My name is Ryan O'Donnell, today I come before this committee, first and foremost, as a dad - I was a foster parent in Durham for nearly 3 years to a little boy.
I’m also a serial tech entrepreneur, the founder/CEO of Sunlight, the creator of Your Case Plan, improves communication between parties in child welfare cases. In this capacity, I have spoken with literally hundreds of people in this state and beyond who lead various child welfare agencies, attorneys, judges, and most importantly families impacted.
This gives me a unique perspective and it has led me to come to the following conclusions.
This system consistently fails many of the very children that it claims to protect.
Efforts to reform the system in North Carolina aren’t working for parents or children impacted.
Let us begin by first acknowledging the basics. Child abuse is terrible. Victims of child abuse should be protected. There is a debate about what to call this system and whether this system should be reformed or abolished.
But let me be clear – no one wants more child abuse.
But we should be honest about what is actually happening in our state.
When agencies try to recruit foster parents you will often hear many things.
You’ll hear that there is a system full of abused children who need a safe and loving home.
You’ll hear that fostering-to-adopt is a financially more attractive way to grow your family. You get paid to foster, instead of paying tens of thousands of dollars for private adoptions.
However, reality paints a different picture.
In North Carolina, nearly 90% of children in foster care were never abused. These families have fallen through the cracks of our broken social safety net. Struggling with a healthcare system that doesn’t serve poor families. Parents working multiple jobs but unable to pay for childcare. The list goes on.
Also, the primary goal of foster care is reunification – not adoption.
Now I’d like to tell you about my experience as a foster parent with Durham County, one of the counties with the lowest reunification rates.
Social workers asked if we would adopt even though mom still had her parental rights and they hadn’t filed TPR. Social workers said that he didn’t have any family, and if they did come out of the woodwork, DSS would handle them.
Worst of all, they told everyone involved that our foster son had no known father.
You see they knew who he was all along but no one reached out to him. They said they “checked their databases” but it came up empty.
He reached out to DSS after learning about his son, not the other way around.
He was a non-offending parent. That means he never abused or neglected his son.
The whole case team wanted the two of them to meet a few weeks later, begin a trial placement and start making up for lost time.
Sadly that didn’t happen. The judge required him to start jumping through numerous hoops to prove he was good enough to deserve the right to raise his son, citing specifically his son’s disability.
So how did the system fail him and his dad?
As a single black man, his dad faced rampant discrimination from the system – seemingly hell bent on doing whatever it could to prevent them from building a life together.
One supervisor said that if he wanted to bring his son home that he should prove he is ready by dropping his son off at school and picking him up. Sounds reasonable, except he lived over an hour away. Also, his son qualified for special transportation – my wife and I didn’t have to pick up and drop off.
He was put on a multi-year long waiting list for parenting classes. When a spot opened up, he was told he wasn’t eligible because his son wasn’t living with him. He needed to be able to bring his son to the classes multiple times a week. But he couldn’t get his son until he completed this class. He asked for expanded visitation to take his son to these classes but was denied.
He was required to take a parenting capacity assessment to determine if he was even capable of raising a child, despite the fact that he had already raised three children. That assessment determined that not only was he fit to be a parent but that he wasn’t at risk of abusing his son. But that report was thrown out in court because DSS hadn’t shared all records with the provider.
When we advocated for our foster son and his dad, the social worker and her supervisor threatened to remove him from our home. They were ready and willing to have him sleep in their office, rather than be reunited with his dad or placed with his paternal grandmother. Eventually, he was removed from our home and moved across the state to another foster home.
This little boy has missed out on the past four years with his dad because this system has kept them apart, even at one point trying to put him up for adoption.
This is what parents, children and their foster parents have to deal with when they are pursuing reunification. This is why so many foster parents close their homes. This is why there have been so many calls for reforms.
This brings me to my second conclusion.Reforms aren’t working.
Our state doesn’t follow federal standards and our counties aren’t following state standards.
7 years ago, when the state passed Rylan’s Law, they wanted to accomplish 3 main goals.
Ensure social workers conduct Rylan’s visits.
Invest in reforms and a CWIS. This hasn’t happened.
Create regional offices for better county oversight. This hasn’t happened.
In fact, since the passage of Rylan’s Law, very little has actually improved – if anything the system has gotten worse, without proper oversight.
The system is in desperate need of transparency and accountability.
Why? Two reasons.
First, caseworkers and their supervisors routinely retaliate against both parents and foster parents who speak out, protected by administrators who would rather suppress information than face public scrutiny.
Second, our courts increasingly seal courtrooms from the public, denying the press access, and threatening jail time if parents speak out.
The last time we showed up for court, we were greeted by more than a dozen armed officers outside of the Durham County Courtroom.
