Lawsuit: South Carolina DSS UPDATED
“When he was 3 years old, the state Department of Social Services removed him and his brother from a relative’s home due to reports of severe physical abuse.
Fourteen years later, after 28 foster care placements around the state, some where he suffered physical abuse and neglect, the 17-year-old sits in the Pickens County Detention Center because the state, according to child advocates, does not have a foster care placement for him.
On Monday, the teenager’s case was spotlighted in a federal, class-action lawsuit filed against the state by child advocates seeking changes to the state’s foster care system.
After growing up in DSS custody, the teen “remains in jail awaiting a foster care placement and at risk of aging out of DSS foster care without any meaningful adult connections in his life, without any support services and without a permanent safe home,” the suit states.
According to the 74-page complaint, maltreatment in foster care goes uninvestigated by DSS, inaccurate data masks a much higher rate of abuse and neglect in care than the state reports to the federal government, and caseworkers are so overburdened that children suffer unnecessary harms.
“As a direct result of longstanding, well-documented failures by DSS, plaintiff children have been and continue to be harmed physically, psychologically and emotionally and continue to be placed at ongoing risk of such harms while in DSS custody,” the suit alleges. “DSS is re-victimizing the very children it is charged to protect.”
Chaney Adams, a spokeswoman for Gov. Nikki Haley, said in response to the suit that the state’s children are a top priority for the governor.
“Governor Haley believes that protecting South Carolina’s most vulnerable citizens, our children, is the state’s most important job,” she said. “That’s why the governor has been actively pursuing a new direction for the agency including hiring new case workers and human services specialists, enhanced training for those professionals and improving coordination with key stakeholders such as law enforcement, mental health and addiction professionals and families. We will continue to pursue reforms at DSS — knowing that our work will never be done protecting the children of South Carolina.”
The suit names Haley and Susan Alford, the newly appointed director of DSS, as defendants.
The suit comes a year after the Legislature began delving into the state Department of Social Services over the agency’s handling of abused and neglected children, including some who died.
The agency’s then-director, Lillian Koller, resigned in the summer following calls for her ouster by some lawmakers. Following a scathing report by the Legislative Audit Council, the agency agreed to seek and hire more caseworkers to reduce caseloads, though lawmakers will have to provide funding for the next budget year.
The groups filing Monday’s lawsuit — national advocacy organization Children’s Rights, the South Carolina Appleseed Legal Center and Matthew T. Richardson, partner at the South Carolina law firm Wyche P.A., noted that deficiencies detailed in the lawsuit have been known for decades.
“For the 25 years that I have been advocating on behalf of South Carolina’s most vulnerable citizens, DSS has continuously failed to make changes to ensure kids in foster care are protected and given proper treatment,” said Sue Berkowitz, director of the South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center. “Since South Carolina has repeatedly ignored its own admissions about the system, we have no choice but to act and demand reform.”
The lawsuit alleges three broad problems it wants the state to address, a “drastic” shortage of foster homes, excessive caseloads and inadequate health care.
The litigation paints a series of horror stories involving individual children at the heart of the suit.
Issues have included repeated placements, changing caseworkers, inadequate health care, a lack of mental health or medical assessments and questionable placements to facilities described as inappropriate and in some cases, dangerous.
According to the lawsuit, a 15-year-old girl was placed in a Charleston facility for girls for 10 months where she suffered maltreatment. She and other residents lacked sufficient food and some of what they had was expired or moldy, according to the suit.
The physical conditions were unsanitary and in disrepair, according to the suit, which alleged there were feces on the shower floor for more than a month.
Staff withheld the girl’s depression medication as punishment, according to the suit. She also suffered inappropriate touching and sexual advances, the suit alleges.
A 16-year-old girl who has been moved in 12 placements over eight years was physically abused by one foster mother, according to the suit. Although she has severe hearing loss, the girl has not received services to address her need, according to the suit.
Her stays have included the Medical University of South Carolina and a group home, where she still resides and “languishes,” according to the suit. She has lost weight and “desperately” wants to live with a foster family, according to the suit.
The girl’s social worker, her third since entering DSS custody, has told her there are not enough foster homes and there is no other place for her, she suit states.
