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From a pool of more than 300 applicants last summer, the state selected 94 to become foot soldiers in the most ambitious effort in Wisconsin history to protect abused, neglected and abandoned children. Among them was Barbara DeBerry, a soft-spoken woman who had spent most of her life in the Inner City. An experienced social worker, DeBerry saw more misery in a single year than most people see in a lifetime. Yet she was eager to enlist for a mission that promised to revolutionize child welfare.

It was long overdue. Milwaukee’s child welfare system had become as dysfunctional as the families it was meant to serve. In 1997, more than 500 of the 6,000 children the county had removed from homes where they were sexually or physically abused or neglected allegedly found the same horrific fate in county care. Social workers couldn’t monitor kids in foster care – they were too busy fighting other emergencies. When police rescued a child and called Child Protective Services (CPS) for a safe haven, “We’d get a recording telling us to call ourselves,” says Police Capt. Victor Venus.

Like other urban areas, Milwaukee was a war zone. Between 1986 and 1993, cocaine hit and the number of abused, neglected or abandoned children doubled nationally, to 2.8 million. While 2,000 died in 1997 at the hands of their parents, the number treated so badly by their own families that they had to be taken from their homes rose to 500,000. “Across the country, the system is in collapse.… It was never designed to deal with the current number of reports… the increasingly complex needs of these families,” wrote Harvard University lecturer Lisbeth B. Shore in her book, Common Purpose. Thirty state and county child welfare agencies faced lawsuits; 21 operated under judicial supervision.

In 1993, when the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit charging that Milwaukee County and the State of Wisconsin failed to protect the health and safety of abused and neglected children in their care, few argued otherwise. “What was extraordinary in Milwaukee,” says Marcia Robinson Lowry, executive director of New York-based Children’s Rights Inc. and a lawsuit co-counsel, “was that everyone, even the people running the system, admitted it was a disaster, and no one had the political will to change it.”

The lawsuit mobilized that will. For more than a century, child welfare was one of Milwaukee’s most vexing social problems. Agencies charged with keeping children safe have been accused of pulling too many of them from their homes and with pulling too few – often simultaneously.

On January 1, 1998, that dilemma became the state’s. Wisconsin’s Department of Health and Family Services (DHFS) assumed responsibility for the 15,000 local kids referred each year to child welfare through its Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare. Legislation for the takeover was passed in 1995; for two years, Madison bureaucrats had studied and planned, devising a system of policies and protocols intended to keep kids safe and get the state out of the lawsuit. Most of that lawsuit was dismissed last winter.

This year, DHFS will spend $118.3 million in Milwaukee, nearly $50 million more than the county spent, doubling the number of feet on the street to protect kids. For the first time in years, calls to the local child abuse and neglect hotline (220-SAFE) go through, and social workers like DeBerry hope to do “real social work.” DeBerry is one of the finest workers in the trenches; the state chose her as one of two I would follow last May to see just how well the system is working.

Wisconsin has invested so much time and money instructing its staff that they are now among the most trained in the nation. It has built a system with a paper trail that can be checked to make sure workers like DeBerry follow policies the state believes will ensure that no child dies needlessly, that children won’t languish in the system, that services rendered across the county will be equitable.

Already, there are signs of improvement. “The state is taking more children into protective custody, children we should have seen years ago,” says Julia Vosper, chief guardian ad litem attorney for the Legal Aid Society, citing one case where there was “a verified abuse complaint in 1989, a sibling died in 1992 and a worker [investigating still another complaint] left a card in the family’s door in 1994.” Now those kids are in the state’s custody. If the trend continues, the state will increase the number of kids in protective custody by 1,200 to 1,500 this year. Many more should benefit from $14 million worth of services to keep children safe in their homes.

The last county cases were transferred to the state in July, but already there are ominous indications, too, that the state’s idyllic model – if it is allowed to continue as is – may soon be as bad as or worse than the dysfunctional system it replaced.

“How long do you wait to blow the whistle on a system when children’s lives are at stake?” asks Dr. Stephen Lazoritz of Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin, one of the country’s foremost experts on child abuse and neglect. “Do you wait until five children die?”

A History Lesson
To oversee the new child welfare system, Gov. Tommy Thompson appointed Susan Dreyfus, former chief of staff to Waukesha County Executive Daniel M. Finley.

