Miavria Thornton Rucker threw down her credit card and charged it to Chicago’s most destitute children.
She spent accounts set aside for abused and neglected infants on a $1,051 ensemble from Bigsby & Kruthers and $1,107 worth of upscale accessories from The Sharper Image.
Her South Side foster agency used state child welfare funds to buy certificates of deposit worth $570.000, then spent those CDs in ways state auditors could not trace.
Illinois officials entrusted Rucker’s company with 289 imperiled children-cocaine-poisoned newborns and toddlers rescued from brutal and negligent parents-and gave her agency $9 million to provide those young people with specialized care and stable homes.
Those were precious burdens to place in the hands of the church organist and her husband, a minister who headed the influential One Church–One Child adoption program.
But in Illinois and across the country, record numbers of orphaned and delinquent children were pouring into state custody during the 1990s, and government bureaucrats were failing to handle the mounting caseloads. Like other states around the country, Illinois began to withdraw from direct care of foster children and parcel out the children to private agencies.
Along with the children, state officials gave the firms some of government’s most far-reaching responsibilities, putting them in charge of licensing foster homes, policing other service providers and ensuring that state wards were safe and making progress.
Agencies such as the Rev. Henry Rucker Memorial Service organization promised to swiftly place the most troubled children in loving foster homes.
To herald this new era, then-Illinois child welfare director Sterling “Mac” Ryder invited television news crews to the opening of the Rucker agency’s first group home in 1994.
Four years later, state workers hastily removed the last of the chidren from Rucker’s control and demanded the return of $3.4 million in what auditors called unexplained or imroper spending by her agency.
This was not put on TV.
The Rucker agency’s breathtaking rise and collapse draw back a curtain on the otherwise hidden precincts of American child welfare during the 1990s. Promising community imvolvement and corporate efficiency, companies such as Rucker’s raked in public funds while passing youngsters down to a little-monitored netherworld of subcontractors who installed rows of cots in heir houses and ran group homes that differed little from the orphanages of the past.
“The children was allowed to be whupped, which was wrong,” said Brenda D. Bland, a worker at one Rucker home.
To provide specialized care to Andre Thomas–a playful infant placed in state custody at birth because his parents had abused and neglected his four siblings– Illinois child welfare officials paid Rucker’s company $2,895 a month.
Instead of placing the infant with a caring family, the Rucker agency shuttled Andre for three years through a series of group homes in which he contracted tuberculosis, ringworm and a persistent ear infection, his case files show.
Andre finally was placed in February 1997 with a woman who would adopt him and rename him Jordan.
When his new mother first reached for him, he lifted his hands to shield himself. For months, he tried to eat out of her garbage can.
Jordan’s experience was mirrored in dozens of agency case files reviewed by the Tribune.
Miavria Rucker declined to answer questions about her agency or the fate of children like Jordan.
“All the records are public, so why don’t you just look at the records?” she said, pulling her office’s glass door shut.
America’s burgeoning youth services market–which includes foster care and youth prisons–has spawned a handful of corporate behemoths, some of which handle thousands of children in facilities spread from coast to coast.
But in states like Illinois, where child welfare laws limit the involvement of profit-making companies, a legion of community-based non-profits have sprung up to capture the multimillion dollar contracts.
The youth services industry has seen instances of impressive achievement and bright signs of promise. But in numerous cases, personal greed and the financial interests of private companies have been injected into one of government’s most sensitive duties: standing in place of failed parents and raising their unwanted children.
“DCFS has farmed out foster service contracts to fly-by-nights, to churches, to community organizations that know how to run boys’ clubs and basketball programs but don’t know a thing about providing foster care,” said Bruce A. Boyer, supervising attorney at the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University Law School.
“With privatization, my experience is that, overall, the quality of services being delivered to kids has gone downhill.”
Illinois and other states have only slowly begun to monitor the private agencies.
When the Tribune requested Illinois child welfare computer files tracking the 289 children placed with the Rucker agency, state data managers were able to locate only 252 of those youths. Jordan was among the uncounted children.
State officials acknowledged that they couldn’t tell from their records where the Rucker agency children were.
Federal law enforcement officials have subpoenaed the records of Rucker’s agency, but Miavria Rucker has not been accused of any crime.
Her agency filed a lawsuit disputing the findings of the state audit, but that suit ended in December 1998 when agency lawyer Ellen E. Douglass asked the judge to release her from the case because Rucker had vanished.
A Tribune reporter found her seated behind a portable electric piano in the former agency headquarters, which is now a church.
`It sounds like a frenzy’
A decade ago, when Miavria Rucker first appeared at the squat, celestial bungalow that houses the Soul Reviving Missionary Baptist Church at 9537 S. Perry Ave., it was to lead the music program.
“The woman can make an organ talk. She’s better than good,” said Loretta Carter, a church member who became a Rucker agency worker.
