Focus 580; The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care

Good morning welcome to focus 5 A.D. This is our telephone talk program. My name is David Inge and we're glad to have you listening. In the first hour today we will be talking about the first federal class action lawsuit that attempted to overhaul a foster care system. The case was known as the Wilder case and it's set in New York City. It was first filed in the early 70s by a young lawyer named Marshall Lowery. It was a class action suit and it challenged the operation of New York City's foster care system essentially arguing that the system which gave private mostly religious agency's control of publicly financed foster care beds argued that system was unconstitutional. The plaintiffs in this case was a girl named Shirley Wilder. She was 13 year old abused runaway. She was African American and Protestant who as a result of those two realities had been bounced around and ultimately lost and the city's foster care system.

We'll be talking about this long case how it was finally resolved the implications for foster care and also talk a bit about what happened to Shirley Wilder. We'll be talking this morning about all of this with the Nina Bernstein. She's a reporter for The New York Times and has been writing about this particular case but also about foster care for a number of years and she's authored a book that looks at this story this tangled and complicated story of the title of her book is The Lost Children of Wilder the epic struggle to change foster care pantheon is the publisher. And it's in the bookstores if you want to read it as we talk. Questions are certainly welcome. And if you want to be part of the conversation all you have to do is give us a call. We ask only that people who called Just try to be brief and keep their comments short so that we can include as many different people as possible but of course anybody is welcome to call the number here in Champaign Urbana 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. And toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5 so it would be a

long distance call for use the toll free line again three three three W I L L and toll free 800 1:58 WLM. Ms Bernstein hello. Hello thanks for talking with us. I'm very glad to be on your show. You and I know have been writing about the issue of foster care for many years now and that you spend quite a lot of time working and researching maturing for this book. How is it that this particular subject happened to engage you to this degree. I think this was a topic that just sees me found me from my first newspaper job in Iowa. Actually I was summoned into the chambers of a judge almost summoned really been invited in and there was a teenager who was a facing possible commitment to a state training school and she she it was not for any delinquency it was essentially because her family didn't want her

anymore. And she I just seemed to me. I felt she was so powerless in the situation and I was very interested in learning more about that system. I was only 21 at the time and. Close enough to being a rebellious teenager that really spoke to me. And then later I covered a children's court in Milwaukee for them along with what was in the Milwaukee Journal. I've covered a lot of other issues and been a foreign correspondent and for news in Berlin and Bosnia. But I've always come back to this topic and in this particular case in the Wilder case I I really found that it's haunted me. Let's go to in by way of background maybe ask this question. Talk a little bit about what the foster care system and the

method of placement for children who needed foster care was like in New York in the early 70s before in the period just before the case came to being. Right. Well it's really the situation that surely face explains it very well. Surely it was as you said of a motherless abused run away from a home where her stepmother beat her her alcoholic father sexually molested her. And she was. Taken into custody by the state for placement in the foster care system dominated by have slick and Jewish charities which by law were allowed to give preference to their own kind and because she was non-Catholic non-Jewish nonwhite as she and other children like her essentially waited for the leftovers.

That meant that she was rejected by one foster care agency after another. These were privately run even though they were financed by tax payers and she spent the first of her 12 year in a detention center that had been already. Term of the year before by a commission unfit for human habitation. And then finally a judge who was actually a real reformer someone who had just seen was a leader who had spent her entire career trying to reform of the sectarian system. When faced with no alternative but to send surely to a state training school a reformatory a very harsh place. So. I think if this was typical in fact of what happened to children who didn't fit the preferred categories they were

they ended up either being left by default in abusive situations or they ended up being criminalized. She was sent as a quote unquote person in need of supervision. And when she got to this. Reformatory she was sexually assaulted by older girls and she was quote unquote treated by being confined in a dark cell felt sorry confinement when she fought back. As I just ate began to underscore this point to the kids who did not find placement through this system and going into essentially a juvenile correctional. That's right institutions that's right. Or they were the other. I'll give you a couple of other consequences. Hard to fathom today but there was a paper bag test what was called what was known among city caseworkers as a paper bag test. If children were darker than a