Daughter-in-law of the former Republican governor known for his trademark red vest, Dreyfus also has a penchant for red, favoring for her official duties, at times, a red suit with a flirty short skirt that seemed appropriate for her cheerleader-like enthusiasm for the state’s new “child-centered, family-focused… system. God knows,” she says, “the government is a lousy parent. There is room for optimism with every family.… This system will work because the governor wills it… for the good of the kids.”

But in Milwaukee, there were deep scars – not just on the children who suffered because the system failed but on the city, where a visit from Child Protective Services had become the stuff of urban legend. No matter how onerous living conditions were at home, kids kept silent for fear that government intervention would be worse.

Recalls state Sen. Alberta Darling [R-River Hills]: “Garland Hampton became one of Milwaukee Public Schools’ ‘sterling students’; then he killed a kid over $5. It turned out he’d grown up surrounded by violence. For years, he was abused, but he took care of his siblings. The grandmother he lived with played Russian roulette,… but the boy never told anyone. I asked him, ‘Why not?’ and he said, ‘Everyone knows that if CPS takes you away, no one ever sees you again.’ ”

Even less trust existed between the state and county. For a decade, the two had fought over money. “We kept telling the state we needed the federal foster care funds they were withholding; they kept saying we were taking too many children into protective custody,” remembers Cliff O’Connor, former director of Milwaukee County’s ?Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).

A week after the ACLU lawsuit was filed, Gov. Thompson diverted the federal foster care funds for state property tax relief. State bureaucrats referred publicly to “the State of Milwaukee,” blaming county employees for both the failed system and the lawsuit.

Both sides’ arguments had merits: The county did need more funds, but it mismanaged child welfare, too. “There were workers who did such a bad job, they should have been fired, but county managers couldn’t follow the procedures laid out in the contract for getting rid of them,” acknowledges Wayne Krueger, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 645. The county ended up promoting them to supervisory positions, says another union representative.

But in recent years, the county had begun to make improvements: The average length of stay in foster care dropped from 39 months to less than 24 and the number of adoptions grew sixfold. The County Board required medical evaluations for all children taken into protective custody, providing objective documentation of abuse or neglect.

But the state didn’t bother to look for the parts of the existing system that were worth saving. It wanted a total makeover.

Religious War
The task of designing Milwaukee’s new child welfare system fell to veteran Madison bureaucrat Linda Hisgen, director of the Bureau of Policies and Programs in DHFS’ Division of Children and Family Services. Hisgen had been a social worker 20 years earlier in Dane County, where, in the worst of times, workers had half the caseload of child welfare workers in Milwaukee.

Hisgen and front-line workers like DeBerry had about as much in common as the high school color guard and the infantry that stormed Normandy. It’s a distinction not lost on ex-county administrator O’Connor, who began his speech to the Wisconsin Social Service Association in May with a quote from John LeCarre: “A desk is a dangerous place from which to observe the world.”

Nonetheless, it was Hisgen who chose the model around which the new bureau would be built. Two options vied for her approval.

One was based on a consensus of a group of experts as to the things that constitute good social work practice. The ?model, focused on the degree of malfunction of the family, not on the risk to the child, is called the Child at Risk Assessment Field (CARF). It was developed by Madison-based for-profit Action for Child Protective Services Inc.

The other option was a statistical model that focused scarce resources on children in the most danger of being abused or neglected. It was designed by actuaries for the not-for-profit National Council on Crime and Delinquency’s (NCCD) Madison-based Children’s Research Center. There was empirical evidence – from both government and academic studies – that the model was reliable.

Choosing a model for Milwaukee created a huge public policy debate. For years, the state had required 31 smaller counties to use CARF. Lining up on the other side, in support of NCCD, were The Urban Caucus – human service administrators from the state’s large urban areas and experienced child welfare personnel. “We warned them that CARF was based on white middle-class suburban values that would not work in urban Milwaukee,” recalls the union’s Krueger, an urban child welfare worker for three decades.

There were good reasons to be skeptical of CARF. In 1995, The Chronicle of Higher Education had looked at the debate over the two approaches and at “50 years of extensive empirical research” and concluded that “even fairly simple statistical models outperform clinical judgment.”

