Nate Farnham entered Vermont’s foster care system when he was about 7 years old. Over his 13 years in the care of the Department for Children and Families, he said, he was placed in 35 different homes and at least eight residential treatment facilities, in addition to multiple stays at the Brattleboro Retreat.
When staff in residential treatment facilities put Farnham in physical restraints, it caused concussions, he said, as well as injury to his shoulders.
“Some of it was my general anger, trying to fight out of it and everything else, but there were times where it was definitely on them and the way they initiated the restraint,” he said recently.
Farnham told his DCF caseworker about these incidents, and then tried to escalate his complaints up through the chain of command, he said, but nothing really changed. He didn’t know where else he could whistleblow outside the department itself.
Valarie Coulter, a foster parent in the Bennington district, said she has encountered similar roadblocks when she’s tried to report concerns about the kids in her care. DCF staff would tell her they would look into an issue, she said, and then she wouldn’t hear back.
Coulter said it felt like “screaming into the void.”
Farnham, now 23, got involved in child advocacy in 2015, and joined networks of other advocates across the country. Through that work, he learned Vermont was the only state in New England that didn’t have an independent ombudsman for its child welfare department.
Twenty-seven states have ombudsman or advocate offices for children and families, according to Vermont’s Joint Fiscal Office.
Farnham brought the idea to Rep. Daniel Noyes, D-Wolcott, and for more than five years, lawmakers have considered creating an ombudsman for the Department for Children and Families.
Farnham’s goal was to “do my damnedest to prevent other potential kids from having to go through the 13 years of hell that I went through,” he said.
This year, those efforts paid off in the form of H.265, a bill to create an Office of Child, Youth, and Family Advocate. On Tuesday, Gov. Phil Scott signed the bill into law.
Competing visions
According to the new law, the advocate’s office will collect data and “identify systemic shortcomings” regarding Vermont’s juvenile justice and child protection systems, then make recommendations to the General Assembly. The advocate can respond to complaints and inform youth and families of their rights, but does not have the power to dictate DCF procedure.
“The purpose of the bill is to provide additional support to the child protection system, and DCF is hopeful the Office will work toward that end,” wrote Katarina Lisaius, senior advisor to the DCF commissioner, in an emailed response to questions from VTDigger. “The Department for Children and Families recognizes the importance of the interest of children having support in this new office.”
Advocates testified to lawmakers that an independent third party was important for upholding public trust, particularly in an organization that, due to the nature of its work, operates under tight confidentiality.
Amy Rose, policy associate for Voices for Vermont’s Children, said independent oversight and systemwide assessment is also needed due to historic injustices in the child protection system.
The foster system “was not designed as a way to protect children from abuse and neglect,” Rose said in an interview. “Originally, it was designed as a system to, at its worst, punish poor parents.”
As the bill progressed through the Legislature, lawmakers had to reconcile competing visions for the advocate’s job: Would it serve as a watchdog toward DCF, or would it work with the department in a more collaborative role?
Farnham wanted the office to have real oversight powers, to independently ensure that DCF followed its own policies. He saw an ombudsman office as one way to shift the power dynamic between DCF and the youth and families it interacts with.
“You can have policy changes all day long,” Farnham said. “But if there’s no legislation to back it up, then there’s no enforcement of it.”
DCF asked for a more collaborative office, housed within Vermont Legal Aid. The nonprofit law firm hosts similar oversight positions for the state’s health care and long-term care sectors.
“The Office must not be adversarial,” DCF Deputy Commissioner Aryka Radke said in written testimony to the Senate Health & Welfare Committee.
Senate committee members ultimately removed the advocate’s power to investigate DCF. That was in part because the advocate’s office will have only two employees and limited capacity, said Noyes, the bill’s lead sponsor. He expects the advocate to focus on big-picture policy.
“Knowing how the Office operates and partners with DCF will be integral to a non-adversarial relationship,” Lisaius wrote to VTDigger. “The Senate made clear their legislative intent was to not have an adversarial Office. DCF believes the best way to serve children and families is to have a coordinated and open approach. The legislation outlines broad responsibilities and expectations of the Advocate, and to meet the duties, partnership will be important.”
Much of the discussion in the Legislature focused on where to house the advocate within state government, according to Rose. Lawmakers aimed to maintain the office’s independence while still ensuring the advocate would have access to confidential DCF records.
In testimony submitted to lawmakers, Rose argued the advocate’s office could “begin to deweaponize confidentiality.”
Coulter, the Bennington foster parent, told VTDigger she was unable to take her complaints outside the department because she was bound by strict confidentiality rules. At the same time, she worried that if she complained to the department repeatedly, DCF would remove the child from her home.
“Most of the foster parents I know are scared of speaking out against DCF … because we really do love these kids,” said Coulter, who also runs the nonprofit Foster Vermont. “And we know that there’s a crisis. We know that there’s not enough homes for the kids in care.”
Stringent confidentiality, while important, can make it difficult to compare case outcomes, Rose said. She hopes the advocate’s office can address disparities in youth outcomes across DCF regional districts.
“DCF is often working in crisis mode, and doesn’t have the chance or the opportunity to look at the bigger structural needs of the system,” Rose said.
The office will be separate from DCF and its umbrella agency, the Agency of Human Services. Lawmakers looked to the long-term care ombudsman, the health care advocate and the Office of Racial Equity as models for an independent oversight role within government, Noyes said.
Anne Ward, who’s been a foster parent in Washington County for 10 years, said she supports the bill, but was initially unsure that it took the right approach. She questioned if it was the best use of limited funds, especially when DCF “is so wildly under-resourced,” she said.
Ward and Coulter both said the department is in dire need of funding to hire more caseworkers.
“There’s not a single person that works in DCF that doesn’t care about this job and the people that they’re affecting,” Coulter said. “They don’t have enough time, and there’s not enough money.”
Ward said she hopes the advocate’s work will go further than data collection, and lead to actionable policy change. But she remains skeptical that the state would commit resources to the department in response to the advocate’s findings.
“I do wonder,” she said, “when the office of child advocate tells us how we could help kids, are we even going to listen?”
