the department of social services was in the dock – again – and that meant Harry Spence was on the hot seat. This time, it was the horrifying tale of yet another child whose name became a household word synonymous with the failings of a state agency charged with protecting her.
The tragedy of Haleigh Poutre, now 12, came into public view last September, when the girl arrived at a Westfield emergency room unconscious, allegedly beaten into a coma by her adoptive mother (who was also her maternal aunt) and stepfather. Soon afterward, DSS gained custody of the child and sought a court order to remove life support. In January, just after the Supreme Judicial Court upheld a lower court ruling sanctioning the action, DSS officials reported – some said belatedly – that Haleigh had begun showing signs of responsiveness. Though the agency decided not to pursue removal of life support, the reversal raised questions about the apparent DSS rush to pull the plug. Other questions had to do with how Haleigh ended up in that condition. After her adoption in October 2001, DSS received multiple abuse and neglect reports, known as 51As, about Haleigh, but those reports were dismissed by medical and mental health providers who concluded that Haleigh was inflicting her own injuries.
The Haleigh Poutre case propelled Massachusetts into another grim debate on child welfare. And that meant another high-level investigation of the Department of Social Services.
At a packed State House press conference in March, the Governor’s Special Panel for the Review of the Haleigh Poutre Case released its report, concluding that there was evidence of “systemic failure on all levels, public and private,” which produced “a frightening confluence of a health care system ignorant of abuse and a child protective system ignorant of medicine.”
But it was the governor himself who addressed the question on everyone’s mind. With the three review panel members behind him, Gov. Mitt Romney revealed that he asked the panel point-blank if the agency needed a change of personnel.
“Their answer was quite clearly and definitively no,” the governor said. “We have a group of individuals, particularly Commissioner Spence, who understand the challenges.”
Spence once declared that he liked taking on public institutions in crisis. Today, the DSS commissioner says his is a classic case of “be careful what you wish for, for you may get it.” Operating in crisis mode is all too common for DSS, as it is for child welfare agencies in most states. On average, a child is reported as abused or neglected in the Bay State every five minutes, according to the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. And it’s the cases that DSS bungles, one way or another, that make the news. Before Haleigh, there was 4-year-old Dontel Jeffers, who died in March 2005, 11 days after DSS placement in a Boston foster home.
In other words, DSS is ignored until some gut-wrenching event jolts the department back into public consciousness. “I think people don’t want to know about it,” says Carol Trust, executive director of the Massachusetts chapter of the National Association of Social Workers. “This is society’s dirty work.”
“human services–industrial complex”
sucks up department resources.
His defenders say Spence is just the man to deal with it. “He fully appreciates the responsibility of the work, and in a way that I have never seen in my career,” says Molly Baldwin, executive director of Roca, a multicultural human development and community building nonprofit in Chelsea, and a friend of Spence’s from his days as receiver for that once corruption-ridden and nearly bankrupt city.
But appreciation for the complexities of child welfare work may not be enough to protect Spence from agency critics, who are weary of the tableau of dead and injured children—and of contrite commissioners. “This is an agency that has wavered on the edges of mediocrity,” says Maureen Flatley, a child welfare and adoption consultant, who charges that Massachusetts, like most states, runs its motor vehicle department more effectively than its child protection agency.
Spence understands that he’s operating in an environment that requires heroic efforts but produces few heroes. “If we could predict human behavior with such certainty that we could protect every child from ever being harmed, we would run the entire world,” he says. Indeed, he sees his challenge as applying his talent for public management to an agency whose mission is as fraught with ambiguity as it is heavy with responsibility. In DSS, the veteran public-sector turnaround artist has taken on one of the most distressing, complex, and reform-resistant tasks in state government. And now that Spence has been more than four years at the helm, the question is: Does he still have a chance to succeed? Or has the task defeated him already?
A THANKLESS TASK
The commissioner, a longtime student of public-sector administration and organizational behavior, considers child welfare a “seriously undeveloped industry.” Considerable research has been done on clinical issues involving families, he says, but almost none on how to organize child-welfare work effectively. Rather, the most common management strategy nationally has been to fire people involved in high-profile cases. “It’s kind of astonishing that we’ve never looked up and said, ‘Gee, it doesn’t seem to have made a difference,’” says Spence.
