Murphy's Law

Should we all breathe a sigh of relief now that Denise Revels Robinson has stepped down as director of the state-run Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare?

The bureau was castigated in several Milwaukee Journal Sentinel stories for failing to prevent the beating death of 13-month-old Christopher L. Thomas Jr. by his foster mother. Two months before the beating, the state had approved transferring the child to his grandmother’s home, but bureau workers somehow never got around to doing this.

The newspaper stories made Robinson the villain, with reporter Crocker Stephenson on his high horse, telling us how “ticked off” he was at her, and demanding to know how the director of the program “can have a baby beaten to death … and not feel an obligation to appear in public to express her pain.” (Is it my imagination or has the paper done a lot of this sort of nagging of late?)

A little more than two weeks later, Robinson announced her departure. A victory for Crocker and the JS, certainly, but will that make any difference for the child welfare program?

It was back in 1993 that the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against the county, which then ran the program, for failing to protect the health and safety of neglected and abused children. Just before the suit was filed, Gov. Tommy Thompson had diverted federal foster care funds that were supposed to go the program, grabbing it for a state property tax relief program.

The state was always stiffing county programs. The attitude of the Thompson administration, it was clear, was that fully funding county programs was like pouring money down a rat hole. Partly, this was a partisan divide, as Thompson was a Republican and Democrats ran the county back then. But the deeper issue was the old Milwaukee vs. Madison conflict. State bureaucrats inevitably feel Milwaukee is a dysfunctional hellhole of inefficiency. Milwaukee officials, in turn, felt Madison was out of touch with urban problems and clueless about the challenges they presented.

And so the Thompson administration decided they’d simply take over the county’s child welfare program. They soon found it was a lot more difficult than it looked from the comfy distance of Madison. As a 1998 Milwaukee Magazine story by Mary Van de Kamp Nohl warned, there were ominous indications that the state-run program “may soon be as bad or worse than the dysfunctional system it replaced.”

The story also offered some ominous indications about Robinson. Though hired by the state because she had worked with Minnesota’s Department of Human Services, which had a good reputation, just eight months after Robinson was hired by the Thompson administration, the Minneapolis Star Tribune had written stories spotlighting “the absolute scandal in the child welfare system in Minnesota’s two largest urban counties.”

Nohl also found that managers needing answers to policy questions sometimes waited weeks for a response from Robinson, as did supervisors who requested urgent meetings with her. The story also suggested Robinson and the state refused to follow county practices more as a knee-jerk, anti-county reaction than for sound policy reasons.

Still, Robinson was left in charge of the program by Thompson and his successors, Scott McCallum and Jim Doyle.

The reality is that it isn’t easy to run a good child welfare program because: (1) it’s difficult to prove that parents are

In short, the story of Christopher Thomas Jr. makes the perfect morality tale. But it barely begins to get at the complex issues presented by the child welfare system.

The Amazing Growth of Cardinal Stritch

Last month, the St. Francis Planning Commission recommended rezoning that would allow Cardinal Stritch University to create a South Shore campus on the site of the old Cousins Center. And this past weekend, Cardinal Stritch announced plans to create a new Downtown campus at the former Pabst brewery site.

The expansion of this once-tiny college on the Glendale/Fox Point border has been little-noticed, yet remarkable. In 1970, it was an all-girls college serving about 800 students. Today it is a coed school that serves 7,000. It plans to build a campus in St. Francis with at least 10 buildings that will serve another 1,900 students, and will move its College of Education and Leadership Downtown, where it can expand “exponentially,” Stritch officials said.

Marquette University and Alverno College, arguably much higher-profile among Milwaukee’s private colleges, have grown a bit since the early 1990s, from about 2,500 to just under 2,800 for Alverno, and from about 10,900 to just over 11,600 for MU. Cardinal Stritch, meanwhile, doubled in size from 3,500 students in the early 1990s. At its current rate of growth, it could pass MU in another decade or so.

All three colleges are Catholic, and Alverno and Cardinal Stritch were like sister colleges, small institutions serving women. But Alverno never went coed (except for graduate programs, which serve some men). It was a leader in enrolling minorities. It has stayed small, emphasizing a personalized education approach that has won it tons of national press.

By contrast, Cardinal Stritch has steadily played the numbers game, concentrating on expanding its campus, constructing new buildings, adding new campuses and at some point changing from a college to a university. While it did not record the number of minority students as recently as 1990, by 2006 some 22 percent of undergraduates were students of color. Many of its students are adults who work while attending school part-time.

If there is any sector of the metro area whose awareness of Cardinal Stritch may have increased, it would be the business community. More than 60 percent of the university undergrads attend the Cardinal Stritch College of Business. This ever-expanding institution has become a key trainer of talent for the local economy.

The Buzz

-Wisconsin has one of the smallest gaps in the quality of health care between low-income and high-income children, a recent study reported in Governing Magazine found. Is this a payoff for the state’s health care programs?

-Another candidate is running for school board against Charlene Hardin: liberal blogger (Pundit Nation) Michael Mathias.

-Check our new online weekly poll: the runaway winners for worst TV news show were CBS Channel 58 (39 percent of respondents) and TMJ 4 (35 percent).

And The Sports Nut takes issue with new Yankee CC Sabathia’s snobby attitude toward the Milwaukee Brewers.