[A]n Al Jazeera America report about a Montpelier mother who was denied parental rights has spurred debate about how Vermont parents with disabilities are treated by the Department for Children and Families.
For the past five years, Alice Goltz has worked as a crossing guard for Union Elementary School in Montpelier, interacting each school day with dozens of children ranging in age from 5 to 12. But she has no right to visit her own 8-year-old daughter, who was adopted by a Chittenden County couple.
Goltz told VT Digger that DCF took her girl away immediately after her birth at Fletcher Allen Heath Care in 2007. A nurse apparently noted her trouble in caring for the newborn and contacted DCF, Goltz said. The day after the birth, two men appeared in her hospital room, saying they were from DCF, and physically removed the child to another location in the hospital, Goltz said. “They didn’t give me no papers, nothing.”
In the subsequent court handling of the case, DCF cited Goltz’s inability to master essential baby-care skills. A brief submitted on her behalf conceded many of the problems, noting that she had “testified that she cannot parent [the baby] on her own.”
“I didn’t give up my child,” she told Al Jazeera. “She was stolen from me.”
Goltz has dystonia, a condition that can cause involuntary muscular spasms.
While the Department for Children and Families worked with her for over a year to determine if she could care for the baby, she believes her shortcomings as a parent were not adequately accommodated. All her parental rights, including her right even to visit her child, were terminated in 2009, and her attempts to fight the state in court failed.
The 43-year-old Goltz speaks somewhat awkwardly and has a below-average IQ, by her own statement and the confirmation of Susan Yuan of Jericho, a psychologist who assessed Goltz’s parenting skills.
Yuan, a recognized expert on parents with disabilities, conducted two assessments and determined Goltz could be trained to care for the child on her own.
“I will say till the end of my days that she’s a capable parent,” given proper support, Yuan told VTDigger.
Now that the child is 8, and baby care has ceased to be an issue, the Department for Children and Families has made no provision to allow Goltz even a supervised visit. In closed cases such as Goltz’s, Schatz said, DCF no longer exercises any authority regarding visitation.
DCF does not comment on specific cases, but presented with a hypothetical situation regarding an 8-year-old child, Ken Schatz, the commissioner of the department, said that “if an older child doesn’t have the same needs with respect to support from the parent, that could certainly open up the possibility for parent visitation.” Schatz clarified, however, that such rules apply only to open cases; following adoption, as in Goltz’s case, the matter is closed.
Goltz said she simply wants to see her daughter.
“I don’t want to traumatize my daughter. I just want to have a relationship with her,” she said.
‘Best interests’
Advocates are concerned that a new law may tip the balance further toward the rights of children, as opposed to parents. Act 60, which went into effect this summer, is designed to protect children from abuse and neglect. Under the statute, a child’s “best interests” are the main criterion the state uses to determine whether parental rights should be terminated.
DCF’s role in the termination of parental rights — a process in which a court makes the final decision — has come into sharp relief as state officials and the public at-large struggle to come to grips with the murder of a state social worker this month.
On Aug. 7, a parent who was upset that she had lost parental rights to her 9-year-old, allegedly shot and killed a social worker who was involved in the case. Jody Herring, 40, has pleaded innocent to the charge of killing Lara Sobel, 48. Herring is also charged with the shooting deaths of three of her relatives on the same day.
Sobel’s killing unleashed a backlash against social workers. Commenters on news websites and Facebook accused the state of “kidnapping” children. Threats were made to state employees, according to Hal Cohen, the secretary of the Agency of Human Services, and one man was arrested for statements on Facebook. The agency has responded by increasing security for employees, and in speeches Gov. Peter Shumlin has publicly called the commenters to account.
Two years ago, DCF began to tighten its child protection practices in the wake of the deaths of two toddlers whose parents were under state supervision. Two-year-old Dezirae Sheldon and 15-month-old Peighton Geraw were fatal victims of alleged child abuse in 2014. Parental opiate use allegedly played a role in the homicides, and charges have been filed against family members.
Despite the hiring of several dozen additional social workers and new recommendations for staff training, the department is struggling to keep up with a 30 percent increase in the number of children in state custody.
The deaths were the impetus for the passage of a new child protection law, Act 60, that put the interests and rights of children first.
Parental rights advocates assert that in the wake of the toddler deaths, criminal charges, a legislative panel and several reports on department failures, the state has become so sensitive to the possibility of new tragedies that it is not doing enough to help struggling parents.