The caseloads of foster care caseworkers and child protective services investigators frequently exceed two times and often three or four times national standards and DSS’s own policy standards, according to the suit. The LAC found DSS child welfare caseloads are “excessive, reducing the amount of attention that can be given to each child” and “reducing the ability of caseworkers to investigate and prevent child abuse and neglect.”
South Carolina’s own standards call for caseloads of 14 to 20 children, according to the groups, but according to last fall’s report by the Legislative Audit Council, 58 percent of workers had caseloads exceeding state standards, 19 percent were assigned more than 50 children, and some were even responsible for more than 75 children.
The caseloads, “combined with persistent high turnover, result in an unstable workforce that does not and cannot provide basic monitoring of children’s safety,” the lawsuit alleges.
DSS fails to ensure timely medical, dental and mental health assessments, periodic screens and required treatment for children in DSS custody, according to the lawsuit. The 2014 DSS Plan, according to the suit, documents a “lack of medical assessments, medical or dental records on file or collateral contacts made with medical providers to obtain assessments or documentation of appointments, make referrals to address medical issues” as well as a lack of medications.
“Foster care is supposed to be a safe haven for abused and neglected children, yet South Carolina is re-victimizing the kids it’s supposed to protect,” said Ira Lustbader, litigation director for Children’s Rights. “There’s got to be accountability when longstanding systemic problems, like a severe lack of mental health services, gross over-reliance on institutions and high caseloads, continue to harm innocent children.”
The 11 named plaintiffs, representing all children in state care, range in age from 2 to 17 and collectively have lived in foster homes and institutions across the state.
The suit asks the court to fix three problems in the system — the shortage of foster homes, excessive caseworker caseloads and inadequate health care for children.”
Lawsuit filed against state on behalf of foster kids[Greenville Online 1/12/15 by Tim Smith]
“A 77 page federal lawsuit names South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and the State Director for DSS with claims of the state failing to protect children in foster care.
Page after page of the lawsuit cites examples claiming the state has “failed to protect foster children, with a system that’s been broken for three decades. ”
The suit is filed on behalf of 11 foster children, more than half from Aiken County.
Attorney Matthew Richardson represents the foster children, many with stories of physical and mental abuse and neglect.
“Many of them have been treated worse than we would tolerate treating convicted criminals,” Richardson said.
The lawsuit claims, DSS failed to properly train or perform thorough background checks on foster parents. Children in DSS custody and foster care went long periods of time without someone checking on their cases, many pulled from their homes only to be separated across the state from their siblings.
“These are the 11 examples,” Richardson said. “These are the children who’ve stepped forward and allowed us to tell their story of what’s happened to hundreds, if not thousands of children in South Carolina.”
Last year Governor Haley unveiled plans to reform the DSS. Her budget plan includes money to recruit and hire over 200 child protective caseworkers and more assistants to reduce the workload on caseworkers across the state.
“As parents, we wouldn’t allow this to happen to our children and we certainly shouldn’t allow this to happen to other children in South Carolina,” Richardson said.
While the lawsuit hears from 11 foster children, it’s outcome affects many more.
“They’re truly heartbreaking,” Richardson said. “And we wouldn’t tolerate this for anyone we know, and we certainly shouldn’t do it for these innocent children.””
DSS lawsuit claims abuse and neglect[WRDW 1/6/15 by Miranda Parnell]
REFORM Puzzle Piece
Update: “The need for change is in the air in Greenwood County. Squeezed between pop songs on a local radio station, a commercial urges families to consider opening their home to a foster child. In this particular town, housing children has lineage. For more than a century, the Connie Maxwell Children’s Home, on a rural highway on the outskirts of town, has sheltered children who have no place to go.
In South Carolina, only 40 percent of the state’s more than 4,000 children currently in the care of the Department of Social Services are housed with traditional foster families, according to agency data. The result, say child advocates, is that the state’s historical dependence on group homes — plus an overtaxed caseworker labor force — has jeopardized safety and led to revictimization of vulnerable children. In January, some of those same advocates filed a class-action lawsuit against the state in federal district court in hopes of forcing reform in South Carolina’s foster-care system.
It’s a legal battle that is expected to bring change. In Greenwood, the Baptist church-run Connie Maxwell residence stands to lose a lot, just by being a group home, acknowledges its president, the Rev. Randy Harling.
