Foster care in Michigan: The case of the phantom foster children
Among the many revelations in the latest report from the monitor overseeing the Michigan child welfare consent decree is this, on page 53:
when a child is removed from home, the child was not registering in the database [that counts entries into care] as a child in care until such time as the case had been assigned to a foster care worker and the worker or supervisor completed the entry information in the database. As a result, a child could be physically in care for several days without registering as a child in care for reporting purposes.
And that raises an intriguing question:
What about cases in which DHS needlessly removes a child, quickly realizes the blunder, and, in two or three days, sends the child home (much the worse for the experience)? Will anyone, aside from those directly involved in the case, ever know the child even was in foster care? And is this leading to an undercount of the number of children taken from their homes in Michigan each year?
The federal government recognizes that even a very short placement can traumatize a child. It requires that any time a child welfare agency causes a child to be removed from the home for more than 24 hours it must be reported as an entry into care.
Kansas has found a way to evade this rule, and there is solid evidence that, as a result, the real number of entries in that state is double or triple the official figure. (For details, see our report on Kansas child welfare.)
In Michigan there is nothing to indicate this is deliberate – just another example of the general incompetence of the state Department of Human Services. And Michigan may be more inclined to want to make use of the one advantage of making sure you count every entry into care – it’s the only way to get federal aid to help pay for those few days of foster care, if the case is eligible for such reimbursement.
But placements with relatives in those unlicensed homes that the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children’s Rights hates so much don’t qualify for federal reimbursement – so there is no incentive to get the data right, and some incentive not to bother, since it will make the number of entries look lower.
For that matter, if the case never officially existed, what implications does that have for the accuracy of caseload counts used to determine if DHS is complying with other parts of the decree?
More on the DHS Data Disaster tomorrow.
Source: Richard Wexler blog
Foster care in Michigan: The DHS Data Disaster
ANY AGENCY THIS SLOPPY WITH DATA IS BEING SLOPPY WITH CHILDREN’S LIVES
Sections of long reports with headings like “accessing and utilizing data” tend to get overlooked.
But with the latest report from the monitor for the Michigan child welfare consent decree, that would be a mistake. A lot of the stuff that should make jaws drop is in that section – pages 51 to 55.
It’s clear that this is among the main reasons the monitoring team wants the DHS leadership fired. There are constant references to leadership failure.
The monitoring team was appalled by the sheer sloppiness of DHS leaders when it comes to their handling of data. For good reason. Any agency this sloppy with data is being sloppy with children’s lives. According to the report:
It is the assessment of the monitoring team that the data quality issues uncovered in the course of the verification work should have been identified by DHS leadership prior to submission to the monitoring team. It is deeply troubling that DHS leadership submitted incomplete information to the court.
When I first read about this, in the summary at the start of the report, I drafted a memo to reporters in Michigan. I said, in my usual, undiplomatic way that DHS had made “the kind of math error that most children can spot by Junior High School.” But I would up replacing that with a direct quote from the report itself, which is nearly as blunt:
For Period Three, DHS produced the four [data] cohorts to the monitoring team, and the monitoring team immediately noticed a problem using basic addition and subtraction: beginning with the number of children in care at the end of Period Two, adding the number of all children entering care during Period Three, and subtracting all children who left care during Period Three, should have equaled the number of children in care at the end of Period Three. It did not. [Emphasis added].
And it’s worth reading this relatively long excerpt to get a sense of just how sloppy and lackadaisical the DHS leadership has been about this, and how furious the monitoring team is about it:
Finally, despite flagging this issue to DHS repeatedly, DHS leadership has not established a high-level verification and review process to test each report and compare reports for consistency from different units of DHS prior to forwarding those reports to the monitoring team. The monitoring team has consistently found important differences between one report and another.
For example, the monitoring team has found a more than 25 percent difference between the number of adolescents in care reported from one source versus another. Training data is not reconciled with caseload staffing data. BCAL data is not reconciled with data produced by the DHS Children’s Service Administration. Spreadsheets in the same report do not add to the reported totals – and sometimes are not added at all.
Much of the data produced consistently arrives without any analysis, including any critical caveats about the quality of the data. When the monitoring team calls these issues to the attention of individual staff, they are cooperative and respond to the best of their ability. And staff have developed a helpful standard reporting format used for a number of reports that includes the parameters of the report, data definitions, summary information, and the detailed reporting. But these are errors and omissions that leadership should be raising long before that information is sent to the monitoring team. The failure to do so suggests the leadership team is not reviewing the data, which leaves open the question of what information the leadership team is utilizing to manage the reform. [Emphasis added.]
I don’t think it’s setting the bar too high to suggest that, when Michigan’s new governor, Rick Snyder, reviews candidates for leadership jobs at the Michigan Department of Human Services, he includes among the qualifications the ability to add.
Source: Richard Wexler blog
