Allie Blum was a social worker the past decade for Washoe County who retired last year on disability, after earning herself the nickname “Ethical Rebel,” always standing up for herself at her job and for the kids she was working with.
“I think there needs to be a call to action,” Blum told Our Town Reno of her reasons for coming forward in criticizing our local foster care system, which she views as riddled with shortcomings. “I think it happens in stages, right? You inform and then you raise awareness and then you act. And I feel like we're just stuck in this stage of informing and no one's listening or the information is not getting to them, so we can't even raise awareness yet.”
Blum said she helped with a Department of Justice investigation which recently found Nevada “unnecessarily segregates children with behavioral health disabilities in institutions.”
The October decision (in screenshot above) concluded that Nevada violates the Americans with Disabilities Act by failing to provide adequate community-based services to children with behavioral health disabilities, relying instead on segregated, institutional settings like hospitals and residential treatment facilities.
Hundreds of children are isolated in residential treatment facilities each year, the investigation found, though “they could remain with their families if provided necessary, community-based services. Over a quarter of these children stay over a year, and some of them are placed outside of Nevada, far from their homes. Nevada also fails to connect children who have been placed in institutions with services to allow them to successfully return to the community,” the report indicated.
According to the press release above, Nevada officials expressed “a desire to work with the department to resolve the identified issues.”
This was a vague response Blum says, and she was disappointed the investigation didn’t get much attention.
Her own conclusion is “that the state of Nevada has the resources and the ability to provide community-based mental health services for these children, and we're just choosing not to.“
There was also a recent Nevada state audit (in screengrab above) on its own child placements released earlier this year which pointed to several shortcomings including that “33% of homes had health or safety deficiencies, about 79% of foster placements had at least one regulatory violation, and there was no evidence of home inspection for 27% of placements.”
Blum feels the internal audit could have gone much further, but that current employees are afraid to speak out.
“I think the issue is the workers don't feel safe enough to say anything, and they're never going to get a clear picture of what is happening if we can't feel safe enough to say something,” she said.
Blum hopes more lawyers from Washoe Legal Service would also speak up. She said she had high hopes when she started in 2013 with a pilot project called Safe Family Connections, which had 15 permanency workers, but that when the program was diluted it got derailed.
“It was an amazing program. It was how I thought child welfare should be. But it kind of tanked after that. Safe FC was really focused on the caseload sizes where, it was 10 families, 15 kids was your caseload size and you would meet with the families every week initially, and then as they were doing better and making more progress, then it would be every other week, and then it would be monthly and then you would close the case. And everything was very client and family centered. So we really made their goals specific to them and to their situations and their families, their services were specific to them. But when we transitioned to the entire agency, the people who were coming in from the business as usual who didn't participate in the pilot program, I think they brought too much of their method of working with them. And so the case plans went back to being very cookie cutter,” Blum recounts.
“We're just checking in with families once a month. And then our caseload sizes just kind of started getting pretty huge. And the demands were getting pretty big… And it got to a point where case workers didn't even have time to see their kids every month. They would just do like a five minute phone call to see how their kids were doing.”
Blum missed the pilot component of the above project, which she said allowed for more focus for social workers.
Blum said she had several kids on her own caseload that were put into higher level of care which she says didn't require that. She said these types of placements are paid more, thus creating financial incentives which get in the way of the child’s welfare.
“And that's why I really started getting into a lot of trouble at work because I would go to court and tell the judge, your honor, he shouldn't be placed in a therapeutic level setting,” Blum said.
Blum talks about the paramount importance of keeping siblings together which she experienced as being undermined in the overall process.
“They talk about how termination of parental rights is equivalent to the civil death penalty, but I think sibling separation is far worse than that. They've experienced these things together and they've gone through it all together. They have a trauma bond. And I think the agency sometimes takes the position that it's easier to separate siblings despite this,” she said.
Blum would also complain against placements which had been made, she says, but it was frustrating to see little to no action despite her efforts to correct mistakes.
“There was one case I had where the foster family was discriminating against my boy because he liked to wear girl clothes and he liked to paint his nails and he liked to wear makeup,” Blum remembers. “They made him sleep on a mattress on the floor with only a blanket. And they said it was because they had bed bugs. So then I told them to show me where his bed was. If they took the bed apart, it must be here somewhere. They didn't have anything to show me. He wasn't allowed to have any of his personal belongings in his room, no decor. There were several large holes in the wall that hadn't been fixed in months. That was one of the cases where I went to the judge and I said, your honor, we as an agency are neglecting this child.”
In the end, a still positive Blum decided it would be best to try to change the system from outside, rather than help make it better from within.