“We feel persecuted for the sins of others,” Harling said.
Warehousing children
Stress fractures in South Carolina’s long beleaguered DSS have been showing for years, with Gov. Nikki Haley calling the agency “more challenging than most” in an address earlier this year in which she promised major changes. Haley hired a new director, Susan Alford, in December of last year, and she has wasted no time pressuring state lawmakers to increase budgets to hire new caseworkers.
“Although the figure changes almost daily, the department employs approximately 1,000 human services caseworkers,” DSS spokeswoman Marilyn Matheus wrote in an email.
Earlier this month, the South Carolina Senate approved a budget that would add 177 new DSS caseworkers and raises for current caseworkers in an attempt to help slow a nearly 40 percent yearly churn in turnover.
The changes, while in the right direction, fall short of addressing the systemic problems with the foster-care system, according to Sue Berkowitz, director of the South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center. The legal center partnered with Children’s Rights, a foster-care-reform advocacy group based in New York, to sue the state on behalf of 11 foster-care children ranging in age from 2 years old to 17.
“We felt the need to bring this lawsuit because the problems that we’ve cited are not new problems,” Berkowitz said. “There have been numerous documentational problems for the last 30 to 35 years at the South Carolina Department of Social Services.”
The plaintiff stories in the lawsuit read like a laundry list of horrors — abuse at the hands of foster families and other children inside group homes; major delays in receiving mental-health care that stretch for months on end; group homes with moldy food, poor sanitation and staffers who make sexual advances; a physically and sexually abused 5-year-old locked away in one institution after another, talking of her desire to commit suicide; housing foster children alongside juvenile delinquents.
The legal group declined to make the young plaintiffs available for interview due to the traumatic nature of their experiences.
“There are so many issues that are going on at one time that it’s definitely breaking the system down,” said Dione Brabham, a field organizer for SC Appleseed. “Collectively, they could be solved a lot quicker with better oversight and management.”
For starters, DSS management is not asking enough questions about the young people’s backgrounds, and kids aren’t getting matched with services they need. Every county is a little bit different and can have its own approach, she explained. A county, for example, might place emphasis on placing children with relatives. “You hear about a lot of kids going into relative placement, but there’s no background check done on that relative, so they get abused and recycled into the system,” Brabham said. In a given county, that scenario could affect 20 kids, she said.
“The biggest issue: There aren’t enough homes for kids to go to,” Brabham said. “Some of them need therapeutic care [for medical or emotional needs that require specialized training], and there aren’t enough therapeutic homes for them.” In those situations, the lack of therapy can lead to the child becoming disruptive, which can lead to their being sent to a group home. “They’re kind of labeled, maybe as a bad kid, but they’re not. The kid just needs a higher level of care than what’s available.”
A child placed with a foster family in Charleston County, for example, was diagnosed with mental illness but was not given his medication, Brabham said. “We don’t know if his foster parents didn’t give it to him, he just didn’t receive it — we’re not quite sure.” When he was symptomatic, however, he would become disruptive, she said. “The way it was perceived was that he was being violent, he was acting out, and that ended up putting him into [Department of Juvenile Justice] placement. That’s a big problem because he’s suffering from an illness and he’s not being properly treated.”
South Carolina has plenty of company when it comes to a poor child-welfare track record. In a report issued earlier this year by the University of San Diego School of Law’s Children’s Advocacy Institute, not one state was found to be in “substantial conformity” to the federal laws meant to protect abused children. The report blames the lack of meaningful oversight of state programs by the federal Department of Health and Human Services, Congress for not providing legislative teeth for when states fail to measure up and a federal judiciary that often shies away from holding states to compliance mandates.
“These politically powerless children, hundreds of thousands of them each year, suffer lifelong consequences, including post-traumatic stress disorder, unemployment, homelessness, sex-trafficking victimization and imprisonment, at rates far above any other grouping. It’s a national disgrace,” said CAI’s executive director, Robert Fellmeth, when the report was released.
South Carolina, however, has the distinction of having the highest percentage of foster-care children housed in institutions and group homes of any state, according to 2013 data from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau. Families, a lobbying organization for group homes in the state, declined to comment.