It’s widely recognized that there are few harder ways to make a living than by intervening in troubled families. Child-welfare work exerts an enormous emotional toll on its workers, and Spence says that is what frequently leads to mistakes: Staff become emotionally frozen, isolated and injured by the work, and then make deep errors of judgment.
A 1998 House Post Audit and Oversight Bureau report on DSS concluded, “There is a feeling among employees that their work is becoming more difficult; that the children are more troubled and the families, more dysfunctional.” That was eight years ago. “Mary,” a social worker in eastern Massachusetts who works with teens and single mothers, says that often she will hear from clients, “DSS doesn’t know what’s good for my family. I know what’s good for my family.” (DSS asked CommonWealth not to use her real name to protect her safety.)
And wielding the state’s power to take a child away from a family is not easy. “I think one of the hardest tasks is for a social worker to make the judgment, within a 10-day period, as to whether the allegation of abuse and neglect is real,” says Marylou Sudders, president of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Then, she says, comes the critical question: “Do you remove the child from the home?”
To relieve some of that stress, Spence is trying to reorganize the department’s nearly 2,200 social workers, through a multiyear “teaming initiative.” Although working in teams is standard operating procedure in many fields, it is new to child welfare: Traditionally, social workers have worked alone, each reporting to a supervisor. Under the new DSS model, five case workers and one supervisor share up to 90 cases. Currently, 12 to14 teams are at work in eight area offices.
“Turns out families love this relationship, because when they call up, any one of the members of the team can talk to them about the case,” says Spence.
Spence also wants to make his social workers better decision-makers by means of expanded professional development. In 2004, DSS launched the Child Welfare Institute in collaboration with Salem State College and the University of Massachusetts Medical School, with the agency defraying the costs of graduate study for DSS workers. Interest in classes such as “Preparing Adolescents for Young Adulthood” has been stronger than anyone at the institute anticipated, says Cheryl Springer, director of Salem State College’s School of Social Work.
“To do this job right, you really need to keep educating workers on a regular basis,” says Edward Malloy Jr., president of the DSS chapter of the Service Employees International Union, Local 509, and a DSS supervisor since 1983.
Malloy appreciates Spence’s consistent defense of social workers, and his push for benefits like the institute. But he faults him for the agency’s continued failure to reduce social worker caseloads. Under their union contract, DSS social workers are supposed to carry no more than 18 cases, each of which involves not only one child but parents, extended family members, and foster parents; social workers and school, medical, and court personnel; and other outside contacts, sometimes adding up to more than 200 individuals. Every one of them, says Malloy, can call and say, “Why haven’t you gotten back to me?”
The Child Welfare League of America recommends that a social worker overseeing foster family care carry 12 to 15 children; a social workers who conducts initial assessments and investigations, 12 active cases per month; and workers with ongoing cases, 17 active families and no more than one new case assigned for every six open cases.
Spence acknowledges that about 250 social workers now carry more than 18 cases, and he notes that the department has never complied with the 18-case benchmark but should be able to do so, with minor exceptions, within a year. As for meeting CWLA standards, that would require more funding, Spence says, which would be a decision for the Legislature.
On top of all these pressures is the department’s bureaucratic culture. Some social workers say they are afraid of retaliation from managers if they blow the whistle about the problems involving children and families. According to state Rep. Gloria Fox, a Boston Democrat and a member of the Special Legislative Committee on Foster Care, the commissioner has admitted being kept in the dark about certain things that have gone on in his agency.
“That’s kind of scary,” says Fox. “Because of that, there are a whole lot of people that are in charge and he’s not.”
But Spence says he’s doing a lot to promote direct, candid conversation on clinical and administrative issues: “In any organization, it’s hard to get bad news to move upward.”
‘REALLY DESPERATE’
Training, teamwork, and manageable caseloads would help, but making a difference in the lot of children living in troubled homes is still difficult. Most DSS clients struggle with poverty, mental health problems, substance abuse, or domestic violence—and have nowhere else to turn. “Families don’t show up at DSS because kids are bad or families are bad,” says NASW’s Trust. “It’s because they don’t have the kind of support that those of us who don’t need DSS have had in our lives.” Every day 20 or more children come into DSS care, according to Stephanie Frankel, a supervisor in the Arlington regional office of the department’s Adoption Development Licensing Unit. “We really are desperate for foster families,” she says.