She ran a young people’s program called “How to Fall in Love Intelligently.”
When she married Rev. William Tate Rucker in a DuPage County civil ceremony in 1991, Rev. Rucker was giving his hand for the fifth time–unless you accept the account of his fourth wife, who said in court papers that they “were never divorced and that their marriage was never annulled.”
Rev. Rucker ran the successful 1984 campaign of then-State Rep. Howard Brookins, then sought the company of Brookins’ more powerful rival, state Senate Democratic leader Emil Jones (D-Chicago).
But Rev. Rucker’s principal vocation was youth. He helped launch One Church–One Child and until his death in May 1996 served as president of the non-profit corporation that carried out its mission.
By 1996, he owned about 5 percent of Sable Bancshares, the holding company of Community Bank of Lawndale, court and corporate records show.
“In church, she would tell people she was a millionaire already,” said Ester Wilson, an agency worker and Soul Reviving church member. “She would get up and say, `I don’t need your blessings because I am a millionaire.’ “
Said agency supervisor and church member Ruby Robinson: “One time I remember Rev. Rucker said they were blessed with a million dollars and his wife wanted to up and go shopping.”
Other congregants recalled that sermon, and they too were taken aback.
Robinson turned to the woman next to her.
“I said to another girl, `He didn’t have a million dollars before he started getting involved in this child business.’ “
In fact, million-dollar foster care contracts were not hard to find in Illinois during the 1990s. As more children poured into state care, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services quadrupled the number of state wards whose cases were handled by private agencies like Rucker’s to 26,400 children in June 1999 from 6,600 in 1990.
The number of cases managed by state workers dropped during that time to 7,800 from 10,900 in 1990.
The non-profit industry mushroomed in large part because of tragedies such as the February 1994 Keystone case in which 19 children were found untended in a squalid West Side apartment.
“Every judge was saying, `Bring in the kids. Search the streets. Cast wide nets.’ Every church was going to respond in their community. I think they did it for good motivations,” DCFS director Jess McDonald said. “And then people discovered that running a foster care system takes some skill. It is a business. And they weren’t prepared for it.”
The largest of the church-based private agencies had existed for more than a century. Maryville Academy, Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services were paid a combined $113 million in state funds earmarked for children in the fiscal year that ended July 1998, state records show.
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But Illinois also committed itself to building a new network of community-based agencies, and so state departments last year spread roughly $500 million among 100 smaller foster service companies, many of which had not existed before 1990.
The private agencies “displayed extraordinary performance” in moving children to permanent homes, said Ron Moorman, who directs the Child Care Association of Illinois, an industry lobbying group made up of 107 firms. Some agencies were able to raise extra funds that supplemented their government grants, and many have deep roots in the communities where they work, Moorman said.
But many of the newcomers fell short of their promises, records and interviews show.
DCFS paid Reaching the View Inc. more than $3 million–nearly $233 a day for each of 140 children placed in its care–but stopped the referrals after an inspection showed young boys in one group home were sexually abused by their older peers, other homes were filthy and company directors had falsified staff credentials and diplomas.
DCFS quietly withdrew the $200,000 contract awarded to Manhood Shelter Inc. after discovering the agency’s director, Louis C. Gross Jr., had a questionable background that included an armed robbery conviction. Gross could not be reached for comment.
In October 1998, after two children died within six weeks in foster homes managed by Aunt Martha’s Youth Service Center Inc., DCFS suspended referrals to the $34 million-a-year agency. Aunt Martha’s had seen its foster care caseload reach 1,400 children, then drop roughly in half when troubles came to light.
DCFS withdrew several youths from the Alpha House group home in November 1998 after residents of the Back of the Yards neighborhood signed petitions complaining that youths were intimidating residents, and tactical squad officers in Chicago’s Deering District said Alpha House youths provided security for a nearby drug house, a state inspection report says. A DCFS review of the home’s records showed “little in the way of effective treatment (let alone supervision) was being provided at this facility.” DCFS has paid Alpha House more than $2.6 million since 1996, state records show.
Alpha House director Richard W. Pitts Jr., a cartage company operator, said in an interview that the criticisms were exaggerated and his agency was being discriminated against because he fought for more contracts for African-American foster companies.
In 1997, CTA bus driver Tracy L. Jones opened four group homes for delinquent state wards. To help garner children, he signed a $20,000-a-year contract with Alice M. Washington, a forensic social worker with the state appellate defender’s office, who recommended Jones’ agency to juvenile court officials.
Six months into Jones’ contract, a review done for the state by Dr. Ronald Davidson, director of the mental health and policy project at the University of Illinois, alleged filthy conditions in the homes, mistreatment and neglect of youth and “a pattern of major financial irregularities (and) deceptive practices.” DCFS removed its wards.