DSS’ system is fundamentally broken and relies on warehousing young kids in institutions and facilities with predictable outcomes, said Ira Lustbader, litigation director for Children’s Rights.
“This one fundamental problem — the lack of homes — leads predictably in South Carolina to kids, especially young kids, being unnecessarily institutionalized, which not only harms them but wastes taxpayer money, because these institutions cost many times what it costs to support a child in a family foster home,” due to administrative and facility expenses, Lustbader said. “Then the state and the agency recommend they just stay in jail because there’s nowhere to put them. That’s how bad it is.”
South Carolina has been forced to acknowledge the grim reality of group homes in recent years. In April 2014, the Boys Home of the South, in Belton, was forced to shut down as a result of a lawsuit brought by Children’s Rights after an 11-year-old was sexually abused by an older child and denied psychological treatment.
The advocacy group is known for its expertise in launching reform campaigns in federal court to change child-welfare systems.
“You’re just allowing kids to deteriorate in state custody when the whole point of, if you’re going to intervene and remove kids and put them in foster care, you’ve got to keep them safe and give them an appropriate place to live,” Lustbader said. “It’s so important to know that these just are some of the most vulnerable citizens in this country,” he said. “The notion that that complete dependency on the state for basic care and protection can be so violated is really outrageous.”
Robert Butcher, an attorney in Camden, was involved in the legal case against the Boys Home. “The biggest problem I see is children being sexually assaulted in foster care. This is child-on-child sexual assault,” Butcher said.
One of Butcher’s current cases, for example, deals with four children who were taken from their parents and placed by DSS with relatives. “They were sexually abused there and they sexually acted out,” he said. They were moved to a new foster family — his clients — who were not told of their background. Then, said Butcher, the unthinkable happened: “[The clients’] two biological children get raped.” Withholding pivotal details about a child’s background is “a huge manipulation” of foster families, who often aren’t aware of mental-illness issues, he added. “A lot of these parents feel like complete failures.”
“It’s a sick system. What we’re doing with sexually aggressive children is institutionalizing them as kids, and we’re almost guaranteeing that they will create and multiply more sex offenders. And we’re almost guaranteeing that they’ll be back into our system one way or another,” Butcher said.
In many of his cases, he said, the end result stems from a simplistic and avoidable root cause: Caseworkers haven’t read the case files. “So, a child who has sexually acted out, if he gets a new social worker, that social worker will just put him with other kids in his next placement because they haven’t read the file that says he’s sexually acted out on four other boys. It’s extraordinarily frustrating,” he said. “I’ve seen social workers cry about it when I’m deposing them.”
All but three of Butcher’s current cases deal with foster care.
“It is depressing [expletive] work,” Butcher said.
“There are group homes that probably needed to shut down,” concedes Harling, the head of the Connie Maxwell home, in Greenwood. “There are foster families who don’t need to be fostering. They’re not any better than the alternative from where the child came from.”
Group-home regulations “get a little bit more restrictive every year,” which makes them more expensive to operate, according to Harling. Connie Maxwell receives only about 3 percent of its budget from the state, and only about a fourth of its children have been placed by DSS, Harling said. The rest of the children have been placed privately, such as when an aging grandparent has custody but feels he or she can no longer effectively take care of the child.
“We are using more private money now than we are state money,” Harling said. “That’s one reason why we’ve been able to stay fully operational and as effective as we have when there have been some that have declined or really reduce their services or go out of business altogether. Those typically have been, historically, those that were very dependent upon state money.”
“I think that we’ve got this huge problem. I think so much of the solution is here in our state. It has just not been leveraged,” he said. “If just some of our churches decided to take one child in — one family somewhere in that church decided to foster and adopt — we wouldn’t have any children looking for homes.”
Harling has also lived the other side of the coin, having adopted and raised two foster sons. The reality is, there just aren’t enough foster families. For one, it can take upwards of a year for a family to become approved by the state, he said. Then, the daily stipend of less than $15 a day for the foster child presents a potential financial burden. “You’re typically not going to raise those children expecting to break even costwise. And that eliminates a lot of potential foster families.”
South Carolina’s per diem for basic foster care covers about 49 percent of the estimated expenses for a 9- to 11-year-old child, according to a 2013 Child Trends report on reimbursement rates. It is one of the lowest in the nation. The state’s compensation rates for foster children have opened up a business opportunity for group homes, Berkowitz said.
