In the last few months, Phyllis Davis had been raising her family in a ramshackle three-flat on the West Side that had neither heat nor running water.
When police found eight children there a week ago, the home was so filthy that one officer called it a “pigsty.”
Those conditions–and the initial belief that some of the children had been left alone for several days–led authorities to place the youths in the temporary custody of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.
It seemed to be a severe, though not atypical case of neglect. But in the days since, the picture has become more complicated.
It now appears that the children weren’t left alone for days. And there are suggestions that the squalor in which they lived, while unsafe and unacceptable, might have been precipitated more by poverty than by parental indifference.
The case, like many in the child-welfare system, is rife with complexities and ambiguities and defies categorization. But it points out a problem with which welfare agencies long have struggled: Where does one draw the line between poverty and neglect when the economic health of a family can determine whether children have food or even a roof over their heads?
Since 1991, when a federal judge entered an order forcing the state to change its policy, Illinois has had a program designed to make clear the difference between poverty and neglect. It also gives DCFS caseworkers access to reserves of cash, which, despite their relative small size, can inoculate a family against the galloping poverty that could tear it apart.
Known as the Norman Fund, the money is granted to eligible poor families to help them pay rent, security deposits and utility bills. It is designed to prevent DCFS from taking children or to let the agency return children it already has removed.
“The purpose is not to separate children from their families just because they cannot afford to provide adequate housing for them,” said DCFS spokeswoman Martha Allen.
But according to Jeanine Smith, the court-appointed monitor of the Norman Fund, DCFS hasn’t always succeeded in getting Norman money–in recent years close to $2 million annually–to the people needing it most. In some years, DCFS hasn’t even spent all of the money.
In addition, though the majority of DCFS cases are in Cook County, most of the Norman money has gone to Downstate cases. In the state’s 1994 budget year, for example, 40 percent of the funding went to Cook while the rest went Downstate. That year, however, more than 70 percent of DCFS cases were in Cook County.
The Norman Fund takes its name from a case that also was riddled with complexities when it surfaced seven years ago. In the time since, though, it has helped define where the line between poverty and neglect can be drawn.
In 1988, James Norman was a 38-year-old, out-of-work steelworker raising his 10- and 12-year-old daughters in Harvey. His wife had died the year before, leaving him as the girls’ sole caretaker.
Norman began taking classes in auto mechanics and picked up some part-time jobs, but he found it difficult to pay his bills, which included medication for a heart condition. Eventually, the gas and electricity to the family’s apartment was shut off because he failed to pay the utilities.
In August 1988, DCFS accused Norman of “financial neglect,” according to court documents, and took temporary custody of his two daughters.
DCFS also accused Norman of being out of the house too often, primarily because of the mechanics classes and the part-time jobs. The agency later declared that charge unfounded.
Once his children had been taken from his home, the federal government began withholding the girls’ monthly $200 Social Security payments, according to court documents. That only sent Norman deeper into poverty and forced him out of his apartment, just as DCFS was requiring him to improve his housing before his children could return.
In 1989, the Legal Assistance Foundation, a Chicago-area legal service for the poor, filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of Norman and other poor families.
The federal suit challenged DCFS for “taking and retaining custody of children from impoverished parents and legal guardians because of their inability to obtain cash, food, shelter, or other subsistence, while failing to assist the parents and children to meet these needs.”
A year later, a U.S. District Court judge approved a consent decree in the case and set policy for DCFS. The agency no longer was allowed to remove children from homes because families were unable to meet the youths’ subsistence needs–unless there was some immediate danger or until after the agency had tried to help the family.
It also created the Norman Fund. That allowed the state to make payments on behalf of a family of up to $800 annually (in exceptional cases, it can be higher) to supplement other welfare programs.
Sadly, James Norman died of a heart attack during the litigation, and his daughters moved in with relatives. But the suit brought on his behalf has helped other families involved with DCFS.
“Before this lawsuit, the system considered poverty to be neglect,” said Julie Biehl, an attorney at the Legal Assistance Foundation. “If you are living in a shelter, it is not neglect. You are poor.”
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Backers of the original suit had another reason to push their cause.
“It is cost effective to keep families together,” said Diane Redleaf, one of the lawyers in the Norman case.
According to a report filed by court-appointed monitors of the Norman program, the average cost of a year of foster care for one child is $8,000. Because the average family in the Norman program has 2.4 children, the $800 payment that keeps a family together saves DCFS $18,400 annually.
The program has produced success stories.
Earlier this year, Sheila Jackson, a 36-year-old with seven children in DCFS care, began trying to get her children back.
The children had been taken from her, she acknowledges, “because I was smoking crack cocaine and drinking.” But by last summer, she had completed a recovery program and was ready to take the children back.
One substantial obstacle remained: She didn’t have the money to establish a home for the children. The state, meanwhile, was paying $8,000 annually to keep each child in foster care.
Through $2,000 from the Norman Fund, the state paid for a security deposit on an apartment, bought bunk beds for the children and paid off past utility bills that would have prevented Jackson from getting service at the apartment.
“Without the Norman Fund, they wouldn’t have returned my kids to me,” she said.
Biehl said: “The state saved hundreds of thousands of dollars over time because you have taken seven children out of the foster-care system.”
Administering the fund can be complicated by the difficulty of distinguishing some poverty cases from cases involving abuse and neglect.
Phyllis Davis’ case is no exception. While there is no evidence of her using illegal drugs, DCFS investigators testified last week that her mother, Doris Davis, had been using drugs. Doris Davis declined to comment on that allegation.
Four of the children found in the garbage-filled home were offspring of Doris Davis, the 47-year-old woman who probably is not eligible for Norman money because of her recently alleged drug problem. Doris Davis, however, was approved for Norman funding when DCFS made contact with her in 1992. She never received the state money, though, because she found financial support elsewhere.
The issue of neglect also is murky. Even though Phyllis Davis apparently did not leave her children and her mother’s children alone for several days, there were questions about how well she was caring for them.
At a custody hearing Thursday, a DCFS caseworker testified that the toilet in the home was overflowing with human waste and that a baby removed from the home was “failing to thrive” because of inadequate care.
Peter Woods, Phyllis Davis’ lawyer, suggested at the hearing that she might not be responsible for the condition of the home when police found the children.
“We do not know how those conditions came about,” Woods said. “We don’t know how long garbage was there and who put it out.”
Nevertheless, Juvenile Court Judge Lee Preston awarded DCFS temporary custody of four of Phyllis Davis’ children. A fifth child, an 8-year-old boy who was not in the home when authorities arrived, was ordered released to the custody of his father, with whom he had been living.
Preston said his findings were based on the “squalor” and “unsafe, unsanitary conditions in the home.”
After the hearing, Woods said he did not agree with the decision. He said his client qualifies for Norman Fund assistance and surely would benefit from it.
“If ever there was an appropriate (Norman) case, it seems this would be the one,” Woods said.