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Considerable negative coverage has been given the Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) in recent weeks following the deaths of at least three toddlers in the Baton Rouge and Houma areas and the sexual abuse of boys living in a dilapidated foster home in Baton Rouge.
But the problems besetting DCFS go back several years and can be laid at the feet of former Gov. Bobby Jindal, who, in typical Republican fashion, chose to abandon the most vulnerable of Louisiana’s citizens by slashing funding for the agency, producing a turnover rate of nearly 25 percent in 2014 that in turn resulted in a 33 percent reduction in the number of DCFS employees.
Jindal’s gutting of the agency made it virtually impossible for case workers to perform their jobs properly, according to a 77-page report: A Review of Child Welfare, the Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services.
At one point, a caseworker in Ouachita Parish was arrested and booked into East Baton Rouge Parish Prison after being accused of filing false reports about mandatory monthly in-home visits with children in foster care.
That was in February 2016. A month earlier, LouisianaVoice received a confidential email from a retired DCFS supervisor who revealed a disturbing trend in her former agency.
“I served in most programs within the agency, foster care, investigations, and adoptions,” she wrote. “Over my career I witnessed the eight years of Jindal’s ‘improvements.’
“Those ‘improvements’ endanger children’s lives daily. The blight is spread from the Secretary to the lowliest clerical worker in the agency. People are overworked and underpaid but it’s not just that. People are so distraught from the unrelenting stress that children are in danger. Add to that the inexperience of most front-line workers and their supervisors’ inability to properly train new staff.”
She then dropped a bombshell that should serve as a wake-up call to everyone who cares or pretends to care about the welfare of children—from Gov. John Bel Edwards down to the most obscure freshman legislator:
“In the Shreveport Region, the regional administrator (recently) told workers that they may make ‘drive-by’ visits to foster homes, which means talking to the foster parents in their driveway. Policy says that workers will see both the child and the foster parent in the home, interviewing each separately (emphasis added). A lot of abuse goes on in foster homes. Some foster families are truly doing the best they can but they need counseling and guidance from their workers. The regional administrator’s answer to that one? Have the foster parent call their home development worker—another person who can’t get her job done now.”
She wrote that she heard of two separate incidents “where a child new to foster care was taken to a foster home and left without paperwork, without contact information for the person in charge of the case, and without knowing even the child’s name.”
You may read the entire 2016 LouisianaVoice post by going HERE.
Adoptions is another area in which there are serious questions about DCFS. A Baton Rouge couple, Christy and Craig Mills, know first-hand the frustrations of trying to get the agency to take action on their behalf in an adoption attempt that went all wrong.
In October 2013, they successfully adopted a baby girl, Morgan, after she was born to a homeless couple, Thomas and Carol, with whom the Mills were working. In February 2014, Thomas and Carol contacted the Mills to inform them they were expecting again and wished to adopt that baby out as well.
The Mills, wishing to keep the natural siblings together, quickly agreed.
Working through the DeColores Adoptions International in Lake Charles and its representative, adoption attorney/social worker Lisa Perquet Harell, the Mills began providing shelter, food, transportation to and from medical visits, and a cell phone for Thomas and Carol.
Four days before the baby boy was born, with Harell’s assistance, Thomas and Carol were suddenly relocated to an undisclosed hotel in New Orleans. It turned out, unbeknownst to the Mills, the expectant couple was also receiving financial assistance from a Denham Springs couple who eventually adopted the infant.
The Mills filed a formal complaint against Harell for an alleged conflict of interest. Included in the package containing the complaint was a copy of a 2005 consent agreement and order in which Lisa Perquet, then a licensed clinical social worker (LCSW) admitted to falsifying documents attesting that she had conducted home visits of adoptees on three occasions and that she failed to maintain fee charges and other billing information for the required six years.
The now eight-year-old complaint pointed out that DCFS’s own child placing agency standards say that “Placement of siblings as a family group is usually the preferred placement.”
“Adoption fraud dominates conversations in the adoption industry and has negative effects on families across the country,” the complaint by the Mills says. “We know first-hand how an alleged wrongful adoption has impacted our own lives today and will impact these two children’s lives once they are old enough to learn that a group of adults and adoption professionals licensed by the State of Louisiana, in our opinion intentionally kept them from being together for the purposes of their own monetary gain.”
That complaint and accompanying documents can be seen in their entirety at the beginning of this post.
Louisiana Voice 
Solid piece and not easy to write something that doesn’t keep with the anti-government fervor the media has been stirring up so aggressively on this matter. Every once in a while, Nakamoto disappointingly does one of these kind of over sensationalized hatchet job stories, and WBRZ loves to beat it to death.
Another public system that, like public defender offices, has been set up for failure mainly, yes, by the hard-right former governor and still hard-right legislature. Wait and see how many people rush to sign up to fill the massive caseworker shortage now after all the unrelentingly harsh publicity. It was discouraging to see so many state legislators jump on the bandwagon and viciously grandstand in attacking the agency.
