Mississippi Fights to Keep Control of Its Beleaguered Child Welfare System

WAVELAND, Miss. — In 2003, a tiny girl weighing little more than 20 pounds arrived at an emergency shelter here on the gulf coast, after being shuttled between five foster homes and youth shelters in three months.

“Who’s the baby?” Terry Latham, the director of the shelter, recalled asking.

“I’m no baby,” the girl shouted, her ribs visible in her emaciated body. “I’m 4.”

The girl, identified as Olivia Y., who suffered from profound malnourishment and possibly sexual abuse, would become one of 13 children whose experiences formed a class-action lawsuit in 2004 against the state’s Division of Family and Children’s Services for “failing in its duty” to protect its own children.

More than a decade later, after a 2008 settlement and an admission by the state in July that it had never complied with the requirements, Mississippi is now trying to avoid becoming the first state to have its child welfare system put in receivership and an outside group hired to run it.

And at a time when 19 states are facing systemwide lawsuits that claim high rates of abuse and neglect of children and serious foster home shortages, Mississippi has become a case study in just how long and egregiously a state system meant to protect children can continue with substandard care that is out of compliance with a court order.

Mississippi’s foster care system, like those in other states, is designed to protect children who have been removed from their homes by a court order after a social worker’s investigation into the conditions there. Ideally, children are placed with licensed foster families, who receive between $684.90 and $1,546.50 per month per child, depending on the age and needs of the child. But, according to data provided by the state agency, Mississippi had just 1,486 licensed foster homes for 5,142 children in its custody as of December.

This means that many children are placed with relatives, few of them licensed and many of them with problems similar to those in the homes the children were removed from.

The suit in 2004 claimed that the system was underfunded and chaotic with abuses not being properly investigated and children often placed in dangerous homes. The suit also pointed to dangerously high caseloads for social workers who are supposed to investigate abuse allegations and monitor foster homes. Using state data from 2001, it found that more than 6,200 reports of abuse, neglect and the use of unsafe foster homes were not investigated.

Terrible failings were documented in the case file. A child was placed with a convicted rapist. Another ended up with a foster mother who threw the toddler to a pair of snarling dogs. In other instances, the division failed to put homeless or neglected children in custody. In one case this failure led to the rape and impregnation of a 14-year-old girl.

The state, in subsequent settlement agreements, has promised to overhaul its system, including hiring more staff and significantly improving its ability to track children. But in July, after the plaintiffs filed a contempt motion, Mississippi publicly acknowledged for the first time that it had failed to comply with the agreement in the seven years since the original settlement. A monitor’s most recent report, submitted to the court last month, shows 12 of the 13 regions in the state backsliding. “The agency does not have the capacity to protect children,” said Marcia Lowry, a child welfare advocate and the director of A Better Childhood, the group overseeing the suit against Mississippi.

State officials acknowledge the challenges. In addition to the 5,142 children in foster care, 4,367 are being monitored by the state but have not been placed in custody.

“It’s kind of like eating an elephant,” said David Chandler, a former State Supreme Court justice who was brought in last month to head the child welfare system. “We have to start one bite at a time. I think the first step is putting together a plan to attract more certified, educated, credentialed social workers.”

The lawsuit against Mississippi is not likely to be fully resolved for years, even if the state manages to significantly increase spending. Court supervision of troubled child welfare systems can last for decades, as it has in Maryland, which has been under court monitoring since 1984.

A rash of deaths of children in custody has plagued Texas’ system in recent years. After a trial on the lawsuit there, a District Court issued a ruling in December saying children who spent more than 18 months in custody “almost uniformly leave state custody more damaged than when they entered.”

Along Mississippi’s coast, where a growing number of children in need of care has overwhelmed available resources, social workers sometimes recommend leaving children in abusive situations to keep them from flooding the system, officials said. Officials also reported that in 2011, three years after the settlement was in effect, overwhelmed social workers destroyed evidence of abuse by shredding photographed documentation so they would not have to deal with more cases.

In Marion County, in southern Mississippi, three children monitored by the state but not put in custody have died since June 2014. In each instance, someone had reported problems in the household, but social workers did not look into them. In the first case, a social worker decided not to investigate the bruising of a 2-year-old girl who was “crying hysterically” in a hospital and “kicking, punching and screaming” to keep from being examined. Less than three weeks later, the toddler died from “severe head trauma.”

After the state’s acknowledgment of accountability for the system’s failures, the head of the Division of Family and Children’s Services resigned last summer. Gov. Phil Bryant, a Republican, made the directorship a cabinet-level position in December and brought in Justice Chandler to head it. Mississippi also hired an agency to analyze its system and make recommendations, which included increasing social workers’ salaries and restructuring the agency. Justice Chandler said he would seek an increase of $34.5 million in the agency’s budget. The Legislature, which would need to approve such an increase, went into session Jan. 5. “I would not waste my time asking them if I thought they were going to arbitrarily deny us,” he said.

In the last legislative session, the Bryant administration requested an increase of about $12 million in funding, explicitly citing the need for settlement compliance. The Legislature came up with about $3 million. According to a court-ordered report, Mississippi in 2012 spent less on child welfare per foster child than every state but Nevada. Salaries are so low — some family workers can earn as little as $23,643 a year — that they qualify for public assistance. Brehm Bell, a former youth court judge in Hancock County on the gulf coast, said he had stepped down after serving for more than three years because of the system’s inability to address failures.

“I was afraid a child would die on my watch,” he said.

State Representative Herb Frierson, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, said that the Legislature wanted to satisfy the court, but that budgets were already tight and a steep revenue shortfall was expected this year.

“It’s going to be tough,” Mr. Frierson said. Still, he acknowledged an outside takeover and accompanying funding mandates could be harder. “A takeover? I don’t know if that’s in the best interest of anything or anybody.”

In Arkansas, the child welfare system is so beleaguered, a report last year revealed that children in custody spent nights sleeping on couches and chairs in the welfare office. But while experts praised Arkansas for tackling these problems, they said Mississippi’s response was largely reactive.

“It is frustrating and heartbreaking to know that we have not given our best to the children who need us most,” Governor Bryant said. “And we are going to change that.”

Several experts said the dysfunction reflected not just problems with foster care but broader problems in the state. Mississippi has among the highest rates of poverty, teenage pregnancy and incarceration in the country.

Montavius Jones, now 19, shuffled through more than 20 foster and group homes after being removed from his mother’s home in 2001, shortly before his fourth birthday. In one, he said, he was whipped with extension cords. His social worker’s report on his care notes “a history of sexual abuse in foster care.”

“I’ve been through stuff a child shouldn’t have to go through,” he said.

Mr. Jones said he had chosen to share his story in the hope that the system would change.

“I want to help other kids like me,” he said. “That would make this all mean something.”