State closes “flawed” office to help black children in welfare system

By Maureen O’Hagan

Seattle Times staff reporter

The Office of African-American Children’s Services — once considered a national model in the way it tried to address the high number of black kids in the child-welfare system — has officially closed.

The state office, touted as a promising new concept when it opened in 2003, shut down in March, after a federal civil-rights investigation deemed it “deeply flawed.”

The very thing that set it in motion — the apparent differential treatment of kids based on race — also led to its downfall. The federal government said Washington can’t transfer children into programs simply because they’re black.

The closure was lauded in some circles, where OAACS was seen as discriminatory or ineffective. But its demise also has deeply disappointed supporters, who saw it as their best hope for addressing troubling patterns.

“I think they had a very strong practice model, and I think they had strong support from the community,” said Nancy Roberts-Brown, who works with the King County Coalition on Racial Disproportionality. “They did not have … strong management and administration that was able to benefit from a really good idea.”

Welfare concerns

The idea behind OAACS (pronounced “oasis”) came from decades of concern about African-American kids in the child-welfare system, according to Germaine Covington of the Black Child Development Institute’s Seattle office.

Nationally, black kids wind up in foster care at a higher rate than white kids and tend to languish there longer. According to a 2004 study, African-American kids make up 30 percent of kids in long-term foster care but only 7 percent of King County’s population.

In 1999, the state Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) opened a pilot project that would handle cases involving African-American kids in King County. With such intense focus, the thinking was, families could get the services they needed and their kids wouldn’t get lost in the system.

Four years later, OAACS opened as a full-blown office. Workers were to receive training in “cultural competency” — the social-work equivalent of diversity training — to deal more effectively with African-American families.

And most cases involving African-American kids were transferred to that office, no matter where in the county they originated. At one point, the office juggled 800 cases.

From the beginning, however, there were problems. Caseloads were high. Turnover was unstoppable. New managers came and went. (more…)