Jones has filed an Illinois Court of Claims lawsuit seeking $175,000 from DCFS and $4.4 million from the state Department of Corrections, which also supplied wards.
Jones, who now works as a consultant and subcontractor for other private foster agencies, also enlisted the help of state Rep. Constance Howard (D-Chicago). Last month, Howard wrote to Gov. George Ryan on Jones’ behalf, saying his allegations that he was given harsher treatment because he was black “certainly appear to demonstrate a prima facie case of discrimination.”
In his fifth year at the helm of DCFS, McDonald has earned national recognition for policy initiatives that enabled Illinois to lead the nation in moving children into permanent foster and adoptive homes. In the spring of 1997, Illinois’ child welfare caseload began to decline for the first time in a decade.
In June 1999, the state child welfare rolls dropped to 34,200 from 46,500 two years before, state records show.
The drop in cases came in large part because state officials and private agencies are placing more of the abused and neglected children with the children’s relatives, McDonald said. These “kinship care” arrangements concern some advocates because the relatives are put through less stringent screenings and training and are visited less frequently than children in other settings, a May 1999 U.S. General Accounting Office report on Illinois’ foster care system said.
“Kinship care is the sharpest double-edged sword,” said Public Guardian Patrick Murphy. “The majority of relatives are very good, but among the rest, a lot of serious corporal punishment and drug abuse goes on.”
But the private agencies remain the primary concern of child advocates, Murphy said.
When some troubled agencies closed, DCFS director McDonald said, they destroyed all of their files, a contract violation that can seriously hinder a child’s care and progress.
And for every start-up venture that folded, another seemed to spring up.
Small operations that had been through a brief mentoring program appeared at McDonald’s office expecting caseloads. Some agencies “were showing up with a year’s worth of bills. No one knew they were out there. It was bedlam,” McDonald said.
“It sounds like a frenzy. Well, actually, it was.”
Illinois has begun to improve monitoring of the agencies, introducing performance standards and updating its record keeping in an effort to ensure that the children placed in private hands are safe and making progress. But too many cases still fall through the cracks, McDonald and other child advocates say.
Starting in July 1996, state officials stopped referring children to the Rucker agency and 31 similar private companies because they held youngsters in unsafe conditions or failed to represent them in court, arrange for visits with their families or secure them stable homes.
But even after documenting the problems and instituting the so-called “intake hold,” overburdened state officials apparently ignored their own restrictions against Rucker. They placed 16 more children with the agency and paid it $3.3 million.
Today, 17 of those 32 “intake hold” agencies are shuttered. During their existence, only eight of those 17 agencies were audited by DCFS or certified accountants as required by their contracts, state records show.
And because Illinois officials were committed to developing a community network, they allowed the firms to continue managing their existing caseloads even after stopping new referrals, paying the agencies $28 million and allowing some firms to care for children through 1998.
More than 50 of the children removed from the Rucker agency were placed with other private companies that collapsed within a year.
Fourteen children were shuffled through more than three other agencies, state records show.
After he left the Rucker agency’s care in November 1997, one 10-year-old boy went through 11 caseworkers with two private agencies.
McDonald and other child welfare specialists say having a single caseworker oversee a youngster’s progress and take ownership of his case is the most important factor in securing a stable home.
Since leaving the care of the Rucker agency, only one in seven of its children have been placed in permanent homes, the state’s computer records show.
`We were all they had’
As the Dodge van rumbled down the 5700 block of South Calumet Avenue, Jordan and three other babies dozed amid the tiny belts and wires of the apnea monitors that tracked their vital signs.
Behind the wheel that January afternoon in 1994, Rev. Rucker drove with care and glowed with pride, and the church mothers cooed over his agency’s first infants. “To see these children, I thought, this is something great,” Loretta Carter said. “You could see how God is working.
“We were all they had. They took to us.”
The Rucker agency placed Jordan in its Shammah House group home that January, but it is unclear from state and Rucker agency records where he went from there, or when. Eventually, he landed in the Rucker agency group home overseen by Denise Hodges, 64.
On a recent afternoon, Hodges slumped in her favorite chair and gathered the collar of her bathrobe. Her hair was tugged into the beginnings of an off-kilter bun.
State records show Hodges cared for a total of five children in her South Side home, but Hodges and others say the Rucker agency entrusted her with a shifting array of as many as eight children at a time.
As for Jordan, “he was a terror,” Hodges said. “He was what you consider a bad little boy. I’ve had plenty of those.”
Hodges sighed as she recalled how she came to work for the Rucker agency. “I saw a news program about them on TV,” Hodges said. “I went over with my son to meet the director. She said everything I wanted to hear.”
Miavria Rucker told Hodges she would have a skilled staff in her home 24 hours a day, nurses on call and quick administrative response, Hodges recalled.