Does that sound like a system that wants transparency or accountability?
Now let’s examine what is actually happening with Rylan’s Law.
First - social workers can use Rylan’s Visits to delay reunification. Delays matter because your parental rights can be terminated if you can’t bring your children home in a timely manner.
Our foster son’s social worker refused to meet his dad for over a year and took almost two years to conduct her Rylan’s Visit.
We shouldn't be surprised to learn that overworked, underpaid, and often unqualified social workers aren’t following the laws we have on the books.
Second – the state was supposed to go live with a statewide Child Welfare Information System, through NC FAST which had a budget over $100M. The system was rolled out in select modules to select counties.
But it was unusable and buggy. it didn’t work. Just last year, the state awarded a new contract to a new vendor to start from scratch.
The state spent years and millions of dollars crafting a major reform plan that didn’t take into account the very families or children impacted by the system.
Why does this matter? Here’s another example.
When our foster son’s grandmother asked that he be placed with her, the social worker, invoking Rylan, said that due to his disability, he could wander outside in the rain, into the nearby creek that might flood and drown. The judge agreed and denied her request.
At the same time, we had a pond in our backyard which was never an issue and this little boy, despite his disability, could swim.
Instead they moved him to two other foster homes. If you saw what I saw and heard what I heard, you would likely conclude that he was a victim of verbal and physical abuse.
When that happened, how did the system respond?
It suppressed information. It praised the foster parents. It portrayed this little boy as a lying and misbehaving kid. His dad was threatened with having his son shipped across the state if he continued to speak out about his son’s safety.
That brings me to oversight.
Third – we were supposed to have regional DSS boards to provide oversight because the state admitted they could not effectively provide oversight for 100 different counties.
The state has taken over a few counties but only when there were major public scandals or lawsuits.
Who do you go to for help? When you speak out, you aren’t protected as whistleblowers but persecuted. Folks like Gaile and I are listened to. We have access to county and state leaders. They take our calls. Do they take the calls of people like Toia or our foster son’s dad.
Without proper oversight, this system is left unchecked and emboldened to disregard rights we have as Americans – the right to raise our children as well as the right to privacy, free press, and free speech.
Our story is just one out there but there are many more.
For example, many kids in foster care have their disability and other benefits stolen by local agencies because they use those benefits to offset the cost of service delivering services. Nationally, it is estimated this amounts to up to $250M in theft but NC won’t release its numbers.
At Sunlight, we aggregated and analyzed thousands of public reviews across all 100 county DSS offices as well as media coverage in the state. I’d like to share a few.
Johnston - one seven year old girl was sexually assaulted inside the county DSS office.
Davie - one mom shared that her children were moved 9 times in a single school year while quote “social workers lied under oath to the judge and made the rules up as they went.”
Cumberland – an adoptive mother starved and tortured her five adopted children. She killed two of those children, Blake and London Deven, before dismembering and burning their bodies.
Does this sound like a system that protects children? A system that has been reformed?
In summary, our child welfare system, in the name of protecting children, is hurting many of them. Many of these children and their families are members of protected classes. Many have more rights when they get pulled over for a speeding ticket than when CPS knocks on their door.
But like I said, I’m here first and foremost as a dad. Last year, we welcomed our first biological child. I’d just ask this commission a simple question. If CPS ever knocked on my door, would I get treated like my foster son’s dad?
As a parent, your worst fear is losing your child. But in this country, if you are unmarried or a minority or disabled or living paycheck to paycheck – then you just have to hope and pray that your worst fears don’t come true when CPS knocks on your door.
The challenges before us are complex. But there is hope and I’ll end by offering up two solutions to consider.
First, we should invest our TANF dollars into supporting families directly and prevention services in their own communities. We already have a statewide network of Family Resource Centers and those investments are proven to reduce child maltreatment reports by up to 26%. These centers receive limited funding today through Family First to conduct parenting classes but struggle to secure funding to provide concrete economic support to families in crisis.
A few hundred dollars shouldn’t be what stands in the way of your child being raised by you or a stranger.
Our TANF dollars shouldnt be used to offset the underfunding of social services across the state. And while we are at it, we should outlaw the theft of disability and other benefits from foster kids, following states like Arizona and Oregon.
Second, we should fund robust interdisciplinary family defense to ensure every parent and every child receives high quality legal representation, like Oklahoma and New Mexico. Likewise, we should follow states like Texas in passing Family Miranda to ensure all families being investigated are aware of their rights.
This is critically important. For when this system violates your rights – and it will – who will fight for you? Who will keep the system in check?
Every case is unique and the only way to ensure equal protection under the law is to ensure that high quality legal representation is a right for everyone.
Thank you.
