Before, during and after the inquests, front-line staff and foster parents talked almost daily to radio and television reporters and newspaper and magazine journalists about how they were working hard to improve the lives of the children and families on their caseloads about the challenges they faced in doing so. Typical was a feature article by Kim Pittaway in Chatelaine, in which she wrote about the lives of CAS workers “behind the headlines,” exemplified by the work of long-time Metro CAS staff member Diane Ternan:
After tragedies [such as the death of a child like Shanay Johnson,] front-line social workers typically get most of the blame. Why hadn’t they seen that little Matthew was in danger? Why had Sara’s father, jailed once for assaulting his first child at age 10 weeks, been allowed near her? But Diane knows from such experience that such cases are rarely as black and white as the grainy front page photo might have you believe. Social workers must deal with the facts as they find them, trust their own eyes, ears — and guts — in assessing the risks facing a child. And even when you follow all the rules, double-check your instincts and investigate every doubt, mistakes can happen.
“But Diane [Teman] knows from . . . experience that [child abuse] cases are rarely as black and white as the grainy front page photo might have you believe.”
— Excerpt from “Behind the Headlines”
article in Chatelaine
Although not all the coverage was as positive as Pittaway’s, and some of it was painful in the extreme, the society judged its efforts to increase public awareness of the complexities of child welfare work to have been successful. It was this very public examination of the child welfare system that provided the impetus for the provincial government to embark on the necessary reforms that Metro CAS had been recommending for many years.
It was this very public examination of the child welfare system that provided the impetus for the provincial government to embark on the necessary reforms that Metro CAS had been recommending for many years.
Child Welfare Reform
Metro CAS carefully studied the recommendations of the inquest jurors and implemented those that that were within its control. At a press conference in May 1998, on the anniversary of the conclusion of the Johnson inquest, executive director Bruce Rivers said, “The Society can reassure the public that, where it is within our power to do so, we have acted to improve our capacity to protect the children and will be accountable in that regard.”
Earlier, in an article published in the Toronto Star after the inquest into Shanay Johnson’s death, Rivers stated that, while CASs were responsible for protecting the community’s children, it was necessary to change those things over which societies had no direct control. Among them was the need for updated child welfare legislation:
A pattern of neglect culminating in death by abuse marked Shanay’s life with her mother. Yet neglect does not prompt the same level of scrutiny that occurs with an abused child. This clearly calls for a strengthening of Ontario’s child welfare legislation to include neglect . . . as grounds for bringing a child into the care of the state.
He also urged the province to make legislative changes that would limit the time children could remain in the temporary care of a CAS. Underfunding of the children’s services system was another concern:
The financial resources allocated to [Metro CAS’s] base budget have been cut by $4.5 million [in the past five years]. This translates into 50 fewer staff at a time when demand remains high, cases are more complex and the social safety net is rapidly disappearing. Our caseloads are in the twenties but when multiplied by family size it means that each worker is dealing with the needs of 70 individual children, youth and adults. We cannot make balancing the budget a greater priority than the welfare of children.
“We cannot make balancing the budget a greater priority than the welfare of children.”
— Bruce Rivers
He also pointed out that the alleviation of the poverty that had created the fertile ground in which child abuse and neglect could easily flourish would ease the public’s mounting concern over the deaths of children, particularly those known to CASs.
The government’s response was to develop a process of change that became known as its Child Welfare Reform agenda, which MCSS carried out in close cooperation with OACAS and CASs across Ontario. To assist in the process, Metro CAS seconded five of its experienced staff — Trudy Blugerman, Felies Einhorn, Hanna Gavendo, John McCullagh and Corrie Tuyl — to MCSS.
The Child Welfare Reform Agenda included:
• a review of the CFSA by a panel of experts;
• a review of the accountability relationship between MCSS and CASs;
• an audit of 3,000 child protection case files;
• a new funding framework;
• a provincewide risk-assessment model;
• a provincewide child welfare information system.
As part of the groundwork to its reform of the system, the government commissioned a review of the Child and Family Services Act’s protection provisions by a panel of experts. (This panel included two former staff members of Metro CAS: the chair, Judge Mary Jane Hatton, and Dr. Nico Trocmé of the University of Toronto.) It also ordered a review of the relationship between MCSS and CASs where accountability was concerned, and an audit of 3,000 child protection case files to examine compliance with the ministry’s expectations.
There followed a series of initiatives that, it was hoped, would make it easier for those working on the front-line of child welfare to protect children adequately. One of the most important of these initiatives was the introduction in 1999 of a new funding framework for CASs: their operating expenses were now to be financed entirely by the provincial government, thus ending the long-time involvement of municipal governments in subsidizing child welfare services.
