what kind of home, to place a child is made based on the best interests of the child, taking into consideration his or her individual needs.”
Officials at Amego Inc., the school and residential treatment center that previously worked with the autistic boy, sounded alarms on moving him into foster care, saying a plan to reunite him with his biological father was unexpectedly scrapped. In a November 2008 letter to DCF officials, school officials said they were concerned the foster parents didn’t have the training to handle the boy’s “behavioral repertoire.”
Later, after the abuse allegations surfaced, school CEO John C. Randall said in a letter that during the move to the foster home, “Our input was not sought, nor were our concerns accepted.”
“We were told that this transition needed to happen,” Randall wrote to then-DCF Commissioner Angelo McClain.”
Social worker: Bosses valued cost-saving over kids’ interests [Boston Herald 1/21/14 by Erin Smith and Matt Stout]
REFORM Puzzle Piece
Update: “The state’s largest foster care contractor racked up 16 confirmed cases of abuse and neglect in just one year — including the death of an infant and the sexual assault of a 12-year-old — stunning examples one watchdog says shows DCF’s “lack of oversight” of its two dozen private placement agencies.
The list of failures for Massachusetts MENTOR is part of a federal lawsuit appeal against the embattled state Department of Children and Families filed by the New York City-based Children’s Rights on behalf of foster children.
“DCF has not built the basic infrastructure to monitor private providers to ensure they are performing as required,” said Children’s Rights attorney Sara Bartosz, who added the 16 abuse and neglect findings demonstrate “a lack of oversight by DCF can have dire consequences.”
Court records show DCF’s own investigators supported 16 reports of abuse or neglect at Massachusetts MENTOR foster homes over a 12-month period ending March 31, 2012, including:
• A child nearly drowned in a foster mother’s pool after three prior safety reports revealed the pool alarm was not activated. A 2009 report showed the alarm was to be activated when the child began crawling but that never happened.
• A 16-year-old broke into a bathroom and forced a 12-year-old to perform oral sex. The 16-year-old was not supposed to be left unsupervised with children under 14.
• A 2-year-old and 4-year-old were found wandering along a busy street trying to get into neighbors’ cars. A supervisor failed to ensure the foster home met safety requirements.
• A 2-month-old girl died in a foster home on Jan. 21, 2012, likely as a result of “unsafe sleeping conditions.” The infant was dressed in “fleece pajamas over a onesie, swaddled in a receiving blanket, placed on her side in a port-a-crib, with a crocheted blanket on top of her and a blanket rolled up on each side to prevent the child from moving.” Her foster mother later found the baby sweating and not breathing.
The foster home was ordered to be closed.
Records also show Massachusetts MENTOR workers did not know safe sleep practices for infants and failed to visit the baby in the week between when she was placed in the foster home and the day she died. The death is reminiscent of the Dontel Jeffers case, where a 4-year-old was killed by his foster mother in 2005. Massachusetts MENTOR was blamed for failing to vet the foster mother or visit Jeffers at the home.
The latest shocking revelations come as DCF chief Olga Roche has been under fire for cases of foster care abuse highlighted by the Herald, more than 100 teens missing and the disappearance of a Fitchburg 5-year-old who is presumed dead. Gov. Deval Patrick and Health and Human Services Secretary John Polanowicz continue to stand by her.
Children’s Rights contended in court that child welfare officials were unable to hold its contractors accountable because a single DCF administrator oversaw more than two dozen private agencies running thousands of “intensive foster homes” — serving some of the state’s most fragile children.
In May, former DCF Commissioner Angelo McClain testified in federal court that it could have been possible for an intensive foster care contractor to go two or three years — an entire contract cycle — without having an on-site visit.
DCF officials told the Herald yesterday the agency monitors contractors through twice-yearly meetings with executive directors and monthly meetings with staff. DCF officials said four employees are currently “providing oversight and support” to foster care providers and they plan to hire two more staffers.
Massachusetts MENTOR said DCF found five cases of abuse and neglect in its foster homes last year. The company had previously reported seven substantiated cases, but later adjusted those figures.
“While any instance of abuse or neglect is unacceptable — and we are continuously focused on opportunities to strengthen our programs — this represents less than 1 percent of the children in our care during calendar year 2013,” Massachusetts MENTOR Executive Director Paul Cataldo said in a statement to the Herald.
Cataldo added they train foster parents in safe sleep practices and are “continuously focused on quality improvement.””
DCF’S top provider cited for abuses[Boston Herald 3/5/14 by Erin Smith]
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