On a recent evening, eight people turn up at the Arlington office for an information session on foster parenting and adoption. A longtime DSS employee, Frankel runs down the in and outs of the foster care/adoption screening process, outlining the application forms, criminal background checks, home visits, and special training classes. She doesn’t miss a beat, even as she scoops up a wandering toddler. The youngster settles into her lap, gazing at her and listening to every word.
Last fall, Spence began rebuilding the foster care recruitment staff that had been eliminated during the state’s fiscal crisis. DSS began a new foster parent recruitment campaign with a goal of bringing in 1,000 additional foster parents. DSS is using experienced foster parents to help serve as recruiters and mentors.
“There are so many people that could open up [their homes] and they don’t,” says Medford resident Audrey Roth, who attended the Arlington session.
DSS has custody of roughly 10,000 Massachusetts children. About 7,600 children and teenagers were in foster care, and another 2,500 in residential facilities at the end of 2005. Statewide, 60 percent of the kids in placement are identified as white, 20 percent are African-American, 4 percent are multiracial, 2 percent are Asian, and the rest are not identified by race. In Boston, most of the kids in placement (57 percent) are black. In the western part of the state, 38 percent of the kids in placement are Hispanic, a higher percentage than in any other region.
If children don’t return to family homes or if adoption doesn’t pan out, they remain in DSS custody until they reach age 18. Last year, 700 young people left the DSS rolls because they had outgrown the agency’s jurisdiction, if not a need for help. “Aging out,” says Spence, is the invisible challenge of child welfare, and DSS tries to persuade these 18-year-olds to participate in various independent living, employment, and education programs until they turn 22.
“Atrocities against children set off an immense public reaction; 700 kids whose lives have no hope disappear without any evidence to the larger public,” he says.
“Harry’s on target on this, by saying aging out is a failure of the system,” says Julie Wilson, director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
Flatley: DSS “has wavered
on the edges of mediocrity.”
Bob Webb knows what failure of the system is all about. Born in 1950, Webb became a foster child at age three. A neighbor called the police after finding him and his four sisters eating garbage. His mother was schizophrenic, his father, “out of the picture,” he says. He navigated seven or eight foster homes over the next couple of years with one sister before being reunited with two others in Ethel Squire’s foster home in Melrose. Although he adored his social worker, Nicki Caperelli (“Every time she arrived at the foster home, she had a big smile on her face,” he says), at age 13 he rebelled against his foster mother’s strict regime and ran away. Once Squires declared him disruptive, he bounced between a series of boys’ homes and camps. After stealing a pack of cigarettes, he ended up in reform schools.
Now married with two children and the owner of Sunrise, a Boston-area window cleaning company, Webb aged out of the custody of the Division of Child Guardianship, a DSS predecessor, at 17. Officials gave him $130 and sent him on his way. He found a room in Boston’s South End and worked “for gangsters” parking cars and doing odd jobs in a dry-cleaning establishment before finding gainful employment.
“I see why people re-offend,” he says.
“This is where we have focused as a department in the last three years,” says Spence. “How do we sustain and improve the safety record of the department while taking up the permanency challenge? [It] gets lost too easily in child welfare because the media doesn’t focus on it—even though the human damage is enormous.”
PERMANENT SOLUTIONS
By “permanency,” Spence means the reunion of a child with his or her birth family, guardianship by another family member, or adoption. Getting kids into permanent situations helps lessen the reliance on one of the least desirable options for children, placement in residential facilities.
The focus on permanency reflects a national trend: moving kids—and dollars —away from residential care, where adolescents are the largest group, to permanent placements in a child’s home community. DSS’s response to this shift, the new Family Networks program, enables the agency to work with outside providers to furnish community-based services to children and adolescents still living at home who are at risk of ending up in residential programs. Contracts with Family Networks began in July 2005.
If reunification fails, the possibility of permanent placement is greater in the home community, since there are opportunities for involvement with a possible adoptive family or for another family member to step forward to act as guardian.