The purpose of the new framework was to ensure that individual societies were funded on a more equitable basis that reflected their workload and service needs more realistically. It included the allocation of $170 million over three years in new funding “to allow societies to hire more staff, provide more training and revitalize foster care.” In reality, however, this simply restored the 5 percent cut to child welfare agencies the government had made in 1995.
In May 1999, the Ontario legislature unanimously passed the Child and Family Services Amendment Act, whose provisions made it clear that the paramount purpose of child welfare legislation was to promote the interests of children. This represented a swing in the child welfare practice pendulum back from a focus on the rights of parents to those of children. In effect, it belatedly recognized the concerns, highlighted in Chapter 7, that had been raised in the early 1980s by Metro CAS — but ignored by the government of the day — about the importance of placing children’s rights and needs in the forefront of the legislation.
In May 1999, the Ontario legislature unanimously passed the Child and Family Services Amendment Act, which swung the pendulum back to a focus on the rights of children.
The Child and Family Services Amendment Act also broadened the grounds on which a child could be found to be in need of protection, specifically including for the first time the concept of neglect and lowering the threshold for earlier action to protect children. It also promoted more decisive planning for children’s futures so that permanent arrangements for those in the care of CASs could be made as soon as possible.
Other reforms to the child welfare system included a mandated, provincewide approach to risk assessment; increased training for CAS boards and staff, foster parents and ministry staff; closer ministry monitoring of the work of CASs; and a new database to link all child welfare agencies across the province.
These reforms were to be reviewed regularly — including a statutory review of child welfare legislation every five years — to ensure that the provincial government and CASs persisted in meeting their common goal of protecting children better.
The tragic deaths of Shanay Johnson, Jennifer Koval’s’kyj-England and th
e other children into whose deaths inquests were held brought about one positive outcome: the most significant changes in more than a decade to the system established to protect Ontario’s children. Along with MCSS, OACAS and its sister agencies across the province, Metro CAS worked diligently to implement those changes. That, however, is a story that must await a later history.
The tragic deaths of Shanay Johnson, Jennifer Koval’s’kyj-England and the other children into whose deaths inquests were held brought about the most significant changes in more than a decade to the system established to protect Ontario’s children
EPILOGUE
When the CAS of Toronto was founded in 1891, it had no paid staff and depended entirely on volunteers to carry out its work of protecting children and providing substitute care for young people who could not live with their families. While this work was funded by charitable donations, they were not enough to prevent the new agency from recording a deficit in its first year.
Ten years later, at the beginning of a new century, the society remained largely reliant on volunteers — board members, fundraisers, children’s visitors and foster parents — although by that time it had begun to employ a few salaried staff members. Nevertheless, it still had to manage its work on an inadequate annual budget, which in 1900 was less than $10,000. While the City of Toronto contributed $3,000, the agency was still dependent on private philanthropy, as it would continue to be for decades to come.
A hundred years later, however, by which time the society had become one of the largest board-operated child welfare agencies in North America, it had a core operating budget of $106 million. Most of this was spent on staffing — in 1998, the salary scale for a front-line worker ranged from $38,500 to $51,000 — and on reimbursing foster parents and other providers for their outlay in looking after children in the agency’s care. While these costs were now fully funded by the government of Ontario, the agency was able to balance its books only through careful, efficient management of resources.
By the end of the twentieth century, more than 700 staff, assisted by almost 600 volunteers, helped protect almost 24,000 children a year while providing support to more than 10,000 families. For every child admitted to its care, the agency helped six more in their own homes.
Each year in the 1990s, however, more than 2,000 young people were unable to live with their own families. Three hundred and seventy foster families now provide many of these children with safe, stable and caring homes. Others are looked after in a variety of children’s residences, while many older youth live independently in the community under the agency’s supervision.
Throughout much of the society’s history — and that of the Infants’ Homes with which it amalgamated more than fifty years ago — the issues it has faced have been consistent: child abuse and neglect, family breakdown, relationship conflicts, poverty, inadequate housing and the challenges of finding sufficient financial and human resources to address them. All of these seem as prevalent at the beginning of the twenty-first century as they were at the end of the nineteenth.
Child abuse and neglect, family breakdown, relationship conflicts, poverty, inadequate housing and the challenges of finding sufficient financial and human resources to address them seem as prevalent at the beginning of the twenty-first century as they were at the end of the nineteenth.
Despite these challenges, the society has achieved many successes over the years in contributing to the well-being of Toronto’s children. Not least among them has been the advancement in child welfare practice that resulted from the series of tragic and highly publicized child deaths and related coroners’ inquests described in Chapter 8. The reforms that followed — which were comparable to those that occurred in the 1920s, with the introduction of boarding home care, and those that took place in the forty years after the Second World War, when agency services expanded significantly and sweeping changes were made to legislation and practice — have had a major impact on all aspects of the society’s work.