grocery bag they except in very extreme circumstances did not take them into custody even when the circumstances they were in work were quite abusive because they knew that the private foster care agencies which controlled the beds were highly unlikely to accept them so they would be the city would be left with them in emergency shelters which became really dreadful and places and abusive places. And then a second example the nuns of New York Foundling. If this is well into the 60s. When they were in doubt about that the racial heritage of a of a foundling of a baby they. Would have the baby carried the nuns would carry the baby to the Museum of Natural History in New York where a resident anthropologist would examine this child and if it was determined that yes the child had

African American heritage the likelihood just the reality of the way placement was done. The likelihood was it was that that baby would spend the rest of his or her babyhood in an institutional nursery rather than being placed for adoption. So it had a really far reaching a far reaching discriminatory impact that the the fact that agencies could pick and were really expected to pick children of their own religion. The lawsuit was filed by a young woman attorney who was working for The New York Civil Liberties Union Marshall Lowery. Was this something that the the civil liberties of people in New York City had been thinking about for some time as being a problem one that needed attention. Well yes I mean I think there was.

There had been a recognition that there was a problem but I think nobody saw it quite as sharply as Marcia Lowry did. And I I think. There was also a kind of division within the civil liberties community in New York because the Legal Aid Society which did a lot of the day to day representation of children in court tended to become part of the system to sort of accommodate I think it's the this is almost inevitable. And there was also the fact that their own board was heavy with people who were important in these religious charities. I think you have really the establishment the power structure of New Yorkers that sometimes is called the permanent establishment the permanent government. What's really heavily represented on the boards of trustees of these religious charities

and they were part of the way New York City did business. And I think that was very hard to challenge it took an outsider with the stubbornness and the some sense of lack of political concern that Marsha Lowery had to just move ahead you know kind of the bull in the china shop. Let me again to this point maybe I should introduce Again our guest for the first hour of the show today we're talking with Nina Bernstein. She's a reporter for The New York Times and we're talking about the story that she tells in her book The Lost Children of Wilder and the title of the book comes from the name of this lawsuit we're talking about here the Wilder case which was named after a young girl named Shirley Wilder was first filed in 1973. It took 25 years to be resolved and ultimately really didn't help the person who was at the center of the case. It's sort of a long story and a long and very interesting one for people. You know you

might want to read more and look at the book well we'll try and do our best to. At least sketch out the details of the story on the program today. Yes go ahead. The thing is about that I wanted to say about Surely when Shirley did finally get accepted by one of the foster care agencies she was 14 and she had just given birth to a son. This is what really drew me to the case. By the way it was that in going through court records of researching a story about troubles in the foster care system in 1990 I stumbled on the fact that surely had had a baby when she was 14 and had left him to the same foster care system that the lawsuit filed in her name had been trying to change. So I want to know what did happen to the baby. What what. Well what happened to Shirley after giving birth was that everybody agreed that she

needed birth control. You know she was 14. She was already a mother a she had been sexually abused as a child. People knew she had no impulse control and she had just been placed in an institution that was co-educational. But she was turned down from birth control she was denied birth control by the agency because it was Catholic and it was against the principles of the of the agency. And I think it's something that we haven't really confronted in terms of what what current today. There is a lot of interest in obviously in the presidential level. But I think across the political spectrum with having public money be spent by religious charities for social services. And I think we haven't quite confronted some of the contradictions like like this one that surely actually ran away from the

facility after they confiscated. The condoms that she did secretly brought in. And she left her child Lamont behind to grow up in a series of foster home would be adoptive placements and institutions. Maybe we should or should ask you to talk for a moment about what the essential argument was that Marsha Lowry was making in this lawsuit. Marshall was making the argument that first the. Structure of foster care in New York was a violation of the First Amendment of the separation of church and state and that that in practice it discriminated against. Children on the basis of of race and religion that it was a bit

