State child welfare system confusing poverty with neglect

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- Missouri's child welfare system confuses poverty with neglect, resulting in more children than necessary in foster care and making it difficult to focus on children in dangerous situations, according to a report released Monday.

The solution, in part, is to do more to keep families together by helping them pay for housing and child care or providing other support services, said Richard Wexler, executive director of the Virginia-based National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, which released the report about Missouri.

The state commission, composed of people from all branches of government and the private sector, has been gathering information from other states and child advocacy groups. It plans to release legislative recommendations by the end of this month.

The panel was formed in response to the death last August of 2-year-old Dominic James of Springfield. The boy was removed from his mother after a domestic dispute and placed with a foster family, where he was kept despite concerns by his biological father and others that he showed signs of abuse.

The boy's foster father, John Dilley of Willard, has pleaded innocent to abuse and murder charges.

Wexler said Dominic should never have been removed from his home, where there was no evidence he was physically abused. Instead, the family should have been helped, he said, or the boy could have been placed temporarily with a relative.

But Wexler said Missouri's system also has wrongly left children in their homes despite repeated warnings to the state Division of Family Services that they were in danger. Some of those instances could have been avoided if caseworkers weren't spread so thin, he said.

The report by Wexler's organization contained 20 recommendations, including:

-- Changes to the state's child abuse hot line. Anonymous calls should no longer be accepted and the state should create better criteria for determining which child abuse complaints deserve an investigation.

-- Restructuring the way the state handles child abuse complaints. A private contractor could do an initial assessment of a family's situation and offer voluntary help, instead of immediately involving state caseworkers.

-- More practical help for families, including assistance for housing, child care and job services, to avoid confusing poverty with neglect. Substance abuse treatment also should be readily available.

-- Eliminating the court's juvenile office from all child abuse and neglect investigations and court proceedings. The prosecutorial functions now handled by the office could be turned over to attorneys for the Division of Family Services.

Wexler said Missouri may be the only state with "two front doors" into the child protection system. A family could do everything asked of it by the Division of Family Services and still not satisfy the juvenile court officers who could press to keep their child in foster care, he said.

But Gary Waint, director of the state's juvenile and adult court programs, said having juvenile officers involved "usually provides good checks and balances with what the Division of Family Services does."

Juvenile court officers are closely tied to their communities, so they can make decisions about whether a case meets community standards for abuse or neglect, Waint said.

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On the Net:

National Coalition for Child Protection Reform: http://www.nccpr.org