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The white social worker looked at the dark spots on the black child's body and assumed the youngster had been beaten. The family denied it, but the social worker insisted.
It turned out the child had "Mongolian spots" — harmless skin blotches common among black children. The social worker's mistake was discovered before the parents got into trouble.
But researchers and policymakers say such episodes help explain why black, Hispanic and other minority children in the United States are far more likely than white youngsters to be taken from their homes and placed in foster care.
Racial or ethnic prejudices — conscious or unconscious — can lead social workers to see abuse or neglect where none exists, these experts say.
The experts caution that stereotyping on the part of social workers is just one factor in the racial gap, and probably a small one at that. Other factors — higher rates of poverty, inadequate housing and child care, for example — are believed to be major contributors to abuse and neglect among minorities.
Nevertheless, stereotyping is enough of a concern that cultural-awareness training for social workers has been instituted in 45 states, many of them in the just the past few years, according to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.
A third of children in foster care are Black:
Nationally, blacks make up about 15 percent of the childhood population, yet account for 34 percent of children in foster care, according to the GAO report. Black children on average stay in foster care nine months longer than white children, the report said.
The report said "bias or cultural misunderstandings and distrust between child welfare decision makers and the families they serve" was one of several factors accounting for the gap, along with poverty and lack of access to services.
"Once we are reported, we are more likely to be investigated. Once we are investigated, we are more likely to be placed in foster care. Once we are placed in foster care, we are less likely to be returned to our families," said Sondra Jackson, executive director of Black Administrators in Child Welfare.
In overwhelmingly white Utah, black children were in foster care at more than six times their proportion of the state's population, according to the GAO. In five other states — Wisconsin, Iowa, New Hampshire, Wyoming, and California — black children were four times more likely to end up in foster care.
In Massachusetts, 7 percent of children are black, but 19 percent children in state care are black. Hispanics are 11 percent of the child population but 25 percent of those in foster care. White children are 79 percent of the population, but just 60 percent of those in state care.
"People come with biases and how those racial biases play out is of real concern," said Bill Brown, area director for the state Department of Social Services in Boston.
The problem is not just black and white.
Confusing marks on kids:
When Vietnamese and Cambodian immigrants began moving in large numbers to Lowell, a mill city outside Boston, social workers started hearing troubling reports of children with odd, circular marks on their bodies.
"Our first reaction was that the children were being battered or bruised or spanked," said Zevorah Ortega-Bagni, a state social services investigative supervisor.
Social workers were actually seeing the effects of a traditional healing practice known as "cupping," in which a cup is heated and placed on the skin to draw out illnesses. Far from abuse, the marks were a sign that parents were doing their best to care for their children.
Researchers say minorities are no more likely than whites in similar socio-economic circumstances to abuse or neglect their children. But minorities are more likely to be poor, with blacks nearly four times more likely to live in poverty than others.
Kandida Garcia, a child welfare investigator in Massachusetts, said her Puerto Rican background gives her an edge when dealing with parents of a similar background — especially in emotionally charged situations.
"Another worker may target them as explosive because they are loud in nature, but I would have a different view," she said. "I could explain that this mother is not being aggressive; she is advocating for her child."
Recognizing own biases:
Other social workers said it took years of on-the-job experience to recognize their own ill-founded assumptions.
Virginia O'Connell, who has worked as a social worker for three decades, said it wasn't always easy to distinguish between true abuse or neglect and instances in which families were doing their best under difficult circumstances.
"I went out to homes where there were kids sharing mattresses on the floor," O'Connell said. "It was my values versus the customs and values of a family I was visiting. I really had to look at my own values and realize I couldn't make judgments based on those."
In Massachusetts, one of the states to adopt cultural training, the 2,800 social workers and supervisors are shown videos, engage in role-playing and talk about their own heritage and their assumptions about others. An Associated Press reporter asked to sit in on a session but was denied for fear it would inhibit open discussion.
However, the GAO found there was little evidence that such "cultural competency" programs have helped.
Other strategies to reduce the gap include creating multicultural teams of social workers, recruiting minority families as foster parents, and relying more heavily on "kinship caregivers" — aunts, uncles or grandparents who can step in during a crisis.
Frances Darden, a black woman who has been a foster mother for four children, said the state should recruit more black social workers and foster parents.
"I don't know if they have the experience around our culture to handle the situation," she said. "Our ways might not be the same as they would do."
Audits turn up misspent money in programs for Foster Children, and Charlotte-Mecklenburg County DSS Officials can't account for $162,000 in donations.
A probe of misspending at a Mecklenburg County Department of Social Services Christmas charity has widened across the agency, and officials now say they are unable to say how much money may have disappeared over the years.
The county's second-largest agency, often a first stop for the community's poor or neglected, has recently been reorganized. Director Mary Wilson, hired last summer, ordered audits following reports of suspicious spending.
The audits looked at several spending programs and financial practices throughout the department.
Among the findings:
Mecklenburg County officials cannot account for $162,000 in donations meant to buy gifts for needy children. That includes a $10,000 check made out to an employee.
Of the 840 receipts inspected for that program, 799 had problems, including receipts that were altered, whited out or omitted in photocopying.
In a separate year-round program, auditors said, money meant to help foster families buy clothes and other necessities for children was spent on office supplies.
The audits cover July 2007 through this past March, but officials say they don't know whether problems started earlier because the last departmentwide audit of DSS was in 1996. Some findings have been turned over to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department.
Officials briefed county commissioners earlier this month about the audits.
But new details are emerging since officials gave a fuller account last week to the commission's audit review committee.
