The announcement went out Monday morning that the head of the Department of Children and Family Services, Trish Ploehn, has been removed as the head of DCFS.
The LA Times predicted her ouster over a month ago.
Axing Ploehn may or may not be the right thing to do. The opinions around town (and beyond) on the matter are all over the place.
Some feel she was simply not up to the job, and that a recent string of child deaths proved it. Others suggest that, in a long troubled and secretive department that has been chronically plagued by child deaths and other horrors, she was simply the nearest and most obvious person to blame.
(The LA Weekly reported in November that as early September, Ploehn’s attorney wrote the County CEO about a “smear campaign” against her allegedly coming from a couple of the supervisors.)
She will be replaced on a purely interim basis by Antonia Jimenez, a top aide to county Chief Executive William T Fujioka, while a nationwide search for a permanent director takes place.
In a story for the LA times, Garrett Therolf writes that it is hoped that Jimenez will begin whipping the department into shape even during her temporary tenure.
Jimenez will not have the benefit of significant child welfare experience. She came to Los Angeles County government only months ago after working as a senior manager at Deloitte, the management consulting firm, and in Massachusetts state government, including the governor’s office, focusing mostly on healthcare issues.
Since arriving in L.A., however, she has gained officials’ confidence for her management expertise and has been admired for her reputation as a turnaround expert. Behind the scenes, she has asked supervisors’ aides to pull back from their involvement in the department’s affairs to give her and the chief executive’s staff the opportunity to take nearly singular ownership of the day-to-day efforts to correct the agency.
Looking in from the outside, the disheartening part of this whole thing is that Ploehn is just the latest in a string of DCFS directors who have gone from being the the possible saviors of the LA County foster care system.
I don’t know Ploehn, but I did talk at length, on several occasions with her predecessor’s predecessor, Anita Bock.
Bock was a rising star in the foster care world, recruited in 1999 to come to Los Angeles after she had a dramatic success in overhauling Miami’s smaller but similarly ailing foster-care system.
When we talked a decade ago, in the spring of 2000, Bock was still viewed as the new DCFS savior, but I found her to be very down to earth and passionate about the work. This is a little of what she said about what needed fixing at DCFS:
“Most of our social workers have 50 or 60 cases, which is quadruple the nationally recommended number of 15. That’s clearly unworkable. We also have a bureaucracy that actively prevents people on the frontlines from making decisions that are in the best interests of the child, and tends to meet its own needs first.” She smiled wryly. “Which means it’s doing whatever it can to avoid liability. We can’t afford to operate like that anymore. We have to put the needs of the kids first, the needs of everybody else second.”
Bock also described the required training for foster parents as woefully inadequate. “And we should do a complex psychological and social evaluation before we place a child, in order to determine their specific needs and match them with an appropriate family,” she said. “Instead, we thrust children into care without any kind of effective assessment. That’s just a recipe for problems.”
So what to do?
Bock sighed. “We have to gently and humanely unravel the mess that is L.A. County foster care,” she said. “And the community needs to step up to the plate as well. There’s a good reason that all these kids are flooding into the system. American children are in deep trouble. That’s obvious everywhere you look.” Still she insisted that she is optimistic. “I think in six months or a year, this agency is going to really surprise everybody — not just the state but the whole country.”
As I said, that was ten years ago.
Unfortunately, instead of gobs of progress, there were some incremental moves forward. The bureaucracy and the resistance was formidable. Yet, while Bock made visible improvements. The troubled department didn’t move fast enough and, after three years, Bock’s contract wasn’t renewed.
Following Bock, there was David Sanders, another purported savior. Sanders wasn’t tossed out, but got so fed up that he quit DCFS to go work elsewhere.
Enter Trish Ploehn, the first director promoted from within the organization and someone on whom many hopes were pinned. And now exit Trish Ploehn.
That’s three directors in 10 years— soon to be four.
It makes one wonder if perhaps the problems are not just with the directors. Perhaps there is something deeper and more systemic that continues not to be addressed.
Still, as foster care activist/journalist Daniel Heimpel points out, under Ploehn there were some substantive changes.
He writes:
Not knowing the full circumstance of Ploehn’s removal, I can only offer what I do know. Under her watch the number of children in care was dramatically reduced, sparing thousands of children from the trauma of removal. She was the architect of a culture shift that compelled social workers to toe the scary line between the safety of foster care versus the value of leaving that child in a family home.
“This is not the easy route,” Ploehn wrote in a letter to her workers announcing the end of her tenure. “But it is what we know to be best for the children and families we serve. And this is the work that needs to be done moving forward – ensuring that each and every child in our County truly enjoys a sense of wholeness, of the security that comes with being a member of a safe, strong, loving family.”
