(Tenn.) DCS will no longer remove kids from homes without a hearing

[alp227]

Source: The Tennessean

Late on a warm August evening in 2008, Robert Andrews was standing in his yard when three caseworkers with the Department of Children’s Services and two Hickman County deputies drove up, got out of their cars and asked to go inside.

Andrews said no, but the caseworkers and one of the deputies went in anyway, searched the home and took each of his four children aside for interviews. Then the officials left. Neither Andrews nor his wife, Patti, was ever accused of a crime in connection with the visit.

The events of that night led to a lawsuit, one of two similar legal challenges filed by families against caseworkers. Both challenges were taken up by a federal appeals court. And in a pair of recent rulings, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit used the cases to spell out for the first time that caseworkers, like police, are governed by the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which protects citizens against searches and seizures done without a warrant.

Read more: http://www.webcitation.org/6KmxZlzZN

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Last week, online news site The Chattanoogan reported: New U.S. Waiver To Give DCS More Flexibility To Help Children:

The Tennessee Department of Children’s Services has been selected to participate in a groundbreaking demonstration project that promises to keep more kids safely in their homes, rather than having them come into foster care.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has chosen Tennessee, along with six other states, to take part in a waiver program that will give DCS added flexibility in using federal Title IV-E foster care dollars to serve children and families.

The waiver will allow Tennessee to use Title IV-E funds for in-home services in an effort to keep children safely in their homes. The waiver does not provide new money to the state. Rather, it lets the state use its federal dollars in ways that were not previously allowed, providing flexible funding of innovative child welfare programs.

The Tennessean also has an ongoing series of investigative reports about the state DCS dating back to September:

The department has been under federal court pressure for a decade to improve its care of children, but improvements slowed in the past two years, and child advocates say problems uncovered by The Tennessean may be endangering the department's ability to serve the state’s most vulnerable children.

They include missed calls at a child abuse hotline, a spike in violence in youth detention facilities, high turnover among senior DCS leaders and a $27 million computer system that DCS workers struggle to use to document their investigations and that led to missed payments to foster care families and agencies, and a failure to accurately report on the children in its care.

DCS also struggled to provide accurate information on the number of children who died, or nearly died, after having some contact with the agency. The agency revised those numbers upwards at least five times since September.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported last week: Missouri child protection undergoes fresh scrutiny on the 24th, and on the 20th the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported about the Georgia Department of Family and Children's Services, Ga. fails children in life and in death.

[mercuryblues]

1. Has

Tennessee's protective services been privatized?

[cheapdate]

2. "...groundbreaking demonstration project that promises to keep more kids safely in their homes"

This is very suspicious. Assuming the social worker is competent and her agency is properly managed, a decision to remove a child from a home only arises when there is serious and credible evidence of abuse or neglect.

[RiverNoord]

3. Yeah this one worries me -

except for the mitigating fact that I don't plan on ever moving to Tennessee. There are often times when immediate removal from the home is the absolutely obvious and necessary thing to do. I mean, if you're a cop and get a legit call, and the parents are high as a kite when you arrive, the house is filthy, the kids are naked, etc., they need to get the kids out ASAP.

I spent several years as a family law attorney practicing in MN. It's never a pleasant situation when children must be removed from a home, but sometimes it has to happen, and immediately.

The problems cited with Tennessee's DCS are not going to be resolved by aggressive efforts to keep kids in-home. Instead there will be more episodes of post-incident child abuse and deaths.

[RobinA]

4. Keep More Kids

safely in their homes...

Meanwhile, caseworkers elsewhere are facing criminal charges when the homes turn out to be not so safe. I'm glad I'm out of that business.

[jwirr]

5. My friend quit child services after one of the workers place a child back in the home and 18 hours

later the child was dead.

This year my own great grandchildren were removed from their home without a hearing. Actually the children were taken from the home on the word of the mother only that things were not as they should be. Both mom and dad are addicts. However, our side of the family had worked with court services previously to set up a safety net for the children. They remained in dad's home while we checked in on them daily and helped him in every way we could to see that the children were safe. The new worker who was from a county that mom had moved to did not talk to any of us including the dad.

The worker spent a full year before she agreed to set up the exact same safety net for the children that we had. The children are finally back home and we have custody. Mom did not even show up in court.

All of this could have been avoided, including the cost, if she had done a thorough investigation by talking to all of us. She did talk to teachers, etc. and they all expressed amazement regarding her actions.

It is hard to be a child protection worker and I am glad I do not have to make the decisions they make. But it is also very important to do the job right.

[lancer78]

6. Tennessee DCS

Is known for abuse and incompetence. It took them 6 months to approve my girlfriends move to my current town.