Milwaukee had tested the clinical CARF model itself in the early 1990s, finding it “too cumbersome and costly,” recalls former County DHHS Director Thomas Brophy. “We concluded that we would need to double the number of supervisory staff to use it.”

Kenosha County’s experience with CARF had been a disaster, too. “In theory and on paper, it uses very good social work tools,” says Pat Bell, program manager for Kenosha’s Division of Child and Family Services, “but it didn’t translate into good practice… no one could do all these steps and still have other clients… not even excellent, experienced workers. It was also so subjective, and the built-in system to separate good from bad social workers [the most appealing part to state administrators] was like a police state.” Kenosha had dropped CARF and gone to the NCCD model, which was working well. Only three of 18 Wisconsin counties using CARF for four to nine years still used the model for ongoing social work.

The debate soon resembled a religious war. “I was ashamed to be part of that.… We were all supposed to be here to protect kids,” says Dreyfus. But in the end, convenience, expediency and spite were all that mattered. “For years, urban counties have said, ‘Screw it, we’re going to do what we want,’ ” says Hisgen. “Well, I liked our model better.… I was comfortable with it. My response to them, if they felt there was too much paperwork, was, ‘Well, if you haven’t been documenting things, shame on you’.… I don’t buy it that just ’cause they’re big, they’re different.” Hisgen’s boss at the time, Dreyfus’ predecessor, Jerry Born, says, “It would have been politically difficult to allow Milwaukee to use one model when the state forced all these other counties to use CARF.”

When she replaced Born, Dreyfus sought to appease the locals by promising to incorporate aspects of NCCD. Until the 11th hour, many NCCD advocates believed that would happen. Then NCCD officials – under contract to advise Brainstorm Inc., the firm charged with developing a $7.8 million statewide child welfare computer system – saw it wasn’t true. NCCD canceled its contract and told the state to stop using NCCD’s name. Shortly afterward and $1.8 million into the project, the planned computer network was aborted and now the state won’t have a new system before 2000.

The state changed the name of its version of CARF. Dreyfus still insists NCCD-type elements are incorporated, but no one believes it. “What does the state take us for, idiots?” asks one child welfare supervisor.

Beyond the computer fiasco and fury over CARF, state planners encountered the last-minute departure of a key administrator, Terry Roe Lund, whom Hisgen had hired as Milwaukee bureau director. Citing a lack of time with her daughter, Roe Lund quit but immediately took a job with CARF creator, Action. The move raised eyebrows.

If Roe Lund had been a political appoin-tee, she would have violated state ethics rules, but she was a civil servant, says DHFS legal counsel David J. Vergeront, “so there was no impropriety.” In the eight months since her departure, Hisgen’s division has paid Action more than $250,000 for consulting and training for the Milwaukee bureau, much of it funneled through the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Outreach and Columbia ?County.

Hisgen recruited Roe Lund’s replacement, Denise Revels Robinson, former director of the Family and Children’s Services Division of the Minnesota Department of Human Services, because of her urban experience and because Minnesota’s program had a good reputation, she says. For Revels Robinson, it was a step down, but, she says, she was “attracted by the chance to be part of a full-scale reform.”

Revels Robinson may have left Minnesota just in time. Eight months after her departure, giant headlines scrolled across the Star Tribune calling attention to what reporter Jean Hopfensperger calls “the absolute scandal in the child welfare system in Minnesota’s two largest urban counties.”

Reality Check
Barbara DeBerry entered the new system in a baptism by fire – a horrible case involving a 7-year-old girl. County child welfare officials terminated parental rights in 1995 and sent the girl to live with a couple who had befriended her mother. School officials called the bureau earlier this year because the girl’s behavior was “inappropriate” and “sexual.” The man the girl lived with turned out to be a sexual predator who had abused her. Cat and dog feces were all over the home. The child’s birth mother, who had been suicidal, “wanted the girl back,” recalls DeBerry.

The state requires DeBerry to pass on cases to another agency within 30 days, but she balked. “I couldn’t send this to someone who’s newly trained,” she says. DeBerry’s supervisor agreed, but supervisors in Milwaukee are more flexible than their bureaucratic bosses back at the state capitol. Says one administrator: “Madison is going to implement its plan, as it is, whether it works or not.”

