A pediatrician imploring fellow physicians to stop wrenching newborns from their mothers. A social worker who doesn’t want to report kids in dirty clothes to CPS. A case planner living with regrets that he failed to avoid a family separation through foster care.
These rare, firsthand stories from the frontlines of the child welfare system are not often shared with the public. But they’re examples of the remarkable testimony presented over three sessions in New York City this year, gatherings titled The Reckoning: Transforming Systems to Achieve Family Justice and Integrity. More than 600 social workers, nonprofit executives and staff, legal experts and advocates for parents’ rights have joined the hours-long convenings that began in March.
Reflecting a significant shift in the social services field, the discussions have focused less on how to remove kids quickly from homes where parents are accused of abuse and neglect, and more on how to “narrow the front door” to foster care.
David Ogando, a case planner with the nonprofit agency Graham Windham, said that just two weeks ago, he watched as a Spanish-speaking mother lost custody of her children. She had been reported to CPS for child neglect while she was in the hospital. Ogando said even with the translator present in court, the New York City mother seemed baffled by the proceedings.
He, too, left the scene stunned, and frustrated that he failed to intervene due to worries about his livelihood.
“It made no sense. I knew it at the time,” Ogando said of the outcome in the mother’s case. “But I thought, ‘No, what about my kids? What about my job?’”
In the Reckoning sessions that concluded Friday, heads of three leading nonprofits that have contracts to care for foster children with New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) joined calls to restrict the family home-to-foster care pipeline.
“We haven’t always gotten it right,” Melanie Hartzog, CEO of The New York Foundling said on stage at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. “But now there’s an opportunity for us to build on that urgency, to really think about a different way of looking at what we call foster care.”
A common goal: family preservation
The Reckoning series was co-hosted by Graham Windham, Good Shepherd Services, and The New York Foundling, three of New York City’s largest nonprofits providing services to children and families. Co-sponsors include Narrowing the Front Door, an advocacy group that aims to reduce foster care entries, and the Redlich Horwitz Foundation.
The convenings originated nearly three years ago, amid a raging COVID-19 pandemic and historic Black Lives Matter protests. At the time, a diverse group of influential thinkers and city leaders began to strategize. The goal centered on reducing trauma: fewer calls to the state child maltreatment hotline, fewer unnecessary CPS investigations, and fewer foster care removals.
The group met virtually at first, but has continued the conversations in person, at times involving experts from across the country. There are no firm next steps, but so far, recommendations include reforming mandated reporting laws, enhancing parents’ legal rights and maintaining better ties with relatives. Some panelists call for a radical fix — abolishing the foster care system entirely. Critics say current practice tears too many families of color apart, punishes parents simply for being poor, and deprives children of proximity to their kin.
Executives of three prominent nonprofit agencies that provide the city with foster care, adoption and other social services, sat on a panel at each of this year’s gatherings: Kimberly Watson of Graham Windham, Michelle Yanche of Good Shepherd Services and Hartzog of the New York Foundling. They shared the microphone with prominent advocates for marginalized families including Angela Burton, a former special counsel working in the state courts; Joyce McMillan, an outspoken activist with a national and international reach and Martin Guggenheim, an influential legal scholar who spent decades as head of New York University School of Law’s family defense clinic.
Despite the divergence in opinions, participants agreed on one central and urgent theme: that family preservation, whenever possible, should be the overarching goal.
The focus in one of the nation’s largest local foster care systems reflects a clear shift in the approach to child safety and protection, which some legal scholars and civil rights leaders now describe as too focused on “family policing.” They say current practice treats impoverished parents and those suffering from addiction, mental health issues and domestic violence as suspects, rather than people in need of support in order to better care for their children.
In the final convening of the Reckoning on Friday, frontline workers spoke frankly about tortured emotions that can accompany their jobs as mandated reporters — particularly when it leads to children being removed from home, and terminations of parental rights.
Matthew Holm, a pediatrician and addiction medicine specialist in the Bronx, spoke on the hazards of positive drug tests that often result in a CPS report.
“Black and brown women and their infants continue to be disproportionately tested, and most often without their consent,” Holm said. “It disconnects people from the ability to access social services through our hospital system.”
