By the end of 2001, Cuyahoga County was de facto parent and legal guardian for some 6,200 children more than the entire student body of the Shaker Heights School District.  Six years of unprecedented child removals by the county's Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) had put more kids in foster care than ever before.

Nearly 2,000 children were waiting to be adopted into new families. Another 3,600 sat in temporary custody, waiting to learn whether and when they would be returned to their old ones. And about 600 too old, too sick or too attached to their families to be put up for adoption were stuck in long- term foster care and unlikely ever to go home.

While difficult to measure, the impact on these children can be substantial. Placement in foster care is deeply traumatic for children, even if they were abused or neglected at home, experts say. The uncertainty of dealing with new people, new rules and questions about whether they will ever go home can be so jarring that children struggle to adapt even in the most loving environment.

As elusive as the human costs might have been, however, there was no mystery at the end of 2001 about the financial implications of the county's bulging foster-care rolls.  By then, DCFS was spending almost $95 million a year to house its legions of foster kids up from $55 million in 1995.  The financially strapped county commissioners, caught between sagging tax revenues and skyrocketing costs, could no longer afford what had become business as usual.  And DCFS Director James McCafferty came under intense pressure to rein in runaway foster-care costs.

What he accomplished in just two years has baffled child-welfare experts.  On McCafferty's order, the number of Cuyahoga County kids taken from their homes each year has plummeted, falling 41 percent since 2001. As a result, the number of children in DCFS custody has dropped by nearly a third in the last two years to just over 4,000.
The precipitous descent has been nearly as sudden, and just as perplexing, as the dramatic surge in placements that erupted in 1996.  Such abrupt statistical shifts tend to raise eyebrows among child-welfare experts. They note that community trends in child abuse and neglect don't typically change so suddenly.
 
"It's definitely unusual, very unusual," said Mark Courtney, director of Chapin Hall Center for Children, a child-welfare research agency in Chicago. "There isn't some radical change in the demographics of the community" that would account for those numbers.

McCafferty acknowledges that department practices, more than changed community circumstances, have driven the declines.

On his orders, for instance, DCFS quickly reunited hundreds of foster children with family or friends. In part, that was accomplished by changing the long- held practice of keeping kids in custody until their parents had fixed all of their problems including those not directly related to abuse or neglect, like getting a high-school equivalency certificate.

The agency also started requiring a shorter sobriety period before drug- and alcohol-addicted parents could regain custody of their children.  And instead of having to prove that they had lived in the same place for six months, parents could simply produce evidence, such as a lease, that they had a place now.

McCafferty insists the changes were made, and placement numbers dramatically reduced, without jeopardizing child safety. 

"It wasn't just we have to save money," McCafferty said. "It was, I believe we can do better by kids.' "

But if that's the case, how many of the thousands of foster kids who fueled the late-'90s placement surge could have been left in their homes after all? Or gone home much sooner?

Conversely, has McCafferty's newly frugal DCFS opted to leave children in potentially unsafe homes in the name of fiscal economy?

Already, some critics have pointed to the beating death last year of 20-month-old Chamaria Drake as evidence that fiscal concerns and a mandate to reduce the number of kids in custody may have trumped child safety in the agency's foster-care cutbacks.
DCFS removed Chamaria immediately after her birth in 2001, when allegations surfaced that her 15-year-old mother, Sharnese Brock, had sexually abused a relative.
The baby entered a foster home and Brock, a foster child herself, entered a residential treatment center. She was later cleared of the charges.

In January 2003, a year after McCafferty promised to scale back foster-care placements and cut costs, DCFS social workers reunited Brock and her baby in a foster home that housed four young children.

Brock repeatedly told DCFS social workers that she didn't know how to be a parent and asked the agency to remove Chamaria, her lawyer and relatives said.
Brock asked for help "not once, twice, three times," her aunt, Margaret Mack, testified later. "At least five or six times, she had picked up the phone and called her county worker and said, Please come get my baby. I can't handle it.' "

Brock's relatives and Chamaria's former foster parents, Albert and Belinda Williams, said they told DCFS soon after the reunification they had noticed marks on the baby.
The Williamses arranged a visit with the child and videotaped the scratches and bruises on the girl's face and thighs and a deep gash on her windpipe.

DCFS social workers decided to give Brock another month with Chamaria to adjust. One of Brock's relatives and her foster mother had agreed to help with child care.  But Brock later complained to DCFS that she was overwhelmed and asked the agency to take Chamaria away.  Within weeks, the child was dead. Brock, then 17, admitted in court that she struck the child in the head because she wouldn't sit still while getting her hair combed.  Brock was found delinquent by reason of involuntary manslaughter and is serving a minimum three-year sentence in the Ohio Department of Youth Services.

"It's obvious to me that Sharnese [Brock] was not able to care for her child, that she was under stress and was ill-equipped to parent a child and certainly was not equipped to be alone with a child as young and as needy as Chamaria," Judge Janet Burney said during the sentencing.

DCFS had been able to reduce its monthly foster-care subsidy for Chamaria by more than $100 a month by keeping her with her mother instead of at Albert Williams' home.
Williams and Andrew Goldwasser, an attorney for Chamaria's estate, say the pressure within DCFS to cut costs appears to have been part of the motivation for leaving Chamaria with her mother.
 
"The fact that they took Chamaria out of the home where she was doing well and placed her in the home of another foster family with her mom was clearly economically motivated and a factor that led to Chamaria's death," said Goldwasser, who has filed a wrongful death suit against the county and DCFS.

McCafferty defended the agency's handling of the Brock case, but declined to give details because of the pending suit.  He was adamant that DCFS has not put budget concerns above child safety and has never made a custody decision based on money.
Chamaria's case underscores the often gut-wrenching, no-win nature of child-protection decisions.  Social workers and academics acknowledge they can't save every child from abuse or neglect.  Judges may send a child home against their recommendation, they say. Parents don't always give warning signs that they might harm the child. And social workers can overestimate or underestimate the value of the signs that are given.

"Nobody does it well," said Marc Cherna, director of Allegheny County Office of Children, Youth and Families, which has been praised for reducing the number of children entering foster care in and around Pittsburgh.

"It's a constantly fluid thing," Cherna said. "Kids coming in, coming out. Very difficult situations, judgment calls all the time."

Every agency has child deaths on its watch even deaths that, in hindsight, look preventable, Cherna said. Agencies should investigate whether policy contributed to the deaths and make necessary changes.

But the last thing these agencies should do is succumb to outside pressure and conclude that kids are generally safer in foster care, he said. "That's really an erroneous assumption."

© 2004 The Plain Dealer. Used with permission.