Attorney Trine Bech, executive director of the Vermont Parent Representation Center, says to build a system on the basis of two cases “is crazy.”
“Unfortunately, in our child protection system, we do have children who die,” Bech said. “And we can’t remove all children in order to protect a few.”
The Department of Disabilities, Aging and Independent Living’s Division of Developmental Disability Services doesn’t offer support for people with IQs above 70, leaving people like Goltz in difficult straits.
“The families that are most at risk are those like Alice’s, who is just a few points too high to be eligible for developmental services,” Yuan said. “When parents are not eligible for developmental services they still face the same stigma of having a disability, but without any support in place.”
In child-protection cases, complexities arise around the issue of parental disability because, among other things, people with disabilities are often impoverished, which in itself renders successful parenting more difficult.
The parents also have to contend with the social stigma affixed to them to whatever degree their disability is observable. Differences exist as to how disabilities should be measured, and intense debate prevails over the extent to which public authorities should intervene with supportive measures that could save a family from breakup.
Advocates Call for Accommodations
The finality of parental rights decisions has affected others much as it has Goltz. Yuan cited the case of two children who were failing to thrive.
“They weren’t eating. They weren’t gaining weight. … When the children were placed with a foster family, the foster family had the same problem with the children failing to thrive. And it turned out that the children had a medical condition. But by that time they had been out of the birth family for a long enough time that it was considered by DCF that the [birth] family couldn’t take care of them.”
The foster family had at that point adopted the children through DCF’s facilitation. No provision was made for visits from the birth parents.
“By that time the family had had another child, and the decision was made to allow the birth family to raise the additional child, who had no medical condition, [but] they lost their two older children.”
“I could see the DCF’s perspective before the children were diagnosed,” Yuan continued. “But … [after the diagnosis] they could have been reintegrated into the family. There’s pressure to achieve permanence for the children, which usually means adoption.”
The quality of DCF’s work varies, Yuan said. “I’ve seen some examples of very good case managers who have a open mind and respond very fairly, and I’ve seen some who come into the matter with the idea that the parent can’t do it, and it’s virtually impossible to shake that idea. Probably more fall in the latter category.”
Several advocates interviewed for this article believed that DCF could do more to provide accommodations for parents with disabilities.
Nicole Brisson, who heads up Sage Haven Associates, a St. Albans-based counseling and consultation group, cited a pending case involving a single mother who is confined to a wheelchair and thus has difficulty handling her baby. Brisson suggested giving the woman a flight vest, such as traveling parents use to secure their children to their laps during airline travel.
“I was told [by DCF] this was not being allowed as an adaptation because that’s not what it was intended for. And it was something that was being used nationally.”
In a lot of cases, Brisson said, “the baby will be taken from the hospital, and because of feeding issues, it’ll often be a general impression from the nursing staff that the parents aren’t able to care for their child, but there’s no training in the hospital so that the parent can really learn. If [staff people] stayed a couple of days with the parent and the parent were properly evaluated, that could be a corrective measure.”
Asked to what extent public agencies, given their budget constraints, could be expected to pay for such expanded training and other intensive services, Brisson turned attention to the utility of less formalized help from the community.
“The parents that succeed are the ones that have the most support – family, friends, people who are supportive.”
She mentioned a new approach, called whole family foster care, in which the child’s parent or parents also move into the foster home. The model, she said, is meeting with success elsewhere in the country.
“It’s better than one hour a week of visitation” from a social worker, she said.
Kathy Holsopple, director of the Vermont Federation of Families for Children’s Mental Health, said that from 2004 to 2010 her organization took part in an initiative that supported “parents in complex situations” who needed services from multiple agencies or providers.
The project had three key parts: helping affected individuals navigate the bureaucracy and paperwork, helping interpret the legal language of court hearings, and conducting accommodative assessments – evaluations aimed at determining what supports a parent needs.
According to Yuan, who played a key role in the project, it involved 855 families, all of them low-income and all of them with children. In 495 cases, at least one parent met the federal definition of physical or mental disability. In only 17 families did the parents have parental rights terminated.
“There’s no place in the world that has a better figure than that,” she said. “And the Agency of Human Services said that they couldn’t pick it up” when the project exhausted its grant financing.
