(NETWORK INDIANA) Indiana’s Department of Child Services is firing back at a lawsuit accusing it of failing Indiana foster children:
The response from D-C-S director Terry Stigdon is unusual in a couple of ways. The state usually doesn’t comment on lawsuits at all. And Stigdon issued not a statement, but a seven-minute video on the agency website. She accuses the New York nonprofit A Better Childhood of cherry-picking horror stories and painting a misleading picture of an agency she maintains has improved dramatically over the last year. She charges the filing of the lawsuit is “demoralizing” for agency employees.
A Better Childhood has filed at least seven lawsuits against child-welfare agencies over the last 20 years accusing them of not meeting children’s needs. The federal class-action against Indiana describes a girl returned to a father who had molested her, and two sisters shuttled among more than a dozen foster homes, in between returns to an abusive stepfather. The suit charges D-C-S’s high rate of foster placements, and the length of time children spend there, adds to their emotional trauma instead of protecting them.
Stigdon notes the agency has reduced the number of children in foster care, and says the average foster child undergoes two placements. She says D-C-S is working to give foster children more permanency, and reduce the number of families caseworkers must deal with at once. A Better Childhood dismisses the changes as “minimal,” and contends D-C-S is “focused more on statistics than outcomes.”
House Minority Leader Phil GiaQuinta (D-Fort Wayne) noted after the lawsuit was filed last week that House Republicans rejected a proposal this year to give make caseload limits a legal requirement. He says the suit reinforces the need to make the cap mandatory, and says the state’s Child Services Oversight Commission should review the lawsuit’s claims.