Holm described patients who are afraid to be honest about their medical needs because they fear being separated from their children. In one case, a woman he treated had been struggling with an addiction for three years — alone with no help. When she finally opened up to him, Holm said he was able to assist in her care and treatment through harm-reduction measures. He called her “one of the best mothers I could have ever imagined.”
Other patients have told Holm they’re reluctant to reveal that they lack stable housing and food — even though if doctors knew, they could refer them to available resources that would help.
“ACS is not seen as a support service,” Holm said. “Unfortunately, it’s seen as a policing agent.”
Panelist Akelia Maitland — a vice president at the nonprofit Good Shepherd Services — echoed Holm and her colleagues when she described the challenges of a job that can be associated with someone else’s pain.
“I’ve also taken away a parent’s voice, and I’ve also taken away parental authority,” Maitland said.
Other case managers and social workers also chimed in — saying that working with vulnerable families has opened their eyes and provided new insight.
They included Sejal Mehta, a social worker with the city’s Department of Education and mandated reporter along with teachers, counselors and school nurses. By law, these professionals must report incidents that fall under the child maltreatment category known as “educational neglect.” The accusation centers on parents failing to care for their children by ensuring they attend school, but can spiral, ensnaring struggling families in frightening investigations and lengthy court proceedings.
Mehta said she and her colleagues are taught in schools of social work and instructed through job training to report every possible case to CPS — from missing a few days of school to dirty clothes. She described the orientation as: “When in doubt, call it out.”
Mehta also said social workers aren’t taught to recognize or to pursue the possible reasons behind such parental slip-ups, so they can provide support rather than simply report parents to the authorities.
“Families can be having so many challenges beyond what the school personnel are able to see,” she said, adding that school staff are often driven by fear of losing their jobs if they hesitate. “Fear definitely drives that call, and it has nothing to do with the safety and the protection for families or children.”
Guggenheim, a former law professor, called it “a systematic strategy of taking children from their families, permanently banishing them from their birth relatives, and sending them to live with strangers.” He commended New York City for working to reform its practices — which include a current local policy of issuing “Miranda-style” rights to parents being investigated for maltreatment.
But Guggenheim criticized spending more money on foster care than on providing the social services needed to prevent the need for such an invasive government action.
“It’s about a disgust for people who live in poverty, believing them to be lesser,” he told members of the foster care industry. “We are performative in it, in this child welfare industrial complex, which sends you a check every week.”
Agencies vow next steps
Kimberly Watson, CEO of Graham Windham and a former foster youth, acknowledged the centuries-long harm of the system. But she argued against a complete dismantling. Watson and other providers pointed to work their agencies do, connecting parents with drug treatment, mental health care and other programs that keep families out of the foster care system.
After Amanda Wallace — a former North Carolina child abuse investigator-turned activist and founder of Operation Stop CPS — called on social workers to “quit and do something else,” Watson pushed back.
“I don’t think everyone should quit their jobs, because I think families still need support,” she said, adding: “I think we need to do the work differently.”
In an interview, Watson said her agency would expand its foster care prevention programs and focus more on community-based support for families in need.
Michelle Yanche, head of Good Shepherd Services, said since she joined the Narrowing the Front Door discussions, her staff has taken steps “to really hold up the mirror” to internal practices. They’ve also focused on what legislative changes the agency could support, such as efforts to expand Miranda rights for investigated parents statewide.
“We could use our voice and our standing as an organization to advocate for change,” Yanche said.
In a statement to The Imprint, Hartzog described her organization’s commitment to making a change, which she said focused on “areas where we can have an immediate impact.” That includes how the agency handles family visits for kids in foster care, and workshops for frontline staff on implicit bias.
“There is so much work to do,” Hartzog said of the larger effort underway city-wide, “but this is a very meaningful start.”
Clarification: Additional co-hosts have been added to the story.
Disclosure: The Redlich Horwitz Foundation is one of the funders of Fostering Media Connections, The Imprint’s parent nonprofit company. Per our editorial independence policy, the organization had no editorial role in our news coverage.