As necessary as the reforms of the late 1990s were, they placed the emphasis of child welfare practice on compliance and accountability and focused on the protection side of the child welfare mandate, with little attention being paid to the parenting role of CASs. Child protection services, however, cannot be provided in isolation from prevention programs that keep children in their own families whenever possible or the provision of alternatives for those young people who are unable to live at home. A major challenge for the CAS of Toronto in the new century, therefore, will be to maintain the continuum of support and services it provides for children and their families and to deliver them in the context of flexibility, creativity and sound clinical judgment.
Child protection services cannot be provided in isolation from prevention programs that keep children in their own families whenever possible or the provision of alternatives for those young people who are unable to live at home.
To meet this challenge, the society and its funders will have to continue to develop innovative early intervention and prevention programs, “pushing the envelope” where necessary, to ensure that as many children as possible can remain safely in their own homes. At the same time they must support extended family members and local communities in providing creatively for children who cannot live with their parents. For those children whose needs include being looked after by caregivers other than their family members, the agency will need adequate resources to meet those needs through imaginatively revitalized foster care and adoption programs. It must also be recognized by Queen’s Park that the responsibility for looking after the needs of CAS wards does not necessarily end when they reach the age of eighteen or twenty-one.
The government’s reform initiatives have brought increased resources, standardized procedures and better opportunities for the development of the knowledge and skills required of child welfare practitioners. Meeting the new MCSS accountability and compliance requirements, however, has led frontline CAS workers and their supervisors to spend less time providing services directly to children and families and more time documenting their activities and performing other administrative tasks. Despite lowered caseloads and a substantial infusion of money for additional staff, workers at the CAS of Toronto currently spend only 20 percent of their time on direct service. Workers have fewer opportunities to reduce risks to children, while the number of young people admitted to the society’s care or being brought before a family court judge have increased dramatically.
It takes time to develop helping and trusting relationships with children and families. If service delivery is to be improved and children protected and cared for adequately, workers will need the time and resources to develop relationships with their clients and to reflect thoughtfully about how to get positive results for the children for whom they are responsible. The sooner children receive the support they need, the greater the chance that they will develop into healthy and productive adults.
The sooner children receive the support they need, the greater the chance that they will develop into healthy and productive adults.
For these goals to be realized, the community and governments must commit to adequately fund child welfare and other social and health services. There must also be an investment in children and their families to relieve the poverty in which so many of them live. According to Toronto Campaign 2000, one in three of the city’s children are poor. More and more hungry children are using food banks, while an increasing percentage are homeless or inadequately housed. Meanwhile, the CAS of Toronto and other community agencies have fewer resources to support such families, despite the knowledge that poverty increases risks to children and the likelihood of child welfare involvement.
This book is about the legacy of 125 years of caring for Toronto’s children by the board, staff, foster parents and volunteers of the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto. Throughout that long history, each new generation of those who have worked and volunteered for the agency have enhanced that heritage. For those who are
currently members of the CAS of Toronto community, what does being involved with the society mean?
For one social worker, CAS means that young people have the right to be cared for:
A fifteen-year-old youth whose parents have died doesn’t have to rent a bed in a rooming house and work six hours a day in a fast food place to stay in high school.
“Why do I work for the CAS?” asks another social worker:
Because, quite simply, there could be no greater privilege and pleasure than to work for the welfare of children. All life is special but new life is very special indeed.
A parent explains that:
Thanks to my CAS worker, I never felt alone. There is always someone there to listen to me and help me to be the kind of parent I want to be. I couldn’t do it alone. The CAS helped us with our problems before they got out of hand. Now we know how to sit down and talk about our problems. They helped us not to give up.
Another parent recalls that:
I hated the Children’s Aid at the time, but looking back I know that me and my kids wouldn’t even be friends today without the help of our CAS worker. It’s been hard, but he has kept us on track.
A youth remembers that being in care meant that he had someone to talk to:
My workers were respectful of the fact that I was a human being, not a number on a caseload. When you notice that, it can really give your self-esteem a big boost.
Another youth describes how:
I came into care because I felt I deserved a safe and warm place to live. I know that every child deserves peace, happiness and security in their lives and CAS gave me that.
A nine-year-old boy speaks of his adult special friend:
We go on trips like to Fun City and Wild Water Kingdom. She rents videos and we go to the movies. Sometimes we go to her house and we play Monopoly and stuff and eat hot dogs and chips and stuff. I get to see her once a week and I like that.
A Legacy of Caring Page 33