From the outside things seem black and white. But we as a culture left those hard decisions to the workers under Ploehn’s watch. They were the ones who had to decide whether a child was safer in his or her family home or in a foster care system known to be imperfect. As one worker told me “the only way they [the children] would be safer is if we slept in the homes with them.”
But the workers don’t sleep in broken homes and humans have the capacity to act horribly. Whenever that happened, we looked for someone to blame. Too often that was the Department and its head. Now she is gone. Without someone to blame, maybe it is time we all ask what we can do to help our collective children.
Yes. What he said.
UPDATE: in January 2003, the wonderful writer Ed Hume wrote an article for LA Magazine called “The Unwanted. It was about DCFS in general, and the infamous and now-closed MacLaren Hall, in particular. I was rereading the story this morning and was struck by this paragraph:
Bold pronouncements from county officials that a solution is at hand have become an annual ritual, followed by another ritual: rounds of finger-pointing and firings when little is solved. (Anita Bock, ousted last July as director of the Department of Children and Family Services is only the latest casualty….)
Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.
Photo by Anne Cusack, Los Angeles Times
JIM NEWTON LAUNCHES A WEEKLY LAT COLUMN AND FINDS WIDESPREAD DISAPPOINTMENT IN VILLAGRAIGOSA
It’s good. Read it.
Here’s how it opens:
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s inauguration, on a sunny Los Angeles morning 5 1/2 years ago, was a moment of celebration and promise. Villaraigosa’s personal future appeared limitless; the city seemed poised to reap great things. “We need,” he said that day to 3,000 adoring supporters, “to start thinking big again.”
That feels like a long time ago.
THE COST OF MONDAY’S HEALTH CARE RULING
The NY Times’ Sheryl Gay Stolberg analyzes what Monday’s ruling on the health care bill really means in a practical sense. (Hint. It’s not good.)
You write of Trish Ploehn:
“Some feel she was simply not up to the job, and that a recent string of child deaths proved it. Others suggest that, in a long troubled and secretive department that has been chronically plagued by child deaths and other horrors, she was simply the nearest and most obvious person to blame.”
But there’s another way to look at it: She was simply not up to the job and the fact that the LA Times suddenly started paying attention to the kinds of deaths that have been happening all along has nothing to do with it. (There is no “string” of deaths, no “spate” of deaths and no “series” of deaths – there are, however, the same tragic deaths in roughly the same proportion as has existed for as long as there has been a DCFS, and long before that. The Times simply started paying attention again when a new state law made it easier to the paper to get information about them).
Ploehn wasn’t up to the job because of her bunker mentality, complete with withholding information to which the public is legally entitled and a Watergate-style search for leakers. That played right into the hands of the LA Times, giving them story after story to push their agenda of hype, hysteria and what David Simon so aptly calls “Pulitzer-sniffing.”
Of course no one leader is responsible for everything wrong with DCFS and a new leader alone can’t fix it. But all over the country, child welfare systems that have vastly improved have two things in common: A commitment to stop taking away so many children needlessly and a strong, dynamic leader to carry out that commitment.
There are some suggestions for how Antonia Jimenez might become such a leader on our child welfare blog today: http://bit.ly/eFaZf4
Richard Wexler
Executive Director
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform
http://www.nccpr.org
Thanks, Richard, for the suggestions for Antonia Jimenez, or whomever comes after her.
In the United States of America our child protection industry is engaging in Medicaid fraud, racketeering and human rights abuses. We have granted the child protection industry unlimited power to remove children from their families on the basis of suspicion alone. There is no system of accountability or oversight in place to deter this. Its mission of protecting children has been undermined by a criminal element. We are allowing criminals to use child protection for their own greed and personal agendas. It has to end.
Child abuse is a crime. It is assault, rape, torture, starvation and homicide. It is violent crime and the evidence is obvious. There is no mystery to it. We must bring science, logic and reason back into the way we handle violent crimes against children. We must base our statistics on scientific evidence, not mere accusations. We must remove the perpetrator, not the child.
We are accusing our citizens of crimes without the use of forensic evidence and denying them due process in a criminal court of law. We are tearing children out of the arms of their mothers and fathers, and their extended families without evidence of a crime. We are warehousing children in foster homes and facilities across the nation without evidence of a crime. We are allowing these children to be exposed to sexual abuse in the custody of the states. We are allowing these children to be used in servitude in the custody of the states. We are allowing these children to be brutalized and murdered in the custody of the states. There are children aging out of foster care into homelessness and crime. Our prisons are filled with children who grew up in foster care. It has to end.