violated both for the First Amendment separation of church and state and the 14th Amendment equal protection before the law. And actually on the first point which is the question of whether just on paper it violated the Constitution. She very quickly lost it. In 1974 what was then the process in New York a three judge panel ruled that this was not a mandatory religious placement this was when when practicable when that that it was essentially could be. A If it was handled properly it could be constitutional. And so what remains to be determined at trial if necessary was whether in practice it violates the Constitution. And that was the wrong road for Marcia in terms of the legal case struggling to get this

these issues to trial she had depositions where all this information came out like the nuns taking the baby to be examined by an anthropologist to determine their racial heritage. And many other are sworn statements about the discrimination of the system really beyond religion. Tutu a really dyed in the wool racial discrimination. I thought it was. Stuck in the courts it was a hot potato politically and it was bounced around year after year and she decided that the case was really too good. That was the problem. And this is that is why it is that it took more than 20 years for this to be resolved. Well not not only. It was ultimately there was a settlement after 15 years. It took 15 years to get a settlement it was a settlement. It was a very interesting you know. Well I should say the case the

filing of the case itself had some dramatic impact. It was hugely controversial and it as lawsuits can sometimes be. It was a catalyst that opened up this system in particular you have a real veil of confidentiality. This is. A secret system in many respects and a court to. Depositions courtroom testimony can really open it up to scrutiny by among others journalists. And that in itself can have an effect and it did in this case it certainly did change give it impetus to legislative changes that that that that helped some. But. What was very discouraging was that after a settlement of that promised first come first serve children would be placed on the basis of their need not

creed or convenience or race certainly. And it promised also an overhaul that would be good for all children which was really what Marshall was after to begin with was a system to overhaul the foster care system for all children. The enforcing the settlement proved terribly terribly difficult and one reason is because a court suit is the slow moving thing and a good life of children are relatively speaking a childhood is is pretty quick. And things change on the ground and one of the things that changed was the crack epidemic areas of recession. And a huge increase in the number of kids coming into foster care. The system that that you've described that the system for placement that was centrally controlled by religious agencies primarily Catholic and Jewish

that had been in there was in place in 1983 when the suit was filed had been in place for some time. TIME How is it that in New York City the system for placing kids in foster care came to be like this. This is the system of foster care in America generally and typically in New York City. If it was very much shaped in the 19th century in New York it was shaped by immigration and part of the demographics of poverty in New York. The pool overwhelmingly the children who go into foster care are the children of the poor. We tend to forget this is the last three generations or so but but in fact. A lot of the children of the poor in New York of course were Jewish kids and Catholic kids the Irish Catholic or we've forgotten but they

so dominated the jail of the mental institutions poorhouses in New York in the in the earlier part of the in the by the still in the mid 19th century that they were talked about as though they were some kind of inferior race. And one of the things that happened was that there were agencies that arose too. Rescue the next generation by sending them for example in the orphan train out west. And there were objections by their own. Parents and certainly some of the Catholic community who fought to establish their own if to sions and to establish the political clout to get public funding to help keep kids in New York in state either in

Catholic homes or in institutions run by by Catholics. It's really a quite understandable impulse and what happened was that this this really increased dramatically in an episode that I think of as kind of a precursor to what our whole welfare reform impetus and in this country I mean in this era. In 1875 a law was passed that children would no longer be allowed in the poor houses where their parents took refuge and instead public money would follow them into orphanages run by the people of their own faith. The result was a huge boom in orphanages and of course the same reformers who had established this in part to save children from the. Bad effects of poor

houses and who had. I forgot to say this. This was preceded by or simultaneous but this was a law that essentially ended relief to poor families in their own homes. If they'd had done that to try to stop what they called pauperism they were very worried about illegitimate births to immigrants. The size of these families that seem to be not self-supporting. And if so it was their effort to end dependency. But these same reformers then complained that the parents were all too willing to turn their children over to these these orphanages. So you have you have a huge increase in Catholic and. And also then followed by Jewish orphanages and at the same time more and more unhappiness about how children were turning out in the East and how expensive it was because substitute care always turns out to be more expensive than

