Childrens' Rights:
Winning for Children
By Geoffrey Knox*

OVERVIEW
Children's Rights is a national non-profit advocacy organization for children, dedicated to establishing and enforcing children's legal rights when they become involved with child welfare systems. Over 1 million children in the United States are victims of abuse and neglect each year. Currently, 600,000 abused and neglected children live in foster care. Foster care is supposed to be safe and temporary, but children are staying in state custody an average of three years -100,000 languish over 5 years-re-abused, neglected or denied education and health care they desperately need to thrive.

Children's Rights' goals are to make sure these vulnerable children are safe from abuse and neglect; receive the quality care and services they need; return quickly and safely to their families whenever possible; and, if necessary, move swiftly through the adoption process to permanent, loving families.

Children's Rights uses a unique strategy that combines advocacy, policy analysis, public education, and targeted litigation to take specific actions on behalf of children, that include:

• Exposing what happens to children in failing child welfare systems.
• Educating the public on why specific systems fail and how they can be fixed.
• Creating support for programs and initiatives to prevent abuse and neglect and benefit endangered children.
• Utilizing the power of the courts to compel government systems to fulfill their legal mandates on behalf of children.
• Interacting with child welfare advocates, professionals and policymakers to share insights and advance a common agenda.

Children's Rights employs its expertise to build the sustained political and public pressure needed to compel child welfare bureaucracies to change. The first step is to put failing systems under close scrutiny, identify the problems and generate solutions. When a system fails to respond, Children's Rights brings litigation to force reform and then monitors implementation of promised reforms to ensure that children's lives actually get better.

By creating beneficial and lasting change in child welfare systems, the organization hopes to ensure that children who are dependent on these systems stay safe, receive proper services, and return to their own families safely or find adoptive families so that they can have healthy childhoods that lead to productive adult lives.

ORIGINS AND STRUCTURE
For over 30 years, Marcia Robinson Lowry, founder and executive director of Children's Rights, has been a leader in creating new law and obtaining sweeping court-ordered decrees that serve as a model for reforming child welfare systems nationally. Originally a project of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Children's Rights became an independent non-profit organization in 1995.

Over the past eight years, the organization has grown substantially to now include a staff of 25 people, as well as interns, who work on different legal cases and policy issues. The organization also partners with local and national child welfare experts, policymakers and advocates.

Legal Department
The staff of Children's Rights decides to investigate a child welfare system after being approached by local advocates, foster parents or caseworkers over a period of time. They then conduct extensive interviews and meet with the people involved in the day-to-day operations of the child welfare system, including state judges, state and private agency caseworkers, educators, foster parents, adoptive parents and children living in foster care. From these interviews, specific examples of systemic failures often point to the need for a lawsuit to force reform of a child welfare system's practices. Those deficiencies often include:

• Leaving children in homes where they are abused and neglected, and even killed;
• Removing children from homes when they could be safely maintained there with provision of services;
• Keeping children in foster care unnecessarily with little attempt to reunite them with families;
• Moving children from foster home to foster home without adequate services or support;
• Allowing children to languish for years in child welfare custody with little hope of a permanent adoptive home.

Children's Rights' legal team is currently active across the country, involved in different stages of litigation in nine states, counties or cities. These include: Connecticut; Fulton and DeKalb Counties in Georgia; Kansas City, Missouri; New Jersey; New Mexico; New York; Tennessee; Washington, D.C.; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Two additional jurisdictions are currently under investigation.

Policy Department
The Children's Rights' policy department was created in 2000 to conduct national and local studies in various locations throughout the United States. In 2001, it released the first national study on the effects of privatization on child welfare services. Unlike other studies, which have taken a theoretical or "macro" look at the privatization of child welfare services, the two-year Children's Rights study, entitled Privatization of Child Welfare Services: Challenges and Successes, examined how privatization has played out in reality. The study reveals both benefits and negative consequences of privatization on children, families and the child welfare system itself. At a time when growing numbers of public agencies are entering into new types of arrangements with private, for-profit and non-profit agencies to provide services to children and families, the study offers important policy and practice recommendations based on "lessons learned" which can serve as a blueprint for child welfare privatization initiatives in the future.

