Editorial: How did Sabrina and Natalie slip through Iowa's safety net?
The death of two teenage girls raises questions about Iowa's child-protection services.
The Register's Editorial | The Des Moines Register
A child-protection system that allows two 16-year-old Iowa girls to die — one from starvation and the other from malnutrition — is a system that’s in urgent need of repair.
But where to begin?
To hear the Iowa Department of Human Services tell it, massive cuts in staffing over the past seven years haven’t lessened the agency’s ability to protect Iowa’s children. Yet there are two dead girls — both home-schooled and both from the state’s foster care system — to account for.
On May 12, Sabrina Ray was found unresponsive and suffering from severe malnutrition inside her adoptive home in Perry. According to authorities, DHS had been “monitoring” the girl’s home due to past complaints of abuse, but the extent of that monitoring is unclear. Investigators said they found no evidence of abuse, but by the time she died, Sabrina weighed just 56 pounds. Her parents now face criminal charges of kidnapping, neglect and child endangerment resulting in a death.
Like Sabrina, Natalie Finn was adopted out of foster care. She was living with her adoptive parents in West Des Moines last October when she died of starvation. Her mother has been charged with first-degree murder and her father faces charges of kidnapping and neglect or abandonment.
Understandably, state lawmakers are now examining the manner in which foster parents are recruited and trained by the state. They’re also focusing on staffing levels at DHS and the high caseloads of state social workers and child-abuse investigators.
Although every Iowa lawmaker can credibly claim they’re “supportive” of Iowa’s children, some of the legislature’s inquiries seem more like political theater than a diligent effort to identify and address any shortcomings in the system. These are the same lawmakers who repeatedly cut the budget at DHS, knowing full well that their actions were likely to result in some sort of harm to the people DHS is charged with protecting.
As Sen. Matt McCoy, a Des Moines Democrat, pointed out during a legislative hearing last week, there are 1,135 fewer people working for DHS today than there were when Gov. Terry Branstad took office in 2010. That alone is cause for alarm, despite the department’s assurances that the number of child-protection workers within the agency has remained level.
McCoy says some DHS caseworkers are handling as many as 50 to 70 cases at a time. DHS officials flatly deny that and say that on average workers are handling a little over 13 cases at any given time, a slight decrease from a few years ago.
Is that average the result of “data manipulation,” as McCoy alleges? It’s possible. He says payroll data shows that in 2016, 156 of Iowa’s child-protection workers collected more than $5,000 each in overtime pay. In 2015, one social worker earned more than $40,000 a year in overtime pay by working 60-plus hours per week, he says.
Apparently, it’s going to take an independent investigation just to get a handle on actual caseloads, which should not be the case. The Iowa Legislature’s oversight committees might be able to get to the bottom of this particular issue, and the Child Welfare Policy and Practice Group, hired by DHS to conduct a review of Iowa’s child welfare system, may shed additional light on the matter.
But the parameters of the Child Welfare Policy and Practice Group review seem limited. It’s expected to entail six on-site visits at a total cost of just $39,550. Fortunately, the state ombudsman’s office is conducting its own investigations — and unlike the practice group, it’s not doing so at the behest of DHS itself.
Wendy Rickman, division administrator of adult children and family services at DHS, has told lawmakers that 99.7 percent of the Iowa children in foster care “are free from any kind of maltreatment.”
That’s an impressive statistic, but to be entirely accurate, Rickman should have added the phrase, “as far as we know.” After all, the day before she died of malnutrition, Sabrina Ray would have been counted among the 99.7 percent.
It’s entirely possible that DHS now has too few staffers to reliably determine just how much abuse is occurring in these homes. It’s easy to claim there are few cases of child abuse in Iowa if many of the people charged with spotting abuse have been saddled with unmanageable caseloads.
Aside from caseloads and staffing levels, legislators and other investigators need to examine the laws and regulations that make it possible for children in state-subsidized adoptive homes to go “off the grid” — removed from the public school system as home-schooled students who then have little or no interaction with the outside world. Both Sabrina and Natalie were home-schooled at the time of their deaths.
In 2013, legislation eliminated the reporting requirements that had been imposed on Iowa’s home-school families. Iowa is now one of only 11 states that don't require families to give notice to the state if they are home-schooling, which means no one knows who in Iowa is home-schooling their children. The state doesn’t even have statistical information that would indicate how many children are being home schooled.
Some lawmakers are now calling for a new requirement that home-schooled children in foster care meet semiannually with a teacher and/or health care professional. That idea has merit, but more is needed.
It will likely be several months before the public has a better handle on DHS’ interaction with the families of Sabrina Ray and Natalie Finn. In the meantime, Gov. Kim Reynolds will have to replace former DHS Director Charles Palmer, who resigned shortly after the details of Sabrina’s death were made public.
The department is in desperate need of a leader who is more than a proxy for the governor. It needs a leader who is willing to fight for the agency, its funding, its workers and all the vulnerable Iowans who depend on DHS to keep them out of harm’s way.