The Joplin Globe, Joplin, MO

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May 5, 2009

Oklahoma: Judge OKs class action for child-care lawsuit

The Associated Press

TULSA, Okla. — A lawsuit accusing Oklahoma’s Department of Human Services of mistreating its foster children will be allowed to proceed as a class action, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.

U.S. District Judge Gregory K. Frizzell found that Children’s Rights, a New York-based child advocacy group leading the lawsuit, met the class certification based on two remedies it is asking the court for: limits on case loads DHS workers handle and monitoring of the safety of the children in DHS care.

The ruling also expands the group’s initial lawsuit from nine Oklahoma foster children to include the 10,000 or more children believed to be in the state system.

A class-action designation will allow the group to collect evidence to determine how widespread any potential harm to children in the system is, and what could be done to fix it.

“We’re thrilled,” said Marcia Robinson Lowry, executive director of Children’s Rights, following the ruling. “We have a ways to go, but we’re on the path of getting better protection for children in Oklahoma.”

Attorneys for the state had argued against the class-action status, asserting that each child’s case should be addressed on an individual basis.

Robert Nance, an attorney representing DHS, said, “we obviously are disappointed with the ruling, but we respect it.”

The group’s 2008 lawsuit accuses Oklahoma of victimizing its foster children by not finding “safe and adequate” homes for them and inadequately monitoring their safety “due to an overburdened and mismanaged work force.”

It seeks a complete overhaul of the state’s child welfare system and alleges DHS has failed to provide for the basic safety of foster children in ways that “threaten their ability to live normal childhoods, to grow and develop and, in many instances, to even survive.”

Children’s Rights has proposed a remedy to the court that would limit caseloads for welfare workers, beef up training programs for employees and foster parents and ensure better monitoring of children in the state’s system, among other requests.

Earlier Tuesday, Lowry argued for the class action designation, using examples from the children her group is representing: a girl who was moved 13 times while in DHS custody and had to be hospitalized for dehydration; a 9-year-old boy who was moved 14 times and was repeatedly abused and a 14-year-old girl who suffered repeated abuse and resorted to self-mutilation.

“What these children have in common is they have had so many different workers, it’s as if they’ve had no one to care for them at all,” Lowry told the judge. “These children are being harmed.”

The foster children named in the lawsuit are identified only by their initials and range in age from four months to 16 years. The lawsuit says they share a history of suffering in DHS placements.

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