On May 14, I accompanied DeBerry on her rounds. She made a second visit to a 75-year-old grandmother raising her 11-year-old grandson, his 14-year-old sister and her baby. The boy had not been to school in months and is in third grade though he is old enough for fifth. The school social worker who called the bureau believes parents are negligent if they don’t get their children to school, but the grandmother cannot make the boy go. The boy’s father recently moved out and the mother is a crack addict.

If DeBerry was following the law as the state and Dreyfus see it, she would close this case now. Dreyfus says truants and runaways are not the state’s concern, pointing to a clause she says assigns that responsibility to the juvenile courts. Judge Thomas P. Donegan, former presiding judge at Milwaukee County Children’s Court, doesn’t interpret it that way. Donegan issued a court order forcing the state to take these cases until it can agree with the county on whose case it is.

It all boils down to money: The county pays for services for juvenile delinquents; the state when a child needs services because of parental neglect or abuse. The trouble is that cases often involve both.

This situation keeps DeBerry awake at night. She knows that in a few years, the boy will be in a gang. Then it will be juvenile court, a home for delinquents – costing $55,000 a year – then a state prison. So DeBerry doesn’t close the case – she refers it to the state’s new “safety services.” She is ecstatic when St. Charles Youth and Family Services agrees to send a mentor to work with the boy.

The next case is more complicated, but there are dozens like it, involving large ?sibling groups. Five children have been sleeping on mattresses on the floor of a temporary ?shelter for three months, where no one is supposed to stay for more than a month. The youngest is 10, the oldest is 20 and a high school senior. Their mother, with a long history of mental illness, was working her way off welfare with a W-2 job. She refused to take the drug prescribed by her psychiatrist for depres-sion and panic disorder because it was addic-ting. Panic struck, and she ran home and hid. The kids quit going to school, trying to hold things together, until the family was evicted.

Now the mother is in jail, says DeBerry, “because the DA revoked her probation on another incident where she fought with a neighbor. He wants to teach her that she has to send her kids to school. He had her arrested in front of everyone at the shelter.” Through all this, the second-oldest, a 17-year-old with a toddler of her own, and the oldest, took care of their siblings. They kept going to their part-time jobs at a fast-food restaurant so they could eat and so someday they’ll have saved enough money to escape from this life.

Now the kids are back in school and the father of the four youngest children – only erratically part of their lives in years past – is at the shelter taking care of his daughter’s child. No one appears to have thought of putting the father in jail, just the mentally ill mother. Sometimes the system tries to squeeze blood from a rock, says DeBerry.

She wants to put the younger children in the oldest girl’s custody when she turns 21. DeBerry put her on the list to receive Kinship Care, a subsidy so the state will not have to take custody, but the state’s program is already out of money (see “Time Bomb,” page 78). “The kids are very close. All they have is each other. I should take these kids into protective custody,” she says. (An estimated 7,000 of MPS students are homeless.) “But if I take them, I will have to separate them. We have no place for a large sibling group like this.”

Nearly 10 years ago, Howard Fuller, then Milwaukee DHHS director, proposed re-opening the county children’s home for kids like these. Fuller was a gutsy civic leader, but the opposition he faced “made it impossible,” he says. “I had to give up.” Fuller’s foes said the county would quit trying to find foster families to take these kids. One of his fiercest critics later complained that locals didn’t have “the political will to change things,” but was it any wonder?

For two years, SOS Children’s Villages, an international organization with a long and admirable record of helping kids, has tried in vain to find a Milwaukee neighborhood where it can build seven homes for large sibling groups of neglected or abused kids, including those virtually guaranteed to spend the rest of their childhood in the system.

Now DeBerry deals with the repercussions of such inaction. She tries plan B, referring the family to New Concepts Self-Development Center Inc. (one private agency state-contracted to provide “safety services” so that families don’t have to be broken up). Mom will be out of jail soon. DeBerry asks for help in finding the family a place to live and in connecting them with services. But New Concepts says the case is “too complicated.”