But residential care won’t completely disappear. Those with severe developmental delays or violent tendencies will continue to need residential placements, and foster families will still need the break that respite care offers. And some of the 100 or so residential providers who work with DSS say the agency may be moving too fast to embrace permanency.
“Does the field staff have all the information they need to help manage a change?” asks MSPCC’s Sudders, whose agency contracts with DSS. She also says some providers are experiencing financial problems, since they no longer receive referrals, yet they aren’t sure where the kids are going.
It’s critical that, if a child can’t make it in a community setting, there is a place for them to come back to, says Michael Weekes, president of the Massachusetts Council of Human Service Providers and a former DSS deputy commissioner. But while most agree that concerns about gaps in service are justified, at least one provider termed objections to the speed of the long-anticipated changeover “ludicrous.”
For some agency critics, reliance on the private sector for services is itself problematic. State Rep. Marie Parente, a Milford Democrat who chairs the Special Legislative Committee on Foster Care, says the new system relies too heavily on outsider providers, which she likens to a “Massachusetts human services–industrial complex,” funneling too much money to vendors that rely on government funding rather than to families.
Besides boosting permanent placements, Spence believes that redirecting funds from residential care to community agencies will bolster early intervention programs. The agency’s proposed 2007 budget is $762 million (with about $516 million allocated for services for children and families), up from about $744 million in fiscal 2006. As recently as last year a little less than one-third of the total budget went to kids in full-time residential settings (about 2,500 of them), at a cost of $100,000 to $120,000 per child per year.
“It’s a classic all-acute, no-preventive system,” Spence says. “When people say to me, ‘Do you have enough money in the system?’ my fundamental response is, ‘Until we get it in the right places, I can’t tell yet.’ We’ve been spending it in so many wrongheaded ways.”
Mary Jane England, president of Regis College and the agency’s first commissioner (serving from 1979 to 1983), says DSS initially focused on early-intervention services, in the hopes of preventing child abuse before it occurred. But as reported abuse overwhelmed DSS resources, those components atrophied. “I think that’s a big issue for the commissioners who have had to follow me,” she says.
At the end of 2005, some 40,000 children were receiving services from DSS, about 30,000 of them at home, with more than 350 private agencies delivering services under the supervision of 29 DSS area offices. Most families don’t become DSS clients because of abuse and neglect reports. Rather, they seek out voluntary services, such as tracking (keeping tabs on kids at school), mentoring programs, parenting classes, and home-based counseling. Others turn to DSS when older children and adolescents make trouble at school, get hooked on drugs, or become uncontrollable at home, ceding custody to the state under a CHINS (Child in Need of Services) petition.
“If you take a family in crisis, everyone knows that’s the best opportunity to make a change,” says Spence. “But you need to get services in immediately.”
Union chief Malloy doesn’t dispute the need for these services, but he says the idea of shifting resources to provide them is a shell game. The message it sends the Legislature, he says, is, “We are going to interact with families in this magical way and then we don’t need more staff, and we don’t need significantly more money for services.”
Spence has his game plan, he’s putting it into effect, and many people in the field are rooting for him. “Harry is on the right track in a lot of ways,” says Weekes. But even Spence has to admit that evidence of progress is slim.
“The benchmarks we’ve laid out for ourselves are ones that require the substantial revision of the system to achieve,” he says. “Child welfare does not lend itself, nor should it, to quick fixes.”
So, how does DSS measure up, overall? Massachusetts, at least, has more resources and is able to do more for children than some other states. “This agency is not worse on any general measure of success and is probably better on some,” says Mary Elizabeth Collins, an associate professor of social welfare policy at Boston University’s School of Social Work.
MADE FOR THE JOB?
Only the strong survive in a Darwinian atmosphere like DSS. Tall and rail-thin, Lewis Harry Spence hardly looks like Hercules, but mentally he is every bit as strong, says Stephen Kraus, chairman of the board of trustees of City on a Hill Charter School in Boston, where Spence also served as chairman. (He is currently on the board of the school’s foundation.)