Posing yet another possibility, she noted that, unlike Vermont, “some states have open adoption, where a parent can, for instance, decide that it would probably be too difficult to raise the child, but they have an arrangement by law that the child will be adopted by another family, but the parent will still be able to have contact with the child.”
“We’re using removal as the first line of defense rather than the last line of defense,” Bech said.
Permanent Separation?
Goltz’s situation invites questions because, in her job as a crossing guard, she is responsible for children the same age as the daughter she is forbidden to visit.
Asked whether his school’s parents had registered any complaints about Goltz’s interactions with youngsters whom she escorts across Montpelier’s Main Street, Union Elementary School principal Chris Hennessey told VTDigger, “Oh, God, no — none whatsoever.”
Her intellectual deficiency “is not having an impact on her job,” he said. “I don’t have to worry about Alice.”
“I knew nothing about her situation before the Al Jazeera article was published. I don’t think anyone here at Union knew about it. I’ve had parents contact me, ask me what they can do. It’s heart-breaking for everybody who knows her,” Hennessey said.
The Massachusetts Case
Experts commenting for this article noted that DCF’s emphasis on giving the child stability translates into the permanence of the parent’s loss. Brisson termed the scenario “very prevalent.”
She estimated that anywhere from 40 percent to 80 percent of children of parents with intellectual disabilities are removed from their homes. Her comments returned repeatedly to the primacy of the family.
“If you compare children from families that need intervention versus those who have been put into foster homes, the outcomes are better with children that have been left in their homes,” she said.
She is concerned about what she calls “anticipatory neglect,” the tendency of agency personnel to worry that children might in the future experience neglect “because of this class of individuals [with disabilities], rather than looking at their strengths and abilities and support systems.”
“There’s no correlation between parenting and IQ unless the IQ is very low,” she said.
Brisson cited a Massachusetts case in which a mother with an intellectual impairment found herself in a bind much like Goltz’s in 2012, when that state’s Department of Children and Families removed her baby. Among other things, the agency noted that the mother had difficulty reading an analog clock, according to thedailybeast.com.
In a joint January 2015 letter, the federal Department of Justice and Department of Health and Human Services informed Massachusetts DCF that it had engaged in illegal discrimination by seeking to terminate the parental rights of a woman with what the federal authorities described as a “mild intellectual disability” — described by the Massachusetts DCF as “mental retardation.” The letter noted that the Social Security Act requires agencies to make “reasonable efforts” on behalf of individuals with disabilities, and cited the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) as mandating “reasonable modifications in policies, practices, or procedures when the modifications are necessary to avoid discrimination on the basis of disability.” The mother and child were subsequently reunited.
Schatz said he was unfamiliar with the case and federal findings would not change “any specific practice in Vermont with regard to providing services to parents with mental disabilities.”
Schatz’s stance is consistent with the Vermont Supreme Court’s position in the Goltz case, in which failure to comply with the ADA was not considered relevant in weighing the termination of her parental rights.
Schatz also cited a Vermont statute that requires his department’s rules to “strike an appropriate balance between protecting children and respecting the rights of a parent or guardian, including a parent or guardian with disabilities. … The rules shall include the possible use of adaptive equipment and supports.”
The department rule uses virtually the same wording, but adds a key qualifier in noting a possible need for “reasonable accommodations, including adaptive equipment and supports.” Schatz also alluded to a statute that mandates “consideration of the needs of children and parents with disabilities, provided that the child’s needs are given primary consideration.”
All of the provisions Schatz cited predate the new legislation.
“When we intervene we only do it when the child’s safety is at issue,” Schatz said. In the case of families wrestling with cognitive disabilities, for example, “the parent’s mental health is not involved at all, except to the extent that this is making conditions for the child unsafe.”
That may explain why Goltz’s intellectual shortcomings, however assessed, received little mention in the Supreme Court’s decision in her case; but it also raises the question of whether Vermont’s authorities might be circumventing the ADA by simply minimizing the role of a given disability. One expert with a knowledge of the case, who declined to be identified, said, “The finding that she doesn’t have a disability is an easy way to get out of the obligations for accommodations.”
Semantics and Relativity
The question of how to help families dealing with disabilities returns again and again to semantics, to what is “reasonable” and “appropriate” in the context of agency resources – money, in a word. Asked to what extent budget considerations affect the scope of services that DCF provides to parents with disabilities, Schatz stated in an email that “the Department recognizes its obligation to make reasonable accommodations. The challenge in Vermont relates to the availability of services and supports to accommodate all needs.”