The Policy Department is currently involved in efforts to improve child welfare in New York City:

• In February 2003, a report was released entitled Continuing Danger: Child Fatalities in New York City that details the factors associated with child fatalities in New York City. Working with pediatric and case practice experts, Children's Rights evaluated 194 child fatality review reports issued by the New York State Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) and analyzed the fatality reports to identify the key practice and medical issues that compromise children's safety and place children at risk of death. The report provides specific recommendations for improving practice in this area and has been shared widely with the child welfare advocacy community in New York City. Children's Rights is partnering with the NYC Public Advocate's office to promote the creation of an independent child fatality review process for New York City.

• Children's Rights partnered with two other child advocacy groups - Lawyers for Children and the Juvenile Rights Division of The Legal Aid Society - to address the City's performance in two critical child welfare areas: placements and services for teenagers in foster care, and the length of time that children and youth remain in care. This collaborative effort, which is being guided by national advisory boards of experts, involves data analysis and structured interviews and focus groups with key stakeholders.

• Children's Rights released the first report-Time Running Out: Teens in Foster Care-in November 2003. The study focuses on youth placed in group and residential care and features interviews with social workers and with youth on their placements, the services they received, the safety of group and residential care placements, and the extent to which they are prepared for life after foster care. The second report, on the length of time that children are in care, is due to be released in the spring of 2004. Both reports make practical recommendations to ensure positive outcomes for children and youth in the foster care system.

In addition to the studies in NYC, Children's Rights' Policy Department has three other major studies underway, including:

• A study of youth who are dually involved in the juvenile justice and child welfare systems;
• A study of the use of emergency shelters as placements for children and youth who enter foster care; and
• An analysis of how kinship care can be supported as a service for children and families, and can reduce the overrepresentation of children of color in the child welfare system.

Public Education
Children's Rights uses its Public Education department to build awareness among and engage a broader and wider constituency to promote and protect the rights of abused and neglected children. The organization works through the media and its own publications to educate and engage a greater national population in support of local and national child welfare reform efforts. The public education effort works collaboratively with the legal and policy departments to increase interaction and dialogue with child welfare professionals, policymakers and advocates everywhere to share successes, experiences and insights.

Children's Rights has also re-designed its website-www.childrensrights.org-to reach a broader range of audiences with the latest information on its work and key developments in the field of child welfare. A navigational system, plus a range of new features, provides users with quick access to information on Children's Rights' legal work, other child welfare resources and data, and new policy analyses. A new search engine further facilitates use of the site-making it a valuable resource to child welfare professionals, policymakers, legislators, local and national advocates, researchers, the media and the general public.

Funding
The work of Children's Rights is funded by the generous support of individual donors and foundations. When the organization prevails in a class-action lawsuit, it also receives attorneys' fees as provided by federal law. Children's Rights receives no government funding. The organization's budget and location does not allow it to represent individually all of the children who are in need of legal representation. The focus of its efforts is on having an impact on large groups of children and achieving system-wide reform through class action litigation, with the intent to help thousands of children in the systems in which it is involved.

CREATING CHANGE
In every jurisdiction where Children's Rights has initiated reform, measurable results are making a difference in the lives of children. Achievements include: more funding; stronger child protection services; shorter stays in foster care; fewer moves for children while in foster care; increased training for caseworkers and foster parents; and increased adoptions for children who could not be reunited with their parents. Highlights of reforms include:

Prohibiting Discrimination
The landmark New York City Wilder lawsuit settlement, prohibited, for the first time anywhere, discrimination and imposition of religious practices in foster care by private, publicly-funded religious organizations. (The Wilder lawsuit is the subject of a book by Nina Bernstein, entitled The Lost Children Of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care, published by Pantheon in 2001.)