Spence has certainly survived taxing assignments in combative environments. Before returning to Boston, he was deputy chancellor for operations in the New York City Public Schools from 1995 to 2000. “Harry has an extraordinary capacity to look into the institutional blockages…that prevent services from getting to children,” says his ex-boss, Rudy Crew, formerly New York City Chancellor and also once a Boston deputy superintendent, who is now superintendent of the Miami-Dade County Public Schools in Florida.
Before that, Spence put a bankrupt Chelsea back on the road to solvency and led housing authorities in Somerville, Cambridge, and Boston, where he helped desegregate Charlestown’s public-housing developments without the violence that marred attempts elsewhere. Returning to the Hub after his New York sojourn, Spence worked as a College Board consultant as the firm sought to expand its Advanced Placement program beyond suburban classrooms.
Despite his distinguished résumé, Spence says the opportunity to take over DSS “came out of the blue.” Andrea Watson, now project director for the Federation for Children with Special Needs, suggested to then-state Human Services Secretary Robert Gittens that Spence was the man for the DSS job. Spence took his time mulling over the resulting offer. Among those he consulted was Nicholas Scoppetta, who led New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services through landmark reforms. Plenty of people were working to improve schools, Scoppetta told Spence, but child welfare needed the help of people like him.
The kicker came in his old Chelsea stomping grounds. Invited to attend a weekend “circle” of open conversations facilitated by the nonprofit group Roca, Spence found himself in the middle of a generational failure to communicate. When young people launched into complaints about DSS, the adults would have none of it. “Do you know what it was like before they were really active in this community, how many lives they’ve saved?” Spence remembers them saying. Acting Gov. Jane Swift appointed him the sixth commissioner of DSS in November 2001, handing Spence his most challenging public-management assignment to date.
Spence’s first efforts in public service came in his hometown of Cranbury, NJ, near Princeton, in the 1950s. At that time, the town was a small agricultural community, about one-quarter African-American or Hispanic. The town’s poor population of farm laborers lived in appalling conditions, and after some homes were destroyed by fire, his father started a volunteer homebuilding group, a sort of early Habitat for Humanity. As a teenager, Spence spent weekends on rooftops, helping his father with the construction.
A graduate of Harvard College and Law School, Spence, who turns 60 in November, lives in Boston’s South End. He credits his wife, Robin Ely, a Harvard Business School associate professor of organizational behavior, with helping him draw on “the best management theory available.” His youngest daughter, fourth-grader Francesca, is 9. Two older children, from his first marriage, both live in New York; Rebecca, 29, is a freelance writer and Adam, 31, a Wall Street leveraged buyout specialist.
Now charged with saving at-risk children, Spence finds his attitudes informed by age and personal experience. In his early years as a father, Spence disciplined by spanking. But one night at dinner his son, then 9, suddenly asked that the spanking stop. Flummoxed, Spence wanted to know what he was supposed to do if Adam said to “go jump” when asked to take out the garbage. They could talk, Adam told his father. Spence never spanked his children again.
Perspective of a different sort came from a diagnosis of prostate cancer in September 2003, which caused him to step down from his dual post as assistant secretary of health and human services in August 2004. At the time, he said, “In what would once have been a bad joke, I’ve decided I’m going to dramatically reduce my stress level by just being commissioner of DSS.”
“The word ‘cancer’ confronts you with mortality [and] the sense that goes with aging that time is short,” Spence says today. Now cancer-free, he says the experience reinforced a belief that his current work “is as important as anything I could wish to do on this earth.”
But there are others who wonder if Spence is up to the task. “You hate to hurt a good man like Harry Spence, because he is the nicest commissioner that we’ve had,” says Parente. “But you need a tough man for a tough job.”
“Haleigh’s case is a screaming indictment of the agency because this case played itself out through Harry’s tenure,” says advocate Flatley, who is involved in the Jeffers case and has served as a CNN analyst on the Poutre case. Flatley is not convinced that past success in public management translates into success in an agency like DSS. In Spence’s case, she says, the bloom is off the rose.
“You are reminded a little bit of The Picture of Dorian Gray, where for a period of time he appears to be the golden boy,” says Flatley. “He’s this attractive, dynamic, persuasive leader and then, all of sudden, someone opens the door and peers behind the façade.”