The subjectivity required in applying the new standard is another issue. Best, as in the best-interests standard of the new child-protection law, is the superlative form of good, and is open to interpretation, critics say.
“Middle-class values come into play,” Bech said. “We’ve got to be careful that we are not doing total economic engineering, removing children from poor homes and placing them in middle-class homes because we think it’s better.”
Asked how the poverty of a parent with a disability weighed in the balance, Yuan said, “It’s hard to sort out, since people with disabilities are often poor, too.” She nonetheless found the income question problematic. She mentioned a lawyer who represents birth parents in parental-rights cases.
“He likes to avoid getting into what he calls a beauty contest between the birth family and the adoptive family, because, basically, most of the families he represents are in poverty, and the child can have an economically better life often with the foster family. It’s not fair to the birth family.”
Schatz said the standard of “best interests” would “absolutely not” open the door to removals if DCF simply thought some parent somewhere could do a better, or the best, job of raising the child.
‘A Delicate Balance’
Looming over the debate is Act 60, which took effect July 1. It amended many statutory provisions affecting DCF. The law gives concern to Rep. Anne Donahue, R-Northfield, who has worked since the1990s as an advocate for Vermonters with disabilities. Donahue cast one of only three nays when the bill passed the House; it passed the Senate unanimously.
The law, she said, “will bear close watching. I have seen situations over the years where a parent’s mental health disability is used against them inappropriately, and so I fear that the changes in the statute could make it worse for those parents. I am very concerned that it could place parents with a disability at a greater disadvantage in situations where they should be able to keep their children. They may be finding greater obstacles that are not necessarily even in the best interests of the child.”
Schatz supported the law because it “eliminates any doubt with respect to ‘best interests.'”
“The court and all the participants in the process need to focus on the best interest of the child,” Schatz said.
The new statute refers 12 times to the “best interests” of the child as the overarching standard in DCF interventions, thus simplifying, in the view of advocates, the child’s removal from the home.
In a late July interview, Bech said the law was already beginning to make its mark by removing the preference that the pre-existing law accorded to relatives of the affected child in placement decisions. “I have one case where the caseworker says, ‘I don’t have to place this child with a relative, because under the new law I don’t have to. I don’t have to look for relatives.’
“Our removal rate for very young children is now twice what it was a year or two or ago. Children are being removed to non-relatives, which is a traumatic experience.”
Sen. Dick Sears, D-Bennington, one of the legislation’s six sponsors in the Senate, disagreed with the assertion that the law has tipped the balance against the parents.
“There are always advocates that oppose and support everything you do. You can’t make them all happy,” he said. “I think the bill makes allowance for reunification. You make the best interests of the child paramount. That’s a delicate balance for the social worker, the guardian ad litem, the family court judge, the prosecutors, everybody.”
He added his hope that “the new law will allow more voices to be heard in the decision-making.”
Legislators, he said, “recognized that the opiate problem in Vermont was a new challenge and really had not been adequately addressed in terms of the child’s protection.” The Sheldon and Geraw cases “really brought light on the problem,” he said.
As a child, Sears, who is 72, was placed in three foster homes and subsequently adopted. He met his own sister for the first time when he was 62.
“So of course my goal would be to keep families together as much as possible,” he said.
Back to the Future?
Advocates for parents with disabilities shied away from an adversarial view of the agency, and gave it credit where they felt it was due.
“There are some people in DCF, in the leadership, who are trying to move this situation forward, to get more equity for parents with disabilities,” Yuan said. “Those very enlightened leaders are trying to have an impact at the actual case management level, but that’s the most difficult level … where the families are most in contact with DCF.”
Holsopple, of the Vermont Federation of Families for Children’s Mental Health, viewed the current situation against the backdrop of more draconian solutions that child care authorities exercised in past decades.
“Back in the day, it used to be the norm, if the parent had a disability, the child was taken away,” she said.
But even longer ago, when extended families and communities smaller and tighter-knit than today’s formed the context, an organic social network provided some measure of support for people with disabilities. And it is some semblance of that network that advocates for Vermont parents with disabilities would like to restore.
Clarification: Aspects of this story were changed Aug. 26 to clarify DCF’s responsibility in post-adoption situations.