DSS regulations mandate that the agency issue a decision on foster-family applications within 120 days of submission. The reality, however, is an average of six to nine months, Matheus of DSS wrote in an email. There is a business plan in the works that would cut decision processing to a 60- to 90-day window, but “the plan has not yet been implemented,” she said.
“The state is not a good parent. It’s never going to be,” said Harling, who added that his experience is that DSS caseworkers handle about 45 to 50 children. They are required to see each a child in person at least once a month. “In addition to court appearances and family visits, paperwork, meetings and training, and all the other stuff you have to do, it is physically impossible for you to visit 45 kids in a 30-day month when you only have 20 working days,” Harling said. “It does not happen.”
And while Harling agrees that foster homes are preferable, he said a group home like Connie Maxwell should be considered a viable option. The 120-acre campus is dotted with nine cottages in a neighborhoodlike village that surrounds a church. Each cottage, overseen by an adult who monitors chores, homework and behavior, houses about eight children grouped by age and gender. In the afternoons, after a school bus drops them off, kids ride bikes through the tree-lined streets or work jobs around the campus for pocket money. It’s been years since a child ran away, he added.
“That’s what angers me about the Children’s Rights [case],” Harling said. “It’s almost like ‘We’re taking a template from every state we’ve ever sued and we’re transposing that on you and this is in your best interest.’ Are you eliminating part of the segment that actually can be part of the solution for trying to bring reform into the state?”
According to Children’s Rights, it is reform across the board that is needed in South Carolina.
“The big picture there is, sometimes, when problems are extreme and dangerous and unaddressed, it takes a federal lawsuit to vindicate the rights of vulnerable people. That’s exactly what this case is all about,” Lustbader said. “When it comes to bringing a federal lawsuit to force reforms, it’s because these are not optional aspects of a child-welfare system.”
He continued: “It’s our hope and desire that this case will bring the specific improvement and accountability that has been lacking for so many years in the DSS system in South Carolina.””
Good morning. I have done my own reading and investigating on DSS this past year. It is sinful and shameful, the behaviour of some of these caseworkers. I even wrote to Trey Gowdy’s office even though they work within the State level. I was really hoping and praying with Govenor Haley’s teform involvement that things would improve. They have not. Our Judicial system is a joke I am sorry to say. I am a mother who was a victim. There is no worse feeling than your children being stolen by a casrworker out with a vengeance. She and her supervisor have been fired and I still don’t have my childten Back. The investigator dismissed my charges with the State for child neglect when he found out my exhusband filed false information with DSS. The DSS caseworker knew this from the beginning but never told Law Enforcement; as a result my case pended for a year. I never sigmed a safety plan and when I finally reveived a copy it was in the casrworkers handwriting. I spoke with the Solicitor’s office in Greenville when I was advised the investigator never pursued charges. I also have that documentation through my email along with the Investigators text messages stating he was pursuing prosecution on my exhusband for filing false information. Bottom line is DSS stole my 3 little girls, I completed every course imaginable in a 2 month time frame and maintained a full time job. Do they honestly think this is going to be one of those cases they say, “oops we made a mistake and now we need to brush it under the rug”? That is not going to happen. I am forming my own support group here in the Upstate for mothers/victims, to expose DSS corruption and get my children back. I am not from SC. In my home state my family is very political. Attorney’s, Judges, Lawyers and a family member who wrote George Bush Sr’s Presidential speeches. Thank you for reading this and I’m certain we will be in touch.
Lisa Rossetti
(864)346-8334
I am going through a similar situation with dss.
I am going through something similar and see dss took my kids illegally they had no right to take them I didn’t do anything wrong and had nothing in my kids systems my daughter got raped or molested should i say at a friends house because dss said to me that my kids could not go to my parents which was a lie at the time and i didn’t know that they was lying and so dss tried to say they had her checked and all and it came back she aint been messed with well why would a 2 year old lie about that kind of things well come to find out my son got his shoulder broken by the hospital and then now its showing something wrong with his brain and in a few days they want me to go to court to sign my rights away please help;
Please help me with my case I have four children I want to improve and correct my mistakes but the corruption has damaged beyond belief in my case please