What will it take for the department to listen?
In September, the U.S. Department of Justice filed suit against Maine for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act by failing to provide appropriate care for Maine children with disabilities.
The DOJ alleges Maine has failed to provide hundreds of children with mental health issues and/or developmental disabilities the home- or community-based services they are legally entitled to. Instead, these children and their families are forced to look for help in places like emergency rooms or Long Creek Youth Development Center, which the DOJ alleges Maine uses as a “de facto psychiatric hospital.”
The DOJ posits that this constitutes a violation of these children’s rights, as they are forced to be segregated from their families and communities. One of these children, 13-year-old Abby Bedard, spent at least seven months living in the ER at Skowhegan’s Redington Fairview General Hospital. The Press Herald recently profiled several families facing similar situations. When kids can’t get necessary services or are separated from their families, it’s bad for everyone.
As one mother put it: “We’re suffering here.”
According to the DOJ, Maine DHHS’ poor administration of its behavioral health care system is to blame. The DOJ warned DHHS in 2022 that Maine was violating the law but that the issue could be fixed “by making reasonable modifications to its service system.” Yet two years later, DHHS has not made reasonable modifications to prioritize access to community-based services, causing the DOJ to take the rare step of suing our state.
Maine DHHS also is currently finalizing a settlement for a class action lawsuit alleging that DHHS has improperly prescribed psychotropic drugs to children in foster care. The suit alleges that due to deficiencies in the system, children in foster care are being harmed or put at substantial risk of harm by these strong medications.
The federal government also flagged this issue for DHHS in the past, but the Department was apparently unwilling or unable to correct it until confronted with a lawsuit.
These lawsuits reflect serious failures that echo what many of us, including Maine’s Child Welfare Ombudsman, have pointed out for years: that DHHS consistently makes inappropriate decisions about the safety and well-being of the children it is responsible for. These failures take place on a mass scale, as shown by these lawsuits, and on an individual scale when DHHS fails to remove a child from an unsafe home. The result is a record number of deaths in recent years of children who died from abuse or neglect or who lived in households that had prior contact with Maine’s child welfare system.
In December 2023, the nonprofit I founded called Walk a Mile in Their Shoes released a report outlining DHHS’ systemic problems and making recommendations for improvements.
Over the course of 10 months, we spoke with caseworkers, foster parents, law enforcement, educators, child care workers, clinicians and others who know Maine’s child welfare system well. They outlined issues including poor record-keeping, a lack of communication between stakeholders and a dearth of community services that leave children vulnerable to abuse and neglect. Many said that toxic management within DHHS leaves frontline workers feeling unsupported and fearing retribution for speaking out.
For years, the people we interviewed have begged DHHS to open itself to collaboration with legislators, the media and the public to improve transparency and make the changes necessary to protect Maine kids.
Yet, as these lawsuits illustrate, DHHS still struggles to acknowledge its failures and, therefore, cannot make the changes necessary to fix them. What will it take for DHHS to listen? Will these lawsuits finally spur the kind of change needed within DHHS to protect Maine kids? Is this the next step for the families of children who suffer or die because DHHS made an inappropriate safety decision? These are questions many of us around the state are asking and will keep asking until our system can protect all Maine kids.