Under the new system, “some programs don’t want to fail, but that means they won’t take children when you really need them,” sighs DeBerry. Agencies also refuse cases because of incentives built into this system. They are paid like HMOs, a flat rate of $170 for up to four months (plus whatever they can bill Medicaid or Medicare), whether it is a case with five kids or one. The agencies can provide services for a longer or shorter time, but they get paid for 120 days, which is supposed to be the

Dreyfus calls this “a revolutionary application of managed-care principals to the field of human services.” The irony is that state bureaucrats are jumping on the managed-care bandwagon just as politicians and the public are ready to shoot its driver.

Agencies also get bonuses based on their ability to keep families they treat from coming back into the system within a year via another abuse or neglect complaint. If more than 30 percent of cases return, their pay will be docked 40 percent. That requires an almost miraculous improvement over the county system, where recidivism ran 67 percent.

Going to Plan C, her last resort, DeBerry tells the family about two agencies that help mentally ill adults. “This has been going on since the youngest children were 5, 6, 7… and the family has received no services. They’re such nice kids.… This should have never happened this way,” says DeBerry. But now she must close the case.

Reality Check 2
That same May 14th afternoon, Anthony R. Roach (another worker the state allowed me to follow) leaves the building at 1730 W. North Ave., where his office, one of the state’s five decentralized sites, is based. Although it is a government building with a guard, the state’s presence has barely disturbed local commerce. Hookers still turn tricks out front; a car was stolen at the front door.

State planners imagined that decentralized sites would encourage interaction between workers and the locals, creating a better environment for kids. That’s not happening yet, but then, these aren’t really neighborhood sites. They’re more populous than most Wisconsin cities. Roach and DeBerry’s site is the smallest geographically because the state expected more cases of abuse and neglect to come from the Inner City, but that turned out not to be true either.

Before joining the state, Roach worked for Milwaukee County. Although the state takeover created so many new jobs that it is jokingly called “The Social Work Full-employment Act,” Roach still wanted to investigate new cases. “I can do more good here,” he says. “I can remove a child from a ?horrible home and immediately make things better.”

Roach and DeBerry went through training together and are armed with the same 15 pages of paperwork to help them decide whether or not to remove a child from a home. They serve the same clientele and work under the same site manager. Yet in the five months they have worked for the state, Roach has taken no children into protective custody; DeBerry has removed at least 24. The state cannot explain this, but such a disparity is astounding, given that the system is supposed to ensure equity and consistency.

Experienced social workers insist there is no consistency. Says a state worker who quit: “Our system is so nebulous.… They gave us these tools that are like [“The Tonight Show’s”] Carnac holding a card to his head and trying to see the future… but the court looks for concrete factors, common sense.”

Under this new system, social workers have little autonomy. They never make a decision about a child’s fate without a supervisor. This “collaborative model” is supposed to foil renegade workers, but it is like a game of telephone – details drop out and get misconstrued. An investigator who has seen a child’s living conditions firsthand feeds information to a supervisor who, a half-dozen workers say, often makes the real decision from a desk.

This has frustrated some pediatricians so much they’ve stopped giving the bureau details when they report suspected cases of neglect or abuse. “Medical details get misconstrued when the worker goes to the supervisor, and legitimate cases of abuse are being screened out,” says one medical ?administrator.

Workers also distrust their elaborate training. Says one, while another nods in agreement: “The trainers kept telling us to do things that will get your case thrown out of court. They should have done research on the way it works in our children’s court first.”

On this afternoon, Roach and his supervisor have agreed on a case where an anonymous caller claimed that a 2-year-old and a newborn were being neglected while their 23-year-old mother “runs around” with her 36-year-old boyfriend, the children’s father. They decide the children will be safe if they provide “safety services.”

That starts the clock running. First, there’s a meeting to see if the family will co-operate. Then, within 24 hours, Roach must meet with the safety services agency, spelling out the client’s needs. On the seventh day, all parties involved meet. Intake workers have other deadlines, too – a court appearance within 48 hours if a child is detained and new cases to investigate.

The demands are so relentless they discourage workers from referring families to safety services. “The time deadlines don’t really have anything to do with the child’s needs; they have to do with the state ?wanting to track everything,” says Roach. “But if you try to point out problems and you’re a ?former county worker, they don’t want your feedback.” Many workers who’ve never worked for the county agree – nobody wants to hear about difficulties of implementing the state’s plan.