Even some longtime fans are losing patience. Fox says she and others in Boston “go way, way back with Harry Spence” to his days as BHA receiver. But Fox points out, “The Department of Social Services has been out of control for a while.”
When it comes to criticism of his department, Spence distinguishes between the Jeffers case and the Poutre cases. In the Jeffers case, the structure and the oversight of therapeutic foster care (for children with severe emotional problems) was very poor, he concedes. But Spence rejects charges that the Haleigh Poutre case illustrates a failing of the agency at all.
“Simply because we [are] the agency whose task is to deal with issues that the culture finds unbearable to look at, whenever they come to the light of day the first place to look for blame is us,” says Spence.
The commissioner is a fierce, public protector of his staff. There are times when termination has to occur, he admits, noting that the department recently fired its 38th social worker or supervisor in the past two years. “What I will never do is scapegoat social workers in high-profile cases,” he says.
How about Spence himself? Would removing Spence have solved anything?
“No, it wouldn’t address the problem,” says Poutre panel chairman Christine Ferguson, the former state Department of Public Health commissioner, just after the March news conference. “You would have to look at—and it would be impossible to do so—every single person involved in this case for the last 11 years, in the private and public sectors,” then punish them all because the outcome was bad, she adds.
When things go wrong, fingers always get pointed at commissioners, says Harvard’s Wilson, but firing them precipitously can sometimes impede reform, rather than accelerate it. “I think changing commissioners rapidly, unless the commissioner is just not a good commissioner, is not good for the agency, because you can’t get any traction on changes,” she says.
REFILLING PRESCRIPTIONS
Apart from scandals and cases that shock the public, child-welfare agencies have a hard time getting the attention of policy makers. According to a 1995 report from the State Legislative Leaders Foundation, lawmakers generally do not hear about children and family issues from their constituents and rarely read reports about them. But seeing for themselves is a different matter. To provide Utah lawmakers with insights into child welfare, Richard Anderson, director of the state’s Child and Family Services, set up a program in 2001 for lawmakers to shadow a caseworker handling an ongoing case or an investigation. “I can’t believe what you do every day” is the frequent response from participating legislators.
But in Massachusetts, investigating DSS has become a cottage industry, with about a dozen probes since the late ’80s. Major legislative inquiries took place in 1998 and 1995-96, and special commissions on foster care were appointed in 1993 and 1987. And as this story goes to press, the House Post Audit and Oversight Bureau is conducting its own DSS investigation, hard on the heels of the governor’s Haleigh Poutre review panel.
Relying on specific episodes of child abuse or neglect as catalysts for reform has its limitations, however. Prescriptions tend to be narrow and case-specific, and those that aren’t tend to recycle recommendations from past event-driven investigations. The Poutre review is a case in point.The panel’s key recommendations, which addressed end-of-life decisions—one of the rarest dilemmas facing a dilemma-filled agency—involved obtaining a second opinion from a doctor outside the treating hospital, requesting an opinion from the hospital’s ethics committee, and assuring that, once compiled, the information finds its way to the courts, the child’s guardian ad litem, and the child’s attorney. While some of the recommendations deal with technologies that did not exist a decade ago, Ferguson says many have much in common with those made by the 1993 Special Commission on Foster Care (itself established in response to the highly publicized “Mikey” case, involving the sudden removal of a child from a foster home).
The panel’s sole legislative proposal would increase the investigation period for reports of abuse and neglect, as well as the period during which DSS can access medical records, from 10 to 20 calendar days. This proposal mirrors a bill now pending in the Legislature (and first filed in 2003) that would increase the investigative period to 15 working days, and Malloy says his union has tried for several years to get legislation passed to increase investigation periods.
The Haleigh Poutre panel’s criticism of the gap-riddled interactions between DSS and the Department of Mental Health also has many echoes. A 2002 Pioneer Institute report, Rationalizing Health and Human Services, written by former health and human services and administration and finance secretary Charles Baker, found that the Executive Office of Health and Human Services’s various agencies serve many of the same clients, but do so in isolation. One of the goals of the reorganization led by then-Secretary Ronald Preston begun that year was to improve the working relationships between the agencies. And while Spence stresses some improvements, such as reducing lengths of stay for children in psychiatric hospitals, the Poutre review found that inadequate child mental health services at DMH makes DSS the “de facto child mental health resource,” a role for which it is ill-equipped. According to the panel’s report, a child’s DSS status “precludes or hinders” DMH services rather than “triggering the possibility of joint services,” while the DMH eligibility process “serves to obstruct, not facilitate [medical] care.”
