Recently a class action lawsuit was filed in Oklahoma claiming that children are being mistreated within the child protection system. http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=14&articleid=20100708_14_A1_Marcia556191
It was filed against various DHS officials in Tulsa federal court in February 2008. The judge is unhappy that DHS is taking too long to prepare for the trial.
The plaintiffs (children) ask for improvements in the following areas:
Lower Caseloads for DHS workers and supervisors.
Education and training for agency employees, foster parents and adoptive parents.
Monitoring of the safety of children in state custody.
The original plaintiffs were nine children who are alleged to have suffered in DHS placements. The case has since become a class-action lawsuit with thousands of children in DHS custody as plaintiff
How many states have caseloads that are just too high to provide a realistic safety net for the children they support? How many states need more training and education for the agency employees, foster parents, and adoptive parents?
Without educating judges, court workers, and criminal justice people, this nation is still on the path to maintaining excessive prison populations and disastrous school performance among the population of abused and neglected children.
This is the tip of the iceberg. Legislators in many states ought to be finding money to make these changes without class action lawsuits. To think that we are a nation forced to sue on behalf of abused and neglected children because legislators did not see the need to provide the services or resources to keep children safe shows a deep failure within our system.
To those social workers and supervisors that will be made to look bad as this case becomes news; you need to stick together and make your arguments clear and concise. Support each other and recognize that it is a glaring fault of an uncaring institution that would make the people doing the hard work look bad when failure is almost guaranteed as resources are stretched too thinly. Stick together, support each other, and make your arguments to the public. The size and scope of this problem has become too large to keep buried and silent.
America’s child protection systems need help at many levels. Like all of us, social workers do the best they can with the resources they have.
Children need this victory. They will have more resources and support if the case is resolved fairly (& maybe legislators will see the wisdom of avoiding class action lawsuits and vote for more child friendly programs).
There needs to be more money for training and services.
Without it, abused and neglected children will continue to become preteen moms & felons and lead dysfunctional lives in and out of our institutions, costing our nation a multiple of what we might have spent saving them with the price of training and services when they were young.
America is on trial here. Oklahoma is not the only state to abandon its abandoned children.
Here are a few other examples;
Tip Of The Iceberg; Abused Children Dying Due To County Backlogs
By DAVID HARPER World Staff Writer
Published: 7/8/2010 2:24 AM
Last Modified: 7/8/2010 6:10 AM
A trial date that is well more than a year away was scheduled Wednesday in a class-action lawsuit that seeks changes in the state’s foster-care system.
U.S. District Judge Gregory Frizzell set the trial for Oct. 17, 2011, but said the date “may be a bit ambitious” in light of the scope of the case. He told attorneys that “it will require all of your efforts” to attain the goal.
Marcia Robinson Lowry, one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs, had asked that the nonjury trial be scheduled for next summer. However, Frizzell said a setting some 15 months in the future is more realistic.
Even though the lawsuit was filed in February 2008, it essentially became a new case earlier this year after the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Frizzell’s 2009 decision to grant the plaintiffs’ request for class-action status, the judge said.
On behalf of the Oklahoma Department of Human Services, attorney Donald Bingham apologized for the slower-than-anticipated pace of providing pretrial “discovery” materials to the plaintiffs. His apology reiterated that made last Thursday by co-counsel David Page at a hearing before U.S. Magistrate Frank McCarthy.
McCarthy had expressed his dissatisfaction with the number of case files that had been shared with the plaintiffs, and he said that if improvements are not made, the court could issue orders that DHS might consider “draconian.”
McCarthy said the approximately 44 complete case files that were supplied to the plaintiffs’ lawyers in June — as well as the more than 1,400 hours DHS devoted to the effort that month — was unacceptably low and far less than DHS had estimated it could accomplish.
Page told Frizzell on Wednesday that DHS has shared with the plaintiffs 15 more complete case files since then. As of this week, he said, 10 more employees are working full-time on the project and will continue to do so over the next two months. That will more than double the effort that was expended in June, he said.
After the initial 200 case files to be produced have been shared, another group of 200 will be assembled and disclosed to the plaintiffs.
Also, the defense received a request from the plaintiffs just this week for information pertaining to more than 200 children who they say may have been victims of abuse while in state custody. It was not clear Wednesday whether any of those children are among the 400 whose case files were already requested by the plaintiffs.
Saying DHS is not stalling, Bingham noted that since March 26 the defense has turned over more than 155,000 pages of documents that contain the sort of “systemic” information about DHS that is relevant to the plaintiffs’ claims.
He did not suggest a specific trial date, advocating instead that the lawsuit progress in stages until a realistic date becomes apparent.
Lowry said a firm setting was important to the progress of the case.
In the meantime, McCarthy has asked for written updates on the discovery issues from each side by Aug. 6, with a hearing set for Aug. 10.
About the lawsuit
The lawsuit, which alleges deficiencies in the state’s foster-care system, was filed against various DHS officials in Tulsa federal court in February 2008.
The plaintiffs ask for improvements in the following areas:
Caseloads for DHS workers and supervisors.
Education and training for agency employees, foster parents and adoptive parents.
Monitoring of the safety of children in state custody.
The original plaintiffs were nine children who are alleged to have suffered in DHS placements. The case has since become a class-action lawsuit with thousands of children in DHS custody as plaintiffs.
Read more from this Tulsa World article at http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=14&articleid=20100708_14_A1_Marcia556191