Safety services are a crucial part of that plan, the steam valve on the pressure cooker that would prevent the foster care system from becoming overloaded the way it was under the county. But by June, only one-third of the 270 families per month expected to benefit from safety services received them.

“The state is spending almost 14 times as much money, but we saw more kids… under the old system,” says Roger Quindel, county supervisor and chairman of the Health & Human Needs Committee. Down, too, is the number of children given medical exams after they are removed from their homes, something mandated by the county to identify the full extent of abuse or neglect. In a typical month since the state takeover, only 40 of 150 children received medical evaluations.

Roach has referred his client, the 23-year-old mother living with her grandmother, to New Concepts’ safety services. One of the safety services Roach requested was an evaluation of the toddler’s developmental level. Now, on the seventh day, Roach, the mother and toddler, a child development expert, a home parenting aide and supervisor from New Concepts and I crowd into the grandmother’s living room.

The child development coordinator says a team of experts determined that the toddler needs physical, occupational and speech therapy; therapists will come to the home five times a week. Says Roach: “Mom is in W-2 every day until 1:30, and from 4 to 8 p.m., she is working on getting her GED. How can she do this?” he asks. The coordinator says the client will have to disenroll in her government-paid HMO and get regular Title 19, but then a bus can take the toddler to therapy just three days a week.

Roach also requested help for the mother in finding an apartment and writing a résumé. The parenting aide says she will help one hour a week, but first there is paperwork. Her supervisor, who is present, says Roach made an error filling out a key document in the state’s new system, the safety assessment. The two go back and forth on this for half an hour.

The supervisor wants more risk factors checked on the form. Without them, she says, her agency will not get paid. Roach says that more risk factors would mean he has to remove the child from the home. A half-dozen times, the supervisor and the aide warn Roach: “We are only here for 120 days, then we’re gone.”

No one explains to the client that 120 days is only supposed to be an average, or that by then, the mother should be connected with any other services she needs. It’s as if the client isn’t even there. This is ?hardly the family-friendly, child-centered system Dreyfus describes. (“It’s unacceptable,” she says when she hears about the incident.)

The safety services supervisor redoes the paperwork despite Roach’s objections, checking two ‘A’ boxes. One says one or both parents are unmotivated to parent. It seems a gray area open to individual interpretation. The second says the family ?doesn’t have the economic wherewithal to provide for the child. “That’s not true,” Roach insists, and from the looks of the flat, he’s right, but finally he gives up. So much ?jargon has been thrown around that the mother tells me she doesn’t have a clue what’s going on.

Roach’s supervisor cannot explain how two workers, both trained by CARF creator Action, could come up with such different interpretations of how to use the safety assessment. Neither can the site manager, who promises to get back to me with an answer. Despite a reminder one week later, she never does. Dreyfus and Revels Robinson can’t explain this either. The disconcerting thing is not so much that this occurred – it could happen in any new system – but that no one from the state can explain why it did or what will prevent it from happening again and again.

The episode is more the rule than the exception, say at least 15 internal and external workers: Site managers reach for hundred-page volumes in attempts to clarify issues, but all policy decisions ultimately must go to Revels Robinson, and there, administrators say, they often wait weeks for a response.

One of the main advantages of the state system was that it was supposed to replace the county’s exorbitant caseloads with manageable ones. But intake workers are getting 20 to 25 new cases per month. At 30 days, a lot of cases are just getting to court. They can’t be passed along as planned. By mid-June, DeBerry had 20 cases, equal to 90 under the old system, where each family member counted as one case; Roach’s caseload was 30, the equivalent of almost 135. And they were better off than workers at other sites, who, by July, had 50 cases and even as many as 66 cases, according to several workers.

On the same May day we watched DeBerry and Roach struggle to make the system work, Revels Robinson told members of the Attorney General’s Task Force on Child Welfare: “Our training and our practice standards don’t support [a ratio of] one [worker] to 25 or 30 families.” By her own admission, the state system had already hit the wall.

Says one worker struggling under a caseload for which the system was never built: “I got a master’s degree in social work. I graduated at the top of my class. At my last job, I got the highest ratings, but there is no way I can do everything I am supposed to do here.” Says another worker who quit: “I was constantly afraid a child would die because I couldn’t do everything. There were cases where we had two to five days to investigate, and people just put them off. No one would check on that.”