The reality, Hodges said, was different.
“We had staff come and put the quilt over their head and go to sleep,” Hodges said. “I couldn’t tell ’em nothing. The caseworkers quit all the time. They didn’t really get over to the house.”
Many of the Rucker children carried the residual effects of their parents’ drug abuse and physical violence, and so DCFS paid the Rucker agency more than $8,000 a month to provide specialized care for the eight toddlers placed in Hodges’ house.
The Rucker agency paid Hodges $1,666 a month to care for them, and Hodges said she dutifully spent that on diapers, food and provisions the agency had promised but failed to deliver.
“It sounds like you’re getting money, but you’re not,” Hodges said.
Hodges said she wasn’t sure which specialized children were suffering from what ailments.
“The ones with drugs cry and scream all the time,” she said. “The ones with asthma are always sick, and the sexually abused you have to watch very close.”
During the summer of 1996, Rucker workers failed to appear at four of Jordan’s court hearings to determine his progress and had moved no closer to placing him in a permanent foster home, the boy’s juvenile court records show. Rucker workers falsely assured state officials that Jordan’s case had been evaluated by a team of caseworkers when it had not, an October 1996 DCFS memo said.
In May 1997, a Rucker caseworker acknowledged to DCFS that Jordan had not received the specialized therapeutic care for which the state had been paying. She had given inaccurate information “because she was ordered to,” a DCFS memo said.
As the children drifted, Rucker officials devised an intricate layering of charitable and profit-making companies.
To help it lease facilities where foster children would be housed, the Rucker agency paid $263,334 to a for-profit company called Thesaurus Management.
Rev. Rucker was Thesaurus’s director and Rucker agency accountant Jesse J. Ivy was Thesaurus’s registered agent.
A for-profit, Rucker-directed maintenance company–called WTR Maintenance, after William Tate Rucker–was paid another $55,000 in state funds to clean the properties.
These sorts of transactions involving related firms can be legal if they are approved by state officials, but the Rucker agency did not disclose them, according to the state audit.
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Ivy was among the original incorporators of the Rucker agency and a member of the board of directors at the time he audited the agency’s books, state records show. The agency did not disclose that relationship either.
The Rucker agency paid some $37,200 in rent to Global Outreach, a defunct non-profit corporation chartered by Ivy “to perform services to the poor . . . throughout the world.”
Global Outreach had no documented relationship to the properties for which it collected rent.
The Rucker agency also leased space to the One Church–One Child program, but state funds were wrongly used to refund the church program’s $11,165 in rent, the auditors found.
Before his death in May 1996, Rev. Rucker wrote a letter to DCFS contesting auditors’ initial findings.
“I too was an orphan, adopted, if you will,” he wrote, “and my adopted father told me one thing that stayed with me throughout my life. He said, a man is only remembered in this world in two ways, either for the good that he does or for the bad that he does.”
After Rucker died, a special account was set up by probate lawyers to handle his complex finances, and that account held about $61,000 as of March, court testimony shows.
That money also disappeared. At a July 29 court hearing, attorney Thomas E. Vaughn notified Cook County Probate Judge Robert Cusack that the account had been improperly drained. Vaughn told the judge he had been unable to contact Miavria Rucker, who has since married former agency worker Charles Black.
She “has not been physically seen by any of us in seven months,” Vaughn said.
No blanket, few friends
One morning, Denise Hodges said, a DCFS employee she didn’t know “just came and got the kids and that ended it.”
Rucker agency supervisor Ruby Robinson also recalled that morning: A state official had the Rucker workers line the children on a couch.
The official “started calling off the names of children who weren’t there,” Robinson said. Then the state official removed the children who had been accounted for.
By then, DCFS officials had placed Jordan in the foster home of Joanne Schmidt, a suburban grandmother who has six biological children and has been a foster mother to another 10.
Jordan came to her in clothes that were too small and rotted at the crotches and underarms, with busted toys, no favorite blanket, no book, no note.
At 3 years and 2 months, he offered only the beginnings of sentences. He wore diapers. The first time he soiled himself, he asked Schmidt if she was going to whip his butt.
It took Schmidt only three days to toilet train Jordan, but his ringworm lasted 16 months.
No medical report warned Schmidt about the skin virus that would infest her house. Schmidt contracted the disease, then her three Persian cats got it. She shaved the cats. It found her dog. Then her grandchildren. Schmidt had to throw away all of her grandchildren’s stuffed animals.
Miavria Rucker dropped out of sight. For Jordan–quick to cry and sometimes to fight–a tough road remains.
On a recent morning, the 6-year-old laid a neat row of blue and red blocks across the kitchen floor. He was a builder of plastic highways, a Lego impresario.
His project took him deep into the living room.
“I will be happy when the other children accept him,” his new mother said. “I will be happy when he is invited to his first birthday party.”