Life In These United States During The Golden Age Brought Us By Our Leaders

Yeah, yeah, it's a cliche but with all this wealth.... Wouldn't it be nice if foster parents would be paid enough to attract a more, well, competent pool?

From age 4, when she was taken from her drug-using mother, until she turned 18 last year and left the foster care system, Sasha Gray moved a total of 42 times. There were emergency shelters, foster homes, group homes, a brief trial with her mother and short stays in psychiatric care because of defiant behavior.

When she complained that a foster father had climbed into her bed in his underwear, she was moved again, but state workers kept placing other children in the same house until the man was arrested for molesting his niece.

“Instead of properly investigating it, they let it slide,” Ms. Gray said. She now lives with an aunt and despite the traumatic churning of homes and “parents,” she finished high school and is studying to be a nurse.

Ms. Gray’s stories of displacement and abuse while in state custody are unusually common in Oklahoma, according to a new lawsuit and many lawyers, foster parents, former foster children, volunteer mentors and even state employees.

Federal data shows that Oklahoma consistently has one of the worst records in the country of documented abuse of children in foster or group homes. In addition to frequent moves and extended stays in overcrowded shelters, the system is short of foster parents, social workers and needed therapies.

All this has exposed many children to lasting psychological damage, including an inability to form emotional bonds, according to the lawsuit, a class-action filed in February by Children’s Rights, an advocacy organization, and several local lawyers.

Child advocates here are using the federal courts, as they have in more than a dozen other states and cities over the last 20 years, to push for an overhaul of the child welfare system. In an inherently difficult field, often plagued by inadequate staffing and financing, such suits have brought major improvements.

Alabama, for example, at the time of a 1988 lawsuit, had one of the worst records of protecting children and preserving families. Last year, 14 years of court monitoring ended after the state quadrupled its spending on child welfare and cut caseloads to 18 from 50.

Ira Lustbader, a lawyer for Children’s Rights, said of Oklahoma, “This is one of the most dangerous systems for kids in custody we’ve ever seen.”

The state’s Department of Human Services is fighting the suit, saying its system, like any other, has strengths and weaknesses. Officials cite their high adoption rate for foster children as a success, for example, though they admit to shortages of social workers and foster parents.

“Oklahoma is very aggressive at protecting children,” said Gary Miller, a former judge who was named director of the child and family services division in March, after the suit was filed.

But Dynda Post, a district judge for three counties northeast of Tulsa, said, “The entire system is broken, and there’s a lack of accountability to the courts.”

“If you order a child to get counseling, say for rape or physical abuse or if they’re mentally challenged, sometimes you see that kid in custody for months with no treatment,” Judge Post said.

And when things go wrong, “no one is accountable,” she said.

If the federal court agrees that the case can proceed, a possible outcome, based on the experiences of other states, is eventual agreement on a court-monitored program of change. The state could be required to hire more caseworkers, for example, and to provide more psychiatric services to parents and children, to improve emergency shelters and to develop a strategy to attract more foster parents.

In Judge Post’s own purview, 3-year-old Blake Ragsdale, who was born addicted to methamphetamine and had cerebral palsy and other serious disorders, died last year during a trial reunification with his mother that state workers had arranged without the required court permission.

Blake had been removed because of his mother’s drug use and neglect. When he was returned to her last year, the state had still not given her special training to meet his medical needs, she was unemployed and had no phone or car — over all, she was “woefully unequipped to take care of Blake’s special medical needs,” the lawsuit says.

State officials said they were doing their best to cope with a rising number of children in the system, nearly 16,000 during the second half of 2007 and nearly 8,000 on any given day.

In a statement, the Human Services Department said its good record of monthly checks on foster families meant that more safety problems were discovered, not that abuses were more frequent than in other states. But many foster parents and children said that monitoring records were often falsified by harried workers or that untrained aides made visits.

“I went years without seeing a caseworker,” Ms. Gray said, adding that in one four-month period she was assigned three different workers.

The threat to children is broader than records indicate, critics say, including three state workers who spoke anonymously to protect their jobs. The suit describes an 11-month-old girl, identified as C.S., who was taken soon after birth from a drug-addicted mother and has lived in 17 homes, shelters and hospitals since then.

At one point, she was placed with a relative, who threw her against a wall and fractured her skull, the lawsuit says. Many placements later, she had respiratory disease, and a foster parent had her tested for allergies and discovered that she had multiple sensitivities, including to cats and dogs. The household had pets, so she was moved again.

One reason for the foster-parent shortage is the state’s low payments. But more important, foster parents say, is frustration.

“Great foster parents will identify a child’s needs, call D.H.S. for help and get nothing back,” said Anne B. Sublett, president of a lawyers’ group in Tulsa that represents foster children in court.

Caseworkers, who are supposed to monitor foster homes regularly and connect children with services, often have more than 50 clients, compared with the 12 to 15 recommended by professional groups.

Because the work is stressful and the pay is low, starting at $26,000, turnover is high and many case workers are young and inexperienced.

Many states keep emergency homes on call, for temporary placement of children removed from dangerous households. In Oklahoma, such children go instead to large shelters, where they sometimes spend many months waiting for a placement in conditions that some say are unsafe and unpleasant.

Destiny Emmons, 15, spoke recently after spending five weeks in the Oklahoma City shelter; she was removed from her mother’s house after the mother’s ex-boyfriend molested a younger half-sister. Destiny was angry at her removal, and imminent placement in a foster home, saying she wanted to stay with her mother.

In the shelter, as Destiny described it, teenagers just sit in a room watching a television when not in school. She said they had to go to bed at 9 each night and had to ask an attendant to unlock the bathroom.

One of the state workers, who has spent time in the overcrowded shelter in Tulsa, said that staff members were not trained to deal with special medical needs, like heart monitors and feeding or breathing tubes, and that no nurses were on duty at night to help in a crisis. At Christmas, rats and mice ran among the presents under the tree, the worker said.

Ms. Gray, now 19, is grateful to a volunteer mentor, Buddy Faye Foster, who was a constant presence through her whirlwind of moves and who helped fight for needed counseling, took her shopping, even helped her obtain a birth certificate. Ms. Foster also encouraged her to speak out for her interests, which sometimes led to conflicts with families or caseworkers.

Still, Ms. Gray noted, suffering is relative.

“I’ve been blessed,” she said. “All my homes haven’t been horrible.”

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