In most start-up operations, you find an entrepreneurial spirit, a willingness of workers to do whatever it takes to get things done, but before the end of July, 27 percent of the state’s front-line workers had quit.

The Best-laid Plans
All of this might be repairable, before too many children get hurt, if someone could just yell, “Stop.” But the oversight bodies the state built into its plan are a sham, say dozens of insiders. The Milwaukee Child Welfare Partnership Council, which the statute says should oversee and evaluate the bureau, ?“isn’t even a facade,” says council member ?Quindel. “There is no public oversight.”

Dreyfus’ boss, DHFS Secretary Joe Leean, wanted to be council chairman, but when Quindel and others saw a conflict – the council is supposed to review his department’s work – “he just stopped coming to meetings,” says Quindel. “So who do you go to now, the governor? To replace elected officials with a panel with no real power is sick.”

And the council can rarely muster a quorum. In May, only a handful of the 19 members appointed by the governor and three appointed by the county executive bothered to show up. Says Revels Robinson: “We’re fixing that. We’re giving the governor a list of new names to appoint.” But isn’t that backward again? The watched choosing the watchdog?

The second line of accountability looks like a ploy, too. When Sen. Darling proposed the state takeover, she asked for an independent outside agency to monitor the bureau’s performance. Instead, the Legislature approved 16 “internal performance evaluation monitors,” called PEMS for short. Dreyfus calls them “the best investment we ever made.” From a bureaucrat’s point of view, you can see why. “Usually, the Legislature hears about problems and they call in the Audit Bureau. Now there’s less odds of that,” says Hisgen.

PEMS are supposed to alert officials about and remedy problems in the system, but in reality, they walk a precarious line, uncertain of whether they are cops, coaches or Hisgen’s handmaidens (they report to her, not Milwaukee management). Even Dale Carnegie, author of How to Win Friends and Influence People, would be hard-pressed to make a go of a job where workers look at you as the secret police and the mostly ethnic Milwaukee supervisors look at the almost all-Caucasian (15 of 16) performance monitors and ask, “What is this, a… plantation?”

If PEMS “are seen as Gestapo,” acknowledges Dreyfus, “they’ll get shut down.… It’s critical that we see the warts on a daily basis – in order to serve these children. The PEMS are not there to catch people being bad; they’re technical consultants, not spies.”

Right now, PEMS are filling gaps in the new protocols, says one of them, C. Jean Rucker, but eventually that job will be done. “We can always get to the micro things like individual workers’ case files… [and] we can write new policies,” Rucker adds, offering a frightening prospect in a system already strangled by them.

But even PEMS are sometimes ignored. “The PEMS tried to tell Denise [Revels Robinson] some things aren’t workable, but she said, ‘We are not going to do what the county did,’ ” says one state staffer.

Though Dreyfus stresses the importance of each worker, every day the bureau shows workers they aren’t important, say a dozen workers, pointing to a pattern. “If you raise an issue, it never matters.… There’s no follow-through.” Supervisors who e-mail ?Revels Robinson requesting urgent meetings go two weeks without a response. Says another supervisor: “If I ask a question, I feel I made a fatal error. Instead of improving things, administration is controlling them and denying there is a problem.”

External communication isn’t much better. When Judge Donegan issued his court order requiring the state to investigate cases involving truancy and runaways, he says, “I got so many high-fives from everybody – supervisors, the rank and file, clerks.… But I did not get a call from Susan Dreyfus. She says publicly: ‘If you have any problems… we’ll talk about them,’ but why did a judge have to issue a court order to solve an intake problem?” he asks. “The horror stories were supposed to disappear.”

Horror Stories
The worst horror stories involve the lack of places to go with children who are removed from their homes. “You don’t have to be here long before you learn that you don’t take kids out of their homes,” says one state worker.

There is no way to know how many kids remain in dangerous situations because of this, but Wauwatosa grandmother Sandra Quick-Schroeder says that despite repeated calls, neither she nor her husband, a retired attorney, could get the state to intervene when her grandchildren were in danger because their cocaine-addicted, violent and mentally ill mother had them living in a crack house. Or when she abandoned them. Or threatened to take them to Texas with a buddy she met in a bar.