support for the fur children in their own home. And the the the parents who are trying to raise them at home would just about at the midpoint here and there will continue to talk with Nina Bernstein in just a moment but first we need to do this as it is the first Tuesday of the month. We need to do this test of the Emergency Alert System. And this is W I L L Urbana focused 580. Our telephone talk program my name

is David inch and again we're talking this morning with NIDA Bernstein She's a reporter for The New York Times and is the author of a book that lays out in some detail this case that we have been talking about the Wilder case and what it meant for foster care in New York Her book is titled The Lost Children of Wilder. The subtitle the epic struggle to change foster care. It's published by Pantheon and the questions are going to welcome 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 1:58. 9 4 5 5 you you explained that the fact that one of the things that really draw you drew you into the story was when you realized that right at the outset that Shirley wilder when she was 14 years old I mean this was in 1974 had a child had a son and then he went into the same system that she had gone through. She didn't know what happened to him. He didn't know anything about her. And so you I think set out to first of all to see if you

could find him. Well what exactly was involved in your trying to find Lamont Wilder. Have we it we know it there. Now we got you. Sorry we had we had to turn down oh sorry. Finding Lamont first at the find. Surely. And three years passed actually before she resurfaced I kept on asking Marcia Have you heard from Surely because surely it disappeared and when I met her she actually asked me to help her find her son. Once I had her permission it was not so difficult with Marcia's help. Marcia Lowry the lawyers help to locate Lamont. He was at that point aging out of the same system he had answered as a newborn he was. Still a teen not quite 19 in a fall in a group home in in the Bronx. But the real challenge was reconstructing what had

happened to him. He had this photo album jumbled together. He he could point for instance to a picture and say those were the millers in Minnesota. But how he had ended up in Minnesota and who exactly the Millers were at that was really the challenge and especially during part of my effort to reconstruct this in the earlier part sort of before the search engines on the web and I found myself prevailing upon say the clerk in the Motor Vehicle Department in Minnesota too. Home of the millers for the name of the son that Lamont remembered which was an unusual name in that way I was able to pinpoint the right Miller's. I was I I interviewed. Just about everybody of importance in Milan's life and what I discovered in this was born out later when it's an

official inside the Child Welfare Administration hurried me Lamont confidential whole confidential file into shopping bags in the dead of night and if I was able to have all the records as well what I discovered was that Lamont who had been placed originally with a loving Hispanic foster mother in the Bronx was with the best of intentions. Abruptly moved when he was just turned 5. Surely parental rights were terminated and he was sent for adoption to a white family in Minnesota. The Millers. And after a year they changed their mind. They passed him on to another white couple in the Minneapolis area and it's his. Behavior his grief is is confusion erupted in

bad behavior behavior that seem to this family. Gary in light of these rumors that they've heard about. We are here in New York before they send him back to New York City labeled unadoptable. Rape. That's OK it's just it's a stunning story right from the very beginning that that thing should have such a promising start in a sense that he was apparently happy with this Hispanic family and they with him they had some troubles because the the man in the woman broke up. But then for that to for him to go to to be taken so far away and to be adopted by a white family and I guess I would have thought that at the time that the idea of interracial adoption would have been fairly controversial and so for the for that to not only to for him to be adopted by a white family but growing up in and living in New York to go all the way to Minnesota to a place where we really truly would have been very foreign

had just those two decisions alone same. It just leaves one scratching one's head. Well I think with it the thing is hindsight is 20 20 and I know that the people who were involved in the decision like so many of the people involved in this case and surely in the months life were well-meaning. I mean they they they were not villains. But I think this echoes in a way this desire that we have to rescue poor children from a from poverty from what we think of as bad neighborhoods and trouble and and have them adopted by people who are better off who can offer you know the two parent family with the big yard in Minnesota. Two New Yorkers sounded just so wholesome I'm sure

