Politics

Edney rips DSS's record in reuniting kids, parents

Michael Edney

By Bill Moss, Published: August 2, 2015

Michael Edney wants to know why Henderson County does a poor job reuniting children and their biological parents after social workers remove a child from the home.

Gary Cyphers, the immediate past chair of the county’s Board of Social Services, and DSS Director Eric Bush, appeared at a Board of Commissioners meeting on July 15 to describe the agency’s record in reuniting children in foster care with their parents. Although the state and federal standard for “reunification” is 12 months, Henderson County manages to return only 48 percent of children from state custody to their birth parents in that window. That’s behind the state average of 57 percent and the national average of 70 percent, Cyphers said, and worse than the county’s own record the previous year of 58 percent.
“We’ve lost some ground in our drive to get families back together within a year,” he said.
Substance abuse, mental health issues, domestic violence and poor housing are among the barriers to reuniting children with their parents.
“It is no surprise that the impact of substance abuse and the work that we try and do at DSS, particularly in the child welfare area, is a huge, huge problem,” Cyphers said.
Eighty-four percent of mothers and 75 percent of fathers of children taken from homes have a history of drug or alcohol abuse. Sixty-four percent of moms and 25 percent of dads have mental health issues. Around 45 percent of parents are unemployed. Domestic violence and assault add to the challenges.
“The lack of decent affordable housing in the county as we saw most poignantly with Alpine Woods … is the kind of housing situation that we encounter too frequently,” he said.

‘Internal culture blames parents’

Edney, an attorney, delivered a scathing critique of the agency’s record in reuniting children with their birth parents.
“I don’t do these cases,” the fourth-term commissioner told Cyphers and Bush. “I haven’t done them in a while. But I see what’s going on. I’ve been doing them for 30 years and what I’ve seen is the internal culture out there is blaming the parents and their issues and not looking internally at your culture and your expectation and whether or not DSS is being reasonable with the parents. They take the child away, they give the parents a list of 10 things to do. They do the 10 things and instead of giving the parents the child back you just create another list of 10 more things. That could very well be a reason for our bad numbers here.
“Blaming mental health, blaming the state, all those things, does not reunify the parent and child,” he added. “We don’t need to raise kids as a society like Hillary Clinton wants to do. We need to have them with the families, with the church and that type thing, and what you’re doing quite frankly doesn’t do that and that’s why in my mind you’re playing with the rules and saying 12 months we’ll kick them out and let somebody else adopt them.”
Bush said a variety of factors create hurdles to returning children to homes they were taken from.
“I believe first it is the family’s responsibility,” Bush said. “When we talk about issues, even talking with my staff, they’ve said it’s a lot harder to achieve reunification than it used to be. The issues used to be inadequate housing or they’re homeless. The substance abuse and mental health certainly make it more challenging. The substance abuse in particular and then compounded with mental health issues makes it even more challenging.”
Edney pressed on, saying that other counties with the same or higher incidence of drug abuse and domestic violence are doing better.
“If all that were true,” he said of the situation in the relatively affluent local area, “that would imply that Henderson County is in a heck of a lot worse shape socially than anywhere else in North Carolina — that we’ve got worse drug problems, we’ve got worse mental health problems, we’ve got worse housing problems — because we’re falling behind everybody else (in reunification). Those numbers don’t correlate or add up to me.”

‘We can’t expect perfection’

Subjective interpretation, the commissioner said, could be one reason the county’s social workers are siding against birth parents.
“If you’re submersing yourselves in your own culture and only talking to yourselves, ‘reasonable’ can be something totally different than someone from the outside looking in because life in general is not fair,” he said. “We all have our issues, we all have our problems. And we can’t expect perfection from folks, especially folks who have challenges. You’ve got to look at the big picture and not expect more than is reasonable. Every kid’s not going to come out perfect, every kid’s going to have issues and challenges and that’s life and that’s the way we are. … We don’t want to take away a poor woman’s child to give to a rich woman. That’s what it looks like we’re doing, especially with the numbers I’m looking at today.”
Bush said when it comes to termination of parental rights, the agency is not the final arbiter.
“It is the court that makes that decision,” he said.
Edney said the hearings are stacked in the state’s favor.
“They look at your reports and listen to your folks for a very few minutes and take your recommendation,” he said. “You need to do a better job.”
DSS is working with Smoky Mountain Center, the regional mental health agency, to identify better substance abuse treatment programs and improve access, Cyphers said.
“We’re trying to get creative around better substance abuse alternatives,” he said. The agency is working, too, to improve how it works with families before social workers remove a child from a home.
In an interview this week, Edney said the report showing a low percentage of reunification triggered his tough questioning.
“They came and presented statistics and data and figures that showed Henderson County is doing worse as far as putting parents and kids back together than anybody else,” he said. “If they come to me and show it to me, I have to ask the question, What’s going on and why and what are we doing about it? Henderson County as a whole is not a worse place to live and raise kids than all the other counties that are doing a better job.”
He is satisfied, he said, that the agency head and its leaders listened.
“I think they took me seriously and understand I have concerns and I fully expect them to address them,” he said.