Taking children for profit and abusing them in state custody is not what Walter Mondale had in mind when he signed CAPTA into law in 1974. It is not what Bill Clinton had in mind when he signed ASFA into law in 1997 and it is not what Hilary Clinton had in mind when she wrote “It Takes a Village.”
These leaders entrusted our professionals working within the child protection industry with the resources to protect abused and orphaned children. It was a noble gesture. But child protection let us down. They failed to fulfill their promise to our children, our leaders and to our great nation. They engage in egregious violations of law and human rights abuses. The industry has been taken over by criminals who have no decency or integrity. They have crossed the line. They have turned child protection into a national disgrace and it has to end.
We can’t reform an industry that commits atrocities against children. We must start over with new ideas and a completely different approach. We must change the way we think about child abuse and child protection. We must focus our efforts on helping impoverished families build better lives for themselves, not try to turn a profit on human suffering. It is not only impoverished families who are being subjected to brutality. It is any family who can’t afford a costly legal defense against this brutality that is now vulnerable. Your family could be next. It has to end.
If we tear down the child protection industry and return to the practice of criminal investigations under due process of law in criminal court, the number of cases will drop dramatically. We will have the resources we need to help our impoverished and save billions of tax dollars at the same time. We must do better than this for the future of our nation.
We must free our mandated reporters from the threat of losing their licenses if they don’t report their suspicions. Let them go back to healing, teaching, protecting and serving without this constant threat hanging over their heads. We must trust that they are competent and intelligent enough to make a distinction between crime and poverty.
We are turning neighbor against neighbor, family against teachers, doctors, police officers, politicians and our country by allowing the criminal element in child protection to continue on this course. It has to end.
I encourage every American to join together to:
1. Call for an immediate nationwide moratorium on all child abuse investigations that do not use forensic evidence;
2. Call for the immediate transfer of power from child protective services to a division of law enforcement specializing in investigations of violent crime. These investigations must include the use of forensic evidence, and must be conducted independently of anyone working within child protection or in the promotion of child protection, with no financial incentives for taking children whatsoever;
3. Call for immediate state and federal investigations of every organization affiliated with child protection and family court across the nation for the crimes of Medicaid fraud, racketeering and all other crimes, including crimes against humanity;
4. Call for the return of children to families who were accused of crimes and denied due process in criminal court keeping in mind that some children may never be going home;
5. Call for a repeal of CAPTA to end mandated reporting and the child abuse hotline and end the practice of central registries for all cases not proven in a criminal court of law.
It has to end!
Excellent DCFS legal reforms proposals by J. Holderbaum. I just hope it isn’t too late to save my kids still in foster care.
DCFS is a thoroughly corrupted Bureaucracy. Trish Ploehn rose up through that bureaucracy. She reflected it. Her reassignment is a joke, she gets MO money to do less – to count paperclips until her retirement age – no doubt to silence her from going pubic with dirt on the whole system including the LA County Board of Supervisors. DCFS fails in almost all aspects of its mission – it fails to protect truly abused kids and then persecutes innocent families and parents to get the big numbers of seizures for Federal Title IVe monies that flow into LA County coffers overseen by Board of Supervisors. DCFS seizures are UNConsitutional and unlawful by any law of humanity. Multiple sweetheart deals between DCFS and Family Foster Agencies hired by DCFS are under investigation by state authorities at present for corruption, kickbacks and financial fraud and the abuse of children in the foster care system. DCFS social workers openly defy proper court orders to provide services to reunify families with their children. as a matter of course. The Dependency Court system is totally owned by DCFS. It rubber stamps almost all DCFS seizures of kids which they can hold up to two years. Children are more likely to be abused under DCFS care than outside of it. Social workers regularly fabricate evidence and outright lie on reports to court. No accountability or oversight by anyone inside or outside of DCFS or county Counsel takes place. It is government sponsored kidnapping ring for profit. They unjustifiably seize more kids to make the case that they need more budget and social workers. It is empire building at its worst. The problem is systemic facilitated by political cowardice and financial avarice by the Board of Supervisors at the cost of our families and children s lives, All it takes is one malicious phone call to DCFS Hotline and you will forever be plunged into Hell.
These guys above have it right. This is organized crime. Everybody gets a cut for your kids’ and family misery. DCFS/CPS, local governments, foster parents and foster agencies, psychologists, attorneys and law school rejects posing as juvenile judges – all get paid. We need a RICO INVESTIGATION. Where are the whistle blowers? Where are the GRAND JURIES AND DA’s?