that a lot of this really wasn't thought through and I feel we're we're really on the verge of doing very much the same thing. I mean where we are now the Adoption and Safe Families Act. Pushes for quicker parental termination for quicker adoption. And ideally adoption is humane and and wonderful but. There is this law of supply and demand which often works to the detriment of children like Lamont. And what happened to Lamont in fact was that he he suffered tremendous emotional damage by being rejected by these white families it certainly caused him problems in terms of his sense of himself as a as a black child. And then he when he came back to New York he essentially passed the balance of his childhood in what I would call a

modern day orphanage and it was a residential treatment center in Rhinebeck New York a very white prosperous community. You were you there when Shirley and I met. Again yes and that was racin extraordinary extraordinary experience. They Lamont just had grown up yarning to know who with mother was. He had these fantasies that she was an heiress who had been saving a birthday present for him each year that they were apart. And I really think this kind of fantasy is very common among lost children. Who don't know their parents and surely had felt bad about the fact that she had this child out there on his birthday on Mother's Day she she thought about him and both of them were terrified that the other would be would find would be dissatisfied would find them wanting. And

when this meeting actually took place they braced in the middle of a major road in the Bronx. I was a reporter for Newsday at the time and there was a photographer from Newsday with me and we actually recorded that it was a very of an uncanny experience for me. But it was also very bittersweet because. I had just before the meeting come to realize and Lamont realized soon afterwards that surely who. Had a very difficult a very difficult childhood and adolescence had become a crack addict. As an adult she was 33 at that point and for Lamont it became a very painful but he he told necessary experience he had to find arrant felt before moving on in in his own life and he would

literally be looking for her on the street looking for the face of a woman who looked like him selling herself because he realized that she had been reduced to prostitution. And that she lived only another seven years. That's right she died alone in 1999 in the hospice. And. Of Marsha Lowery was one of the last people who visited her. And I I know was really quite. I. Moved and devastated by her her death. And another kind of coincidence that if it were fiction I would not have been able to make it up. It was actually the week that Shirley died that the Wilder case finally was laid to rest because Marcia I mean in one sense Marshall folded it into a settlement in a in an

even larger case an even more ambitious lawsuit against the foster care system of New York one that tried on the basis of federal legislation requiring certain minimum standards for foster kids requiring the system be be overhauled. And I hope that it will change but I have to say that in many ways it is. Them in New York despite change obvious changes is still not a very good one for the children and the families who enter it are there were were there national implications of this case. Absolutely because this was the first as you said at the outset of many cost action lawsuits filed against the

foster care system in the country. It is part of a new wave of efforts to reform child welfare systems through the federal courts and many of them were filed by Marcia Lowry herself who has become a national advocate for children. The director of a children's rights Inc. And what would she have a case for example pending in Milwaukee County. Their case is pending in among other places Tennessee. In and I know you have your own your own case in in Illinois. Not hers but certainly that his litigation has become one of the ways that people try to tackle these very. Tractable systems. Mike my question part of my question in the book was why are they so

intractable. Why have there been reform movements through American history to try to do better by the children who need it. Substitute care. Not not care by their parents and why are these systems so miserable. Do you have an answer to that. Well I have a partial answer. I I think at this we haven't really been willing to face the contradiction between our desire to deter poor parents from dependency. And and our pledges to help all needy children. And I think that actually this system of subsidized care which really is largely for the children of the poor. If we haven't been willing to accept to acknowledge that it is it is functioning in part as

a as a as a as a piece of that system of deterrence by that I mean that I mean one of the things I stumbled on and when I was researching this in terms of the history is that there were reformers in the 19th century who said we don't want the child the children of the drunkards to have a better situation than the children of the working man. So in other words there's this kind of iron law of the conditions just just as. You don't want people don't want welfare to be better than a public assistance to be more generous than what a lot the minimum wage can buy. Abide by the same token. I think though they don't want to acknowledge it they don't really want to care for children to be better than what

the poorest working person can buy for their kids to buy for their kids or is entitled to in terms of universal public services. The problem with that is that the consequences for children are become terribly terribly harsh harsher than we can accept. Him is especially in the air. In an era of growing inequality and of a kind of lowering standards at the bottom for the for those who are working and I think that the then we have a growth in popularity of schemes that say well we can rescue will rescue these kids will take them out of the ghetto and will put them in wonderful orphanages. You know like the ones Charles Murray and Newt Gingrich were proposing or of we'll we'll have we'll have them all adopted like Elizabeth