Increasing Funding
Children's Rights has helped generate well over $2 billion in new funding nationwide for critically needed services in child welfare systems.

Improving Child Protective Services
Because of Children's Rights' lawsuits, child protective services in Connecticut, Washington, D.C., Kansas and New York now are closely tracked on the speed and quality of child protective service investigations to ensure a prompt response to abuse and neglect charges and to ensure that caseworkers have the necessary face-to-face contact with children, parents, and other relevant parties.

Reducing Caseloads
In Tennessee, a year after a landmark settlement in our lawsuit there, over 350 new caseworkers were hired, reducing the typical caseload down from 50 children per caseworker to a cap of 20. In New York City, average caseloads decreased from 27 to less than 20 per caseworker.

Speeding Adoptions
In Connecticut, the rate of adoptions jumped 655%, and Children's Rights forced the state to address a backlog of over 600 children who had long been ready to be adopted. Now almost 400 of these children are with their new adoptive families.

RECENT ACCOMPLISHMENTS

New Jersey
Four years ago, Children's Rights filed a lawsuit in New Jersey to expose the serious dangers in this child welfare system and pressed hard for reform. Just four months ago, New Jersey finally recognized just how dire the situation had become, and agreed to a sweeping settlement agreement that promises relief for thousands of children who are defenseless and in desperate need of protection. The settlement mandates additional funding for caseworkers and creates a panel of experts who will work with the state and Children's Rights, with the backing of a court order, to make sure that such abuses are discovered, corrected and, better still, prevented. Children's Rights will remain focused on ensuring the safety and well-being of the children of New Jersey until the system itself can be trusted.

Atlanta, Georgia
In response to deplorable conditions that had persisted for decades, Children's Rights brought a class action lawsuit in Atlanta that immediately secured the closure of two dangerous shelters being used to house hundreds of children, many of whom were infants. Children's Rights is now pursuing broader reforms in that child welfare system.

Connecticut
After years of noncompliance with court-ordered reforms, the State of Connecticut has agreed to give a Court-Appointed Monitor complete management authority over the Connecticut Department of Children and Families with power to break through obstacles and institute broad reform.

New Mexico
Foster children in New Mexico will be moving into adoptive homes more quickly as a result of Children's Rights' lawsuit, Joseph A. v. Hartz. All parties in that case recently entered into a new court-ordered settlement agreement to solve a problem that has plagued New Mexico's child welfare system for decades: finding permanent families for children whose goal is adoption. The innovative agreement calls for the Children, Youth and Families Department (CYFD) to hire two expert consultants to create Adoption Resource Teams. These teams will meet with caseworkers on every case in which a child's goal is adoption, to create an Individualized Adoption Plan that identifies each child's specific barriers to adoption and set forth steps to break through those barriers. CYFD will be bound to carry out these steps, and the teams will meet every 60 days until the children have permanent homes.

Kansas City, Missouri
Kansas City, Missouri is now complying with two-thirds of the requirements set by a consent decree from a Children's Rights lawsuit to improve the performance of its child welfare system. The system is keeping children in foster care safe from further abuse and neglect, moving them out of foster care as soon as possible and providing proper planning and services while they are in foster care. Children's Rights is working with state and county officials, the court monitor, and local and national experts to solve problems and reach agreement on how to further improve the lives of children in foster care.

Children's Rights has served as the national watchdog of child welfare systems for over three decades. It has achieved lasting and beneficial changes in these systems in numerous states and localities around the country. Children's Rights works to protect children from abuse and neglect, ensures that children who enter child welfare systems are safe, and demands that children receive the support they need to grow up into healthy and productive adults.

*Geoffrey Knox is senior communications consultant for Children's Rights.

Editor's Note: Children's Rights is an excellent organization with many proactive programs in New York and other states. To access Children's Rights recently redesigned website, you can click here www.childrensrights.org