Committee members told county administrators they did not understand how the department failed to adhere to basic financial practices, such as requiring two signatures on checks – a standard spelled out in N.C. law.
Some asked how managers could have allowed such behavior to go unnoticed. The audit committee also appeared surprised that receipts for the department had not been checked for so many years.
Such a review was planned for next year, said Chris Waddell of the county's Internal Audit department, who said he thinks the problems cited in recent audits would have been uncovered.
When panel members asked county auditors and administrators to find out who is responsible for the problems, or how long they persisted, officials cast doubt on whether they could comply.
“There's a lot of missing documentation,” county Finance Director Dena Diorio told the committee.
On Friday, County Manager Harry Jones said officials would respond to problems laid out in the audits.
Overall, Jones said, DSS has been “well-managed,” especially in light of numerous changes in top management in recent years.
But with “an operation of that size it is difficult to be immune from problems,” he said. “We're going to address it and fix it. Hopefully, it won't be recurring.”
"Feel-good" programs:
Officials said charity and emergency spending programs went unchecked by supervisors. Asked why, Wilson said people grew very trusting about “feel-good” programs. Diorio said the longtime programs simply escaped scrutiny.
County officials said some DSS programs were audited annually, but not smaller programs like the Giving Tree.
DSS spends more than $176million annually and employs about 1,200 workers.
Problems surfaced publicly this year when Wilson said she learned about irregular spending patterns in the agency's programs for poor families and foster children.
Wilson said an employee raised questions about money in the Giving Tree program. Wilson said she herself pointed to a need to audit the broader programs.
Since then, leaders have ordered multiple financial audits and suspended two workers suspected of taking $110,000 from the Giving Tree program, which solicits money to buy the holiday gifts.
Officials say they have asked Charlotte-Mecklenburg police to help investigate. One of the suspended workers has been cleared of wrongdoing and reinstated, while the other is now on medical leave. The county has not publicly identified the employees.
County officials say they are trying to determine whether there was criminal activity or just sloppy accounting.
In either case, commissioner Bill James said the findings show the county needs to re-examine how it keeps tabs on taxpayer money. James described the fiscal controls at DSS as “nonexistent.”
“There is a fundamental management control deficiency,” James said. “We have to find out why this lasted as long as it did.”
Ward Simmons, another member of the county audit committee, said there should be two goals. “Fix this for the future, and then this has to do with public confidence in the county: (identify) who's responsible for what happened in the past.”
But county administrators say they are not sure who should be held accountable.
A series of DSS directors:
DSS has had four directors in recent years.
Longtime director Richard “Jake” Jacobsen took a medical leave in 2004 and was briefly replaced in the interim by then-deputy director Brenda Jackson. Jacobsen returned in 2005, only to be reassigned as an executive-in-residence at UNC Charlotte, where he started work in January 2008.
The county appointed another interim DSS director, Janice Allen Jackson, who was also one of the county's general managers.
Director Mary Wilson replaced her last July. Allen Jackson resigned in May for personal reasons.
As a general manager Allen Jackson was responsible for helping oversee DSS for four years. She also was interim director for six months.
Allen Jackson said she was not aware of any accounting failures during her tenure with the county. “No issues were brought to me,” she told the Observer before declining further comment.
Jacobsen worked for 13 years as head of the DSS. Through a county spokesman, Jacobsen declined to comment.
Jacobsen had named a senior-level administrator to oversee DSS finances during his tenure, but county leaders said the post later was vacated. Earlier this year, Wilson recreated the post, naming Angela Hurlburt as the department's director of financial management.
Jones praised Wilson for initiating the financial audit and said she had “clearly inherited this situation.”
“These are programs deliberately designed to operate outside the traditional DSS systems,” Jones said. He said Friday the emergency nature of the charity programs may have led to mistakes. Social workers often must act quickly to address such needs as clothing, housing and medicine.
A lax culture of accounting:
County officials described a lax culture at DSS about accounting procedures.
In some cases, Wilson said, social workers made expenditures without their supervisor's approval. Other times, she said, supervisors did not document approvals for expenses.
Officials say they are unsure whether employees were trained to properly carry out the department's financial policies.
“People who work anywhere need to know what the expectations are,” said John McGillicuddy, county general manager. “And when you know that they've been given those expectations and clear terms ... you can hold them accountable. Part of our challenge is going to be who should have known that these were their responsibility.”
McGillicuddy said county management and DSS directors bear some responsibility in making sure the county is effectively managing the public's money. But he said he thinks that if any of the previous DSS directors knew a problem was occurring, that it would have been addressed.
Officials said they have already addressed issues in the audits, including the need to process all checks through the county finance department and new training for DSS workers on accounting procedures. But the audit panel and county staff said they'd like more investigation.
Commissioner Dan Murrey said the challenge will be infusing the agency with a new culture.
“There are policies and procedures and the way we've always done things,” he said. “In a sound organization those two things are closer together.”
Auditors Found Altered DSS Receipts
Auditors found numerous problems with a Christmas charity run by the Mecklenburg County Department of Social Services.
The now-defunct Giving Tree program collected gifts and donations for children in the county's foster care system
The Giving Tree audit, which triggered an agency-wide probe, found:
- No receipts for a $10,000 check made out to an employee.
- For the remaining $152,289 disbursed, $138,978 in receipt copies were provided.
- Of those 840 receipts, 799 had problems, including:
- Parts of receipts whited out, or omitted in photocopying.
- Altered dates.
- Gift card misuse.
- Multiple submissions of altered receipts.
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Sources: MSNBC, Heart Gallery, Charlotte Observer, Paper Trail, Google Maps
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