Federal Oversight of DCS

NASHVILLE, TN ­– The 2001 settlement of a class action lawsuit, Brian A. vs. Donald Sunquist, did not mark the end of a wrong righted. It was just the beginning of much-need reform of the Tennessee child welfare system.  It began with 15 plaintiffs who sued Tennessee for its systematic failure to protect them.

Brian A. was nine and lived in a homeless shelter for seven months with 20 other boys because DCS didn’t find a place for him to live. He was taken into custody because his parents were drug-addicts.  

Tracy B. was 13 and was placed in 15 different foster homes by DCS in just one year.  She had been in DCS custody since she was four.  

Jack and Charles C., then 14 and 7, were two of eleven children taken from their biological mother who was a crack addict. Jack was living in a group home, his twenty-third foster home during his 11 years in state custody.

These kids had problems stemming from their parent’s drug abuse but they got worse or they developed more problems in state care. They were runaways, disruptive, raging mental cases. The Department of Children’s Services (DCS) did not provide these children the services they needed and when none were provided, the foster parents often gave up and returned them to DCS. Many kids ended up in institutions.

So, you had DCS taking children out of their homes, in some cases terminating parental rights, trying to find adoptive parents, guardians, or foster parents, and in some cases returning kids to their parents.

“Between 1991 and 1995, the total number of Tennessee children in custody increased by nearly 3,000 to over 11,000. Staffing and resources (including foster home recruitment) did not keep pace with this increase and a large percentage of the children had a documented mental health need.” (from Lessons Learned, page 6, Center for the Study of Social Policy 2019.) 

In 1994, Tennessee adopted the Tennessee Children’s Plan to coordinate custodial and non-custodial services and ensure their quality. These services had previously been distributed among the State’s departments of Education, Youth Development, Finance and Administration, Health, Mental Health and Mental Retardation, and Human Services. DCS was established in 1995 to manage the entire child welfare system.

The 2001 settlement put a court monitor and a Technical Assistance Committee in charge of developing and implementing DCS reform efforts.  It didn’t work. For one thing, reorganizing all aspects of raising children no longer with their birth families is no easy task.  There were 141 requirements negotiated in the settlement agreement DCS agreed to do. 

DCS closed some congregate care facilities and their in-house schools. Most of those children started going to public schools. DCS also closed down the Tennessee Preparatory School, founded in 1886 as an orphanage.  

One of the Settlement Agreement’s main goals was changing the way DCS was placing children in foster care —moving to a system where the vast majority of children placed would be in family homes close to the communities in which they had lived and the parents with whom the state would work toward reunification.  But nobody could agree on how to do that. 

Shake Up at the Top 

In November of 2003, the Court Monitor submitted a report finding that Tennessee had failed to comply with the majority of the Settlement Agreement provisions. Sixteen days later, class counsel filed a contempt motion in the Federal District Court. Two days prior to the filing, then Governor Phil Bredesen removed Michael Miller as DCS chief. 

Bredesen installed DHS Commissioner Gina Lodge to replace him temporarily. 

A new commissioner, Dr. Viola Miller, took over from her and served as DCS commissioner from 2004 to 2011. It was during Miller’s tenure that DCS began to fix the many problems in the foster care system. 

Elizabeth Black, a former DCS administrator, characterized DCS’s early efforts at reform as something akin to herding cats. 

“Child and Family Teams (CFTs) are now a core part of the practice model but, at the time, there was internal debate about particular initiatives. There were different constituencies with different positions about what types of processes and meetings 

should be used to carry out the work. These differences were immobilizing to the system. We were caught in the quagmire of who had the authority to make the decision. Once there was a leader to say, ‘This is the DCS practice model,’ then the system shifted from ‘What do we do?’ to ‘How are we going to implement this?’” 

Mediation

It fell to mediator John Mattingly to bring the court monitor and the plaintiffs, the experts of the Technical Assistance Committee (TAC) and DCS leadership into a new agreement to modify the timeline and cooperate with each other. They had often been at odds. Mattingly’s task was to get them to trust each other. TAC agreed to monitor and report on DCS performance. Plaintiffs like that idea. 

“Once we got past explaining Brian A. to everyone, the key moment was when change wasn’t about Brian A., it was about what good practice looks like,”  Mattingly said. 

Dr. Viola Miller (DCS Commissioner, January 2004 to December 2011) 

As the new DCS Commissioner, Viola Miller had to bring changes into DCS operations. She embraced a new practice model called the Child and Family Team (CFT) process built around six core activities (often referred to as the “Practice Wheel”). Those activities centered on engaging the family and forming a team.

Miller needed to sell the concept to the DCS staffers in the field.  Without their buy-in CFT wouldn’t become the centerpiece of case planning and decision-making to move all cases forward and meet the requirements of the agreement. 

“To move from good intentions to reform, a child welfare system needs a well-trained, supported, and resourced workforce with reasonable caseloads. Workers need a safe environment where risk-taking is supported and rewarded. A big part of fixing the workforce is taking away excuses. Fix the salary, fix the caseloads, and fix the physical facilities. Make sure workers get travel reimbursements paid timely. Treat staff like professionals and create an environment in which they can respond to situations like professionals. Social workers are dedicated and if we give them what they need to do the job, they will, ” she said.  

To a large extent Miller succeeded. We will next talk about how Jim Henry kept improving the child welfare system during his tenure.