“I think what the report highlights is that we are still in the nascent stages of that reorganization,” says Health and Human Services Secretary Timothy Murphy. “It doesn’t just happen overnight.”
Some lawmakers are willing to give DSS credit where credit is due, but still want the agency on a tighter leash. In April, the Special Legislative Committee on Foster Care proposed the “Dontel-Haleigh” bill, for which hearings have not yet been scheduled. Notably, four of the committee’s six members—Parente, Fox, Democratic Sen. Stanley Rosenberg of Amherst, and Democratic Rep. Paul Donato of Medford—are former foster children.
“DSS is a significantly better and stronger department than 10 years ago,” says Rosenberg, an Amherst Democrat. But “both cases demonstrate there are very specific areas that need to be addressed.”
Where the governor’s panel targeted DSS-medical community issues, the Dontel-Haleigh bill addresses the breakdown between DSS, state prosecutors, and local law enforcement. Under this legislation, certain child abuse reports would immediately go to district attorneys and local police before, rather than after, a DSS internal investigation. The bill also touches on medical issues, requiring DSS to get a second medical opinion in end-of-life decisions and provide the court with all opinions and medical data; conduct medical screenings within 14 days of placement; and convene multidisciplinary teams in area offices. But the biggest change would affect providers, who now operate outside the DSS legal framework. They’d be mandated to follow laws, rules, and regulations now governing DSS.
This is an “opportunity to craft and mold and reorganize the child welfare system in Massachusetts,” says Fox. “It doesn’t simply hand the policymaking over to the agency, but it continues to put in place a system of checks and balances,” says Flatley.
“We are studying the [legislation] and plan to meet with the special panel on foster care to further understand the details of what they’ve proposed,” says Spence through a DSS spokesman.
STARTING OVER
When all is said and done, the Poutre review was a vindication of sorts for Spence, allowing him to get back to the work he’s started. The single most powerful message of the report, he claims, is the need for child protective and medical communities to deepen their dialogue and their understanding of each other. “The outline of the work that they lay out for us is exactly right,” Spence says.
The report confirmed another of the commissioner’s firmly held views: “I think in the sense that it said very clearly that they found no carelessness no lack of due care or concern or attention by any staff, that was my belief as well.”
But others take a gloomier view. “Let’s blow up DSS and start all over,” declared a Boston Herald editorial.
“What kept coming back in my mind over and over again was the apparent helplessness DSS felt to remove Haleigh from that abusive situation,” says Flaherty. “I just think that nothing good is going to come of this [from] any direction.”
There is certainly reason to wonder whether DSS will ever change, bouncing as it does from one heart-rending case to another.
“I think it’s wrong to blame [DSS] for the kind of failures that happen,” says BU social work professor Collins. Utah child-welfare chief Anderson says the challenge is to build a system that is not reactive, so that one child’s death is not seen as “representative of the system as a whole.”
But Parente doesn’t buy the these-things-are-bound-to-happen argument. “If it’s one case and it’s your kid, would you trust us with your child?” she asks.
“All the ingredients for change are at hand. What is necessary is the political will to give the children and the families of the Commonwealth the type of child welfare agency they deserve.” That was the conclusion of the 1993 Special Commission on Foster Care, and it is the challenge that remains today. The terrible truth about child welfare is that tragedies drive reform, and that reform peters out when memory of those tragedies fades.
“Haleigh’s tragic experience unfortunately underlines the failures of successive governors to implement clear guidelines for major reform set forth in 1993,” says Malloy. For now, Spence soldiers on. His commitment to the organizational triage that, in DSS, passes for reform is undisputable, and it’s conveyed with a passion not often seen in public officials. Whether he can rally and redirect the agency sufficiently to withstand the cycle of accusation, investigation, and recrimination is an open question, though not for the person who threw his hat in the ring in the first place.
“He was absolutely the man for the job,” says Watson. “I have no regrets at all.”