Of course it’s a tragedy, but if the child were taken away and put in a foster home and something bad happened, which evidently is really common, then they would blame the agency for that too. Sorry there just don’t seem to be a lot of fine people eager to foster or adopt disadvantaged and abused kids, despite what the anti-abortion nuts claim.
This has clearly become a society with way too many unsupported children, unsuitable to dangerous guardians, and crippled and deficient public institutions, often by design. With no abortions now allowed for rape or incest especially, I can’t wait to see what bright future lies in store for this great state.
Well said, although horrifically tragic for the children 💔
If only nearly as much concern was given to the already born and breathing as is given the unborn, some real progress could be made. …
I believe that high-schoolers should be educated for the most important job ever, even those who plan to remain childless. If nothing else, child-development science curriculum could offer students an idea/clue as to whether they’re emotionally suited for the immense responsibility and strains of parenthood.
It would also teach how children’s mind/emotional development begins as early as gestation. Inside the womb, children are already aware of their mother’s emotions — and perhaps even later emotionally damaged by them: “When a mother both consciously and subconsciously wanted to be pregnant and welcomed her baby, the child thrived. When the mother either consciously or subconsciously wanted the baby, the child was fine.
When the mother neither consciously nor subconsciously wanted the baby, the child felt the effects of this hostile emotional climate. I remember a story of a woman who not only didn’t want her baby but also resented his intrusive presence in her body.
“When the Italian doctor would use an ultrasound to view the baby as the mother talked about her resentments of him and the pregnancy, the baby would curl up in a tiny ball in a corner of the uterus, trying to make himself very small. Even in-utero, a baby can feel the power of his/her mother’s heart. When considering having children, making a thoughtful, heartful, integrated decision is important for the overall wellbeing of a child.”
http://www.healingheartpower.com/power-heart.html [Linda Marks, 2003]
Another View
Your comments about Jindal’s culpability in these matters are well-stated and correct. However, John Bel Edwards and his Secretary have had six and a half years, and lots of money in the State coffers the last two years, to fix the problems, and they haven’t. Another of the many critical failures of this Administration.
Your observations about JBE are on target. There’s plenty of blame to go around.
6+ years should be long enough for the current administration to turn this agency around. But Tom won’t dare criticize them for their inaction.
You think six years is enough time. There is an old saying about the army. It goes a little like this: Generals don’t run the army, colonels do. In state government, secretaries, assistant secretaries and deputy secretaries do not run the departments, the long time civil servants, below those levels, do. Their bosses are appointed. These are people who have vested in the system and who instill the culture of the department. Whether that’s good or bad, I can’t answer that. It’s a deeply embedded culture that is not easily rooted out with a change in appointed leadership positions..
Louisiana DCFS priority is the money they make from federal and state grants through adoptions, kinship care, and foster care. They could care less about families or children. Yet the reason they have this view is because without that money, they wouldn’t be able to operate. And it seems like our politicians make it worse by continuing to ignore the problem and cut budgets. It’s a vicious cycle with no end. DCFS is going to continue ripping families apart and letting children fall in the cracks until someone steps up and says enough.
Agree with Can’t say, he/she said it right. love the other views who are Trumpites/JIndalites who do not really understand the role of public servants who can only do what the Legislature/laws/regulations dictate. We (the people) will keep trying to overcome our ignorance. love always and go Top Gun ron thompson
My understanding is that male victims of sex-related harassment and/or abuse are still more hesitant or unlikely than girl victims to report their offenders. Boys refusing to open up and/or ask for help due to their fear of being perceived by peers, etc. as weak or non-masculine.
Also, I’ve noticed over many years of news-media consumption that, for example, when victims of sexual abuse are girls their gender is readily reported as such; but when they’re boys they are typically referred to gender-neutrally as simply children. It’s as though, as a news product made to sell the best, the child victims being female is somehow more shocking than if male.
[Interestingly though not convincingly, one online reader suggested to me that since most sexual offences against boys are committed by men and therefore are homosexual in nature, the mainstream news-media will typically deliberately omit this information out of some misplaced concern for a potential resultant increase in hate-motivated violence against the collective gay community.]
Additionally, I’ve heard and read news-media references to a 19-year-old female victim as a ‘girl,’ while (in an unrelated case) a 17-year-old male perpetrator was described as a ‘man.’ Could it be that this is indicative of an already present gender bias held by the general news consumership, since news-media tend to sell us what we want or are willing to consume thus buy?
It’s as though boys are somehow perceived as basically being little men, and men of course can take care of themselves. … It could be the same mindset that might help explain why the book Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal only included one male among its six interviewed adult subjects, there presumably being such a small pool of ACE-traumatized men willing to formally tell his own story of childhood abuse.
It might be yet more evidence of a continuing subtle societal take-it-like-a-man mentality, one in which so many men will choose to abstain from ‘complaining’ about their torturous youth, as that is what ‘real men’ do. [Note: I tried multiple times contacting the book’s author via internet websites in regards to this unaddressed elephant in the room, but I received no response.]