Many questions about how the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services treats the children in its care come after something terrible has happened to one of them.
It is no different with the 11-year-old girl who was allegedly sexually assaulted by her foster father after the private agency that placed her in the home failed to check the man’s criminal record, which included a rape conviction.
But this case raises a new set of questions because it follows a widely discussed proposal to transfer most of DCFS’ work to the private sector. The most crucial is: Would private agencies do a better job of taking care of children than DCFS?
The Cook County public guardian’s office filed a lawsuit last week in Circuit Court accusing a Chicago-based private agency known as PSI Services Inc. of negligence for placing the girl in the foster home where she was allegedly assaulted over a 3-month period beginning last summer.
The agency, which contracts with DCFS to license and monitor foster homes for abused and neglected children, apparently put the girl in the home in February 1994-and left her there for at least five months after the foster parents refused to undergo required criminal background checks, according to the lawsuit and DCFS.
Those investigations, the lawsuit claims, would have shown the foster mother’s husband, 43-year-old Jimmy Wright, was convicted of rape in 1978.
It wasn’t until November, when the girl reported the alleged sexual assaults to school officials, that she was removed from the home. Wright was subsequently charged with 14 counts of sexual assault. The girl is now living in a psychiatric hospital.
News of the lawsuit comes on the heels of a well-received plan to turn over the bulk of DCFS’ responsibilities to private agencies.
Last week’s proposal by the Catholic Conference of Illinois, the statewide lobbying arm of the Catholic Church, calls for transferring within five years all of DCFS’ hands-on work, except intake of children and some licensing functions, to private groups that contract with the state.
In one sense, that move-which would require legislative approval-hardly seems radical. Illinois, like every state, already uses private groups to provide many of its services to abused and neglected children, including foster care, counseling and residential treatment.
Private groups are taking over a bigger chunk of DCFS every year. The private sector, for example, currently cares for 60 percent of the 42,000 children in foster homes, and is expected to absorb all the 2,700 additional children expected to need foster homes by June 1996.
But the philosophical shift of making DCFS responsible for contracts instead of children poses a set of challenges complicated by the immensity of the agency’s mission and the risks involved in shifting that mission to others.
“Short of capital punishment, I can’t think of a more sobering authority the state has than the ability to remove children from their families,” said Michael Petit, deputy director of the Child Welfare League of America, a non-profit research group based in Washington, D.C.
Petit, along with a number of child-welfare experts, argues that states shouldn’t turn over to private organizations the power to remove children from their homes.
Indeed, that is the only major function that the Catholic Conference plan would leave with DCFS.
DCFS would retain control of its telephone hot line, which takes reports of suspected abuse and neglect. The department also would keep its investigative unit, which dispatches workers to determine whether a hot line report is true, and, if so, what to do about it.
According to the Catholic Conference proposal, private agencies would take over once children enter the system-doing everything from placing them in long-term foster homes to appearing in court and arranging adoptions. DCFS, meanwhile, would make sure these organizations fulfilled their contracts to do all these jobs.
That’s where concerns arise. How would DCFS determine that lives, not dollars, are being saved, children’s advocates ask. How would DCFS prevent the cases like that of the 11-year-old girl?
“The monitoring process is what’s key,” said Deborah Daro, research director for the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse. “Is it enough to meet the conditions of the contract? What happens if you don’t follow through on what you said you’d do for a child?”
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The Catholic Conference blueprint doesn’t answer these questions. But Michelle Arnold, a division manager for Catholic Charities in Chicago, said the plan is to make agencies responsible for helping children, not for providing a certain number of beds at a certain price.
The mechanics of monitoring dozens of private agencies is complex, and some critics say DCFS doesn’t do it well now.
However, Cook County Public Guardian Patrick Murphy, one of the agency’s most outspoken critics, doesn’t specifically fault DCFS for the case involving PSI Services.
“DCFS delegated that responsibility,” he said. “The ultimate problem is that if you have this many kids coming into a system that’s not geared up for them, this is going to happen.”
It doesn’t happen very often, although any such incident is disturbing. In 1994, when there were about 40,000 children in the DCFS system, there were 66 documented cases of sexual abuse, including 26 cases where children were living with relatives.
The 11-year-old girl was considered to be living in a relative foster home, even though the foster mother was not biologically related to her.
The woman was the paternal grandmother of the girl’s 4-year-old half-brother, who also lived in the home.
DCFS twice rejected the woman’s application to become a foster parent, but she was approved as a relative foster home through PSI in 1992, after she resubmitted her application under a different name, according to DCFS spokeswoman Martha Allen.
At the time, Illinois law did not require relative foster parents to undergo criminal background checks, Allen said.
But DCFS revoked its approval of the woman in April 1994, when the agency learned she and her husband had refused to submit to background checks requested by a PSI worker, Allen said. She said DCFS was continuing to investigate why PSI did not then remove the children from the home.
PSI officials declined to comment Thursday.
Arnold, with Catholic Charities, argues that DCFS could better monitor outside agencies if its own duties were reduced.
“If DCFS gets out of the business of providing direct services and puts more time, money and effort into monitoring, then its quality of service would improve,” she said.
DCFS Director Jess McDonald, who has cautiously supported privatization efforts, said he would ask all agencies working with the state under a privatization plan to be nationally accredited as a means of ensuring quality.
DCFS itself is going through the accreditation process, the director said.
“The one lesson I’ve learned is that there are no accepted standards for quality,” McDonald said. “There have to be standards for quality, and everyone has to agree to work under those same standards. And that will be difficult.”
A number of private agencies working with DCFS say they already must meet high levels of accountability, because they answer to their boards of directors.
“I have private citizens asking me what I’m doing with their money,” said Richard Calica, executive director of the Juvenile Protective Association, a Chicago-based group that gets about 40 percent of its $1.1 million budget from DCFS contracts.
Calica, however, raised the thorny question of what happens if private agencies no longer are free to refuse services to some children.
People in the child-welfare business call that practice “creaming,” or skimming off the children who are easiest to care for, while leaving the worst abuse victims, the chronic runaways and other troublesome cases to DCFS. For years, the union that represents DCFS workers has said this is why privatization won’t work.