Bartholet is saying. And I just think my story the story that I tell in this book which is largely the human story of Shirley and of Lamont belies the solutions as a panacea because you see how they how they really work for for children and in real life and how much they cost. We have about six or seven minutes left. One thing I'd like to have you do is round up the story a little bit and we did talk about the fact that Shirley Wilder died when she was only 40. In 1999. Anne Lamott however is is still around and is the father of a child. And how is he doing. Well Lamont is really struggling. He's lived been living hand-to-mouth as a barber Friedland barber.

Ironically efforts were for reformers efforts to make parents more self-sufficient through welfare reform. At least in New York City I have been very counterproductive in his efforts to be a real father to his little boy. He he has this child support debt that was a lot of which was incurred when he was still himself in the custody of the state he was in a group home and in till he was 21 and. His child was born out of wedlock when he and on welfare and Lamont because of the child support death because of the crackdown on so-called deadbeat dad can't get a legitimate barber's license that would allow him to work in a better

hair salon. You can't get a student loan he wanted to go back to college to try to better himself. He. And he was at one point actually jailed overnight taken from his barber shop where he was working in Hancock because the his the mother of his little boy pursuing what all women who apply for public assistance must pursue a court action for child support. Had you no fact send him to jail. And indeed the little boy the next day in school was so upset crying on my that my mommy put my daddy in jail and causing such a disruption that the school officials wanted to call Child Protective Services to investigate whether he should be taken into foster care. If you know this is

just so devastating for me frankly when I heard about this because. Then the last thing you really want to see is for this third generation to go into a system which has proven itself. So counterproductive for his father and for his. Grandmother. I think that the one positive note I would say is that. Since I had a story in The Times magazine kind of an update and adaptation from the book this was a week ago Sunday about Lamont struggled to take care of his little boy. He actually filed for custody at one point. I had quite an outpouring of people who'd like to try to help Lamont and that's great on a on a personal individual level. But I think we what we really need to do and this was in a sense the larger goal of my book was

I had to ask what do we need to do as a society as a not just as a foster care system but more generally for a child like like the the child that Lamont calls Cimi that's his nickname who's who's just turned 6. What do we need to do to see that he is get the childhood he needs to. Be a good father himself. Well again that seems to bring us back to the very basic and very big question how can we do we really think that we continue to we can continue to meet pressing social needs with a sort of mixture of awkward badly structured underfunded public agencies coupled with maybe awkward underfunded private. Agencies this sort of system that's been cobbled together over time partly in an intentional way and

partly that's just the way that it happened to work out. It is it is indeed the question and I think that so there are some wonderful agencies and programs out there the people the agencies and programs that are on the front lines for the most part when I hear from the people that I talked to in my reporting is that they cannot do this either alone or in this. Cobbled together way. There really I guess a lot of the question is whether there is a way to put together universal services for families. You know way that we can be comfortable with. I mean I think that there are certainly some. Some of the ideas of welfare reform were to structure assistance in a

way to prepackage it in a way that we as a society could be could be happier with. You know that whether it was in child care or back to school grants or what have you but I just think it's you know we need I think we probably are going to have to look hard at services that are inclusive rather than ones that are targeted in effect to the poorest because that those services like the foster care system end up being just a mix and match that doesn't really do the job. Well we're at the point where we're going to have to stop because we've used our time. The book again for people who would like to read it titled The Lost Children of Wilder that's published by Pantheon by our guest Nina Bernstein. She's a reporter for The New York Times miss Bernstein thank you very much for talking with us today. Thank you.