Shift in focus keeps families together

Foster care cases drop 19% in 2 years

NEW HAVEN — Anna has her son Trevor back home with her, and she thanks her caseworker and the state Department of Children and Families for helping reunite her family.

Anna has had her share of troubles with drug use, so she asked that she and her son not have their real names used. But the appreciation she has for the agency and especially for her caseworker, Brittany Roberts, is real.

Anna and Roberts both credit a change in the culture of DCF that is resulting in fewer children being placed in foster care, and more being returned to their families.

Seeking ways to help families stay together, as long as the children are safe in the home, has resulted in a 19 percent reduction in foster care cases since 2019, according to Commissioner Vannessa Dorantes.

Caseworkers like Roberts help families find their inner strengths and skills to solve the problems that threaten to tear them apart. Roberts said she does that by being straightforward about what her clients need to do to have their children reunited with them.

“You know, I like to just be real, open and honest about what the department needs from clients and what we needed from her at the time and try not to sugarcoat things,” Roberts said of Anna. “And you know, just keep it real simple. Tell her, ‘we need A, B, C, this is what you have to do. And if you don’t do it, this is what’s going to happen.’ Just have open and honest conversations with her. And she appreciated that from the beginning.”

It’s a new way of looking at families, Roberts said, but the message is slow to get out.

“We kind of had a negative vibe, I guess,” she said. “Oh, you work for DCF. You coming to take my kids? Like, that’s the automatic thing people think. So when you come in and say, ‘this is what we expect, and this is what we need you to do, or this may happen,’ she’s like, ‘Oh, OK, well then, yeah, I’ll do it.’”

Anna, 51, the oldest of five children, got into drugs after she lost three brothers — two were killed and one died by suicide. She also suffered domestic violence. But she got clean and sober.

When the pandemic hit, though, she lost her longtime job as a certified nursing assistant when the business shut down. Trevor, 12, who has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, was tough to handle, especially in isolation. “Imagine all day long in the house. You can’t go out,” she said. “I was depressed, I guess.”

Anna went back to the drugs and her parents reported her to DCF. Trevor’s 29-year-old older brother took him in. Anna and Roberts both said that the family connection helped get them through. She is off drugs again and back with her son.

“What really keeps me up is my gospel and knowing that there’s a God,” Anna said. “Drugs is not the answer. I know that a door is going to open somewhere. … I love Trevor. I love life. I’m 51 years old. … I gotta love me now.”

Since the pandemic started, DCF also has tried to help families fill their needs, whether they be medical, financial or both.

The department has been pushing to build up community resources, such as help with child care, housing and food, so that children can remain safely at home. “I think that a lot of times poverty gets mistaken for neglect,” Dorantes said.

“I think the department is definitely moving towards trying to keep family with family,” Roberts said. “And because they are such a close-knit family it really wasn’t much of a change for her son because he already has a relationship with his brother.”

“Once I met Brittany and kept it real, it was a beautiful thing,” Anna said. “She made me feel like I was a somebody.” Anna said Roberts told her, “‘Pick yourself up. You made a mistake. You do what you have to do.’ When I first met her, I could tell she was a good mother. She said, ‘you were an awesome mother,’ and then I started crying.”

Anna said DCF is not seeking automatically to remove children from their homes, unless there is a safety issue involved. “They’re not against us. We’re all on the same team,” she said.

“I loved Brittany,” she said. “There’s something about Brittany. She made me feel comfortable, to be honest. I don’t like DCF at all, but my life felt different once I met Brittany. … DCF is not as bad as people think they are. If you just be honest, they can help you if you help yourself.”

“It’s been a big shift,” Roberts said. “I remember me going through training. And one of the training supervisors was saying, in the ’90s we took kids first and asked questions later, and now it’s shifting to asking questions first. And then if we need to do that, then that will happen.”

In 2019, when Dorantes was appointed, there were 4,300 children in foster care in Connecticut, she said. Today, there are 3,487. DCF spokesman Gary Kleeblatt said that in 2021, the agency reunified 465 children with their families. There have been 394 transfers of guardianship, in which foster parents, usually relatives, take on permanent guardianship. However, biological parents can petition the court to have their parental rights restored, Dorantes said.

“Oftentimes, children in foster care will have to identify a relative or someone that they know for them to be placed with outside of a core adoptive family,” Dorantes said. “And Connecticut also has one of the largest percentage of children in relative or kin care at about 44 percent statewide.” Nationally, the percentage is 33 percent, she said.

“It’s important for me every time we talk about the number of children and placement that we also talk about the fact that we have not seen an increase in reentry or repeat maltreatment, because you don’t want to return children home for them to only have to come back in care within the next six months,” Dorantes said. “So we watch those pieces of data very closely together to make sure we don’t have a revolving door there.”

Roberts said Anna was “just determined” to get her life and her family back together. “I always tell her, this is your case. You run it how you want to run it, right? I’m just here to encourage and support you and whatever you need from me I can help you through this. But you navigate your case.”

A positive, focused attitude helped when it came to taking care of nitty-gritty details, Roberts said. “I’d tell her to go do something. She was like, ‘Oh, Miss Brittany, … I did this already. When do you need it?’ So her just being on top of things was good.”

“It’s looking at the family as a source of strength,” Kleeblatt said. “I came to DCF in the 1990s. … DCF used to previously see families as the problem. Now we see families as the solution. They’re a source of strength for these kids. And if we treat them with respect, and we put them in charge and ask them what they need and build on their strengths, we can have good outcomes. And that’s a huge departure from the way things were 20 years ago. It really explains the change in the data.”

Roberts’ supervisor, Rodney Moore Jr., said she played a big role in helping reunite Anna and Trevor. “I think things worked out extremely well for her because of the worker that she had,” he said. “Brittany’s very hardworking, she’s very transparent. She’s very honest. She knows what to do and how to help her client. And I think because of that they jelled and they worked very well together. I think the success of a family that’s involved with DCF is hugely dependent upon who their worker is, who’s kind of managing their case.”

Roberts said “even in unfortunate circumstances when we do have to remove children, we still seek out the family, we still seek out the parents and their perspectives and what their culture is and things that are gonna kind of help shift and guide the development of their children. So given the fact that Brittany has done such an amazing job with working with this family and providing … both her sons … with the services that they need and the assistance that they need, definitely played a huge part in the success of that case.”

The department is aiming to have 60 percent of its children in foster care be placed with relatives. Now, it’s at 44 percent. The relatives go through the same training as DCF staff social workers.

Being taken from the family home is traumatic, and children may still want to stay with their parents, even if they have been abused or neglected, according to Deb Kelleher of the Annie C. Courtney Foundation, which provides information to potential foster parents.

If a child is placed with a relative, or another adult they know, this can reduce the impact of loss and grief for many children, according to the foundation.

But when that isn’t feasible, foster parents step in.

When Connecticut residents are first considering becoming foster parents, they need to attend an information meeting. Kelleher makes sure the potential foster parents are aware that they play a vital role in providing a safe and stable environment for these children until they can possibly return to their biological parents.

DCF also has improved the experience for families when they have visitations at the agency’s 1 Long Wharf offices. A nonprofit organization, Fostering Family Hope, commissioned local artists to paint the visitation rooms so they are cheerful, colorful and welcoming, rather than bland cells with tables and chairs.

“The artists have all volunteered their time and we haven’t paid a dime to them,” said Megan Pearson, co-president.