There’s no telling how many others are like Barbara Ireland, an MPS counselor who called the state about a raped 14-year-old student and her four siblings who were homeless and didn’t have the medication they needed. The police investigated the rape. The DA filed charges, “but the state said it couldn’t touch a child without a permanent address,” says Ireland, who says she tried to get the state to respond for weeks while the girl was in school, but the youth vanished.

On an average day, the bureau must find homes for 13 children; on a bad day, 22,” says Jim Marx, a county employee who tracks openings for out-of-home placements. “If you have to take a 9-year-old boy into protective custody, you’re screwed,” says a worker. “No one wants him. You have to hope a child runs away from a shelter so there’s room.”

“We are breaking the law, we are ?violating court orders and we are doing it every day,” says a supervisor, offering as an ?example the case of 6- and 8-year-old sisters returned home despite a court order saying they were to have no contact with their mother. The girls were rejected by one foster home and rather than struggle to find another, the supervisor sent them home. A few days later, the girls’ school principal called again. This time he was hysterical. The mother had beaten the eldest for telling ?authorities what happened. She had forced her to hold a stack of phone books through the night; when she dropped one, she beat her with a hairbrush and added more time to her punishment.

Three Strikes
Earlier this year, Sen. Alberta Darling [R-River Hills] convinced the state Legislature to pass a “three strikes and you’re out” bill aimed at parents who abuse and neglect their children. “I almost felt embarrassed,” she says, “because it shouldn’t take that long. No child should have to suffer that much.”

Given the rate at which child abusers are prosecuted in Milwaukee County, it’s easy to see why Darling made the bill dependent on the number of times an abused or neglected child has been found in need of protection or services, not the number of times a parent has been convicted of that crime. Last year, Milwaukee County District Attorney E. Michael McCann filed charges in just 8 percent of the child abuse cases referred to the office by child welfare workers, police and hospital personnel, according to a statement McCann made before the Attorney General’s Task Force on Abused and Neglected Children in May.

In 1997, the DA’s Office brought battery or disorderly conduct charges in another 10 percent of cases. In cases of alleged child neglect, only one in four actually faced charges.

McCann said the prosecution rate is higher in cases where police have investigated and gathered evidence, but since the state took over child welfare, there are fewer cases where social workers collaborate with police.

“It’s hard to think of this as an advanced state of civilization when a guy who kills five cats gets 12 years in prison, but most child abusers walk,” says one medical administrator. “They get convictions in Kenosha on cases that we can’t even get past the DA’s screener in Milwaukee.”

McCann defends his record, saying, “In a lot of cases, no jury would convict. Children, with me, are a priority. Some people don’t understand the difficulty of prosecuting a case.”

Time Bomb
In the wake of welfare reform, state officials were left wondering, “Where did all the former AFDC cases go?” Many have become “Kinship Care” cases under the state program that pays relatives who once received AFDC benefits for dependent children in their care.

But a lot of families that once relied on those AFDC payments aren’t making the transition. The state so grossly underestimated how many of these cases there would be that it ran through a year’s worth of funding in just three months in Milwaukee County. Hundreds of families left on the waiting list for such aid have little hope of getting it before July 1999.

“These are some of the saddest cases I have ever seen. We have seen caregivers hooked up to dialysis machines, grandmothers – where both parents have died of AIDS – trying to support five grandchildren on a Social Security retirement check,” says Marcia Huber, executive director of Perez-Pena Ltd., a private detective agency that investigates requests for Kinship Care funding. “Many won’t be able to ‘hang on.’ ”

There were 5,200 Milwaukee County children in Kinship Care by the end of January; the state anticipated a total of 4,900 by year-end. The parents of close to a third of the children are either dead or in prison, situations that are unlikely to change within the 18-month state-calculated average length of time a child would be in Kinship Care.

Now that there is no more Kinship Care money, the state-run Milwaukee County Bureau of Child Welfare is rushing to license these former AFDC cases as foster homes. The irony is that it costs the state more to put a child in foster care – $282 to $365 a month, depending on child’s age, instead of Kinship’s $215 – and cases must be monitored by social workers. And some can’t be licensed at all because too many people are living in a small space or because a household member has a criminal record.