Family Court Exposed

Even for experienced foster mom Amy Morrison, navigating Allegheny County’s child welfare system can be difficult.

“Getting everything the kids need can be hard. It’s hard to get hold of case workers because they are so busy,” said Morrison, 37, of Whitaker, who has housed 20 children during the past two years.

“Everything has to go through the (birth) parents. I currently have a surgical paper that needs signed for dental work for a 6-year-old. … It’s been a week and a half.”

State and county officials hope “Families 4 Children,” a report released last week by the state Supreme Court, will help improve the lives of abused and neglected children under the watch of family courts.

The goal, said Supreme Court Justice Max Baer, who pushed for the report, is to clarify the mission of the child welfare system.

“We want to find timely permanency. Are there aunts, uncles, godparents, members of the church who are willing to get involved?” Baer said.

“We don’t want children in foster care. That’s not criticism of foster parents — we need them — but stranger care is not good for kids. Kids do better when they’re with their family members.”

Judges can remove children from their parents if an agency such as the county’s Children, Youth and Families agency makes the case that a child is being abused or neglected. The child is then placed in foster care or with other family members.

The four general goals of “Families 4 Children” — protecting children, promoting strong families, promoting child well-being and providing timely permanent placement — will be part of a legal guide for Family Court judges.

The report will not prompt big changes here, but will encourage the county to lessen the time children are with foster parents, Department of Human Services Director Marc Cherna said.

In 2007 in Allegheny County, the median stay in temporary care — which includes time with relatives — was about seven months. That’s down from 8.5 months in 2006; 7.9 months in 2005; and eight months in 2004, Cherna said.

The county has reduced the number of children in the system to 1,807, Cherna said, from 3,300 in 1996.

“We’ve really been working on this by investing in in-home services — more home visits by case workers, aggressive treatment and classes for parents,” Cherna said. “We also used to have a big backlog of adoption. Now we have about 300 adoptions a year.”

Family Court Administrative Judge David Wecht said the report could help judges across the state make consistent decisions on the well-being of children.

“Everybody’s heard nightmare stories of kids bouncing around. The main goal is to help kids,” Wecht said. “Many judges will also find (a bench book) useful.”

Morrison and her husband, Stephen, whom the Department of Human Services recently named 2009 Outstanding Foster Parents of the Year, believe the system needs to focus on the children.

“They’ve already lost out on so much,” Amy Morrison said. “But the goal is always reunification with the parents.”

As families across America celebrate Father’s Day, this year they will be honoring a right that our Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized as the “oldest of fundamental liberty interests.”

More than a freedom protected under the American Constitution, it is an inalienable right that derives from a time immemorial, a unique human relationship that has produced the very civilization we take for granted today.

Unfortunately, the proud heritage of fatherhood has undergone severe and undeserved disparagement in modern times. As our world morphs itself into an institutionalized mindest that supports a growing variety of parental substitutes, fathers are increasingly viewed as superfluous, dispensable and even antiquated.

The consequence of this is already being felt in our communities. A “Fatherless America” has been directly linked to increases in teen pregnancies, pathological behavior and a variety of social ills that have combined to reduce the productivity of this nation on a grand scale. Parents today are spending more time in domestic relations courts than they are in schools, churches and workplaces.

This can be traced to a multi-billion dollar industry that feeds upon the demise of parent-child relations. Statistically, fathers and children have been most victimized as the Census Bureau continues to report that between 80 and 90 percent of all parents paying “child support” are fathers.

In any other civil rights context, such reports would produce extreme outrage. However, in a leadership environment where one political party is able to demean the other as a group of “angry white men,” needful reform becomes remote. Fatherhood has become a suspect class of gender discrimination and the last vestige of institutionalized prejudice remaining unchecked in America today.

True reform begins not with a politically correct speech that one year ago laid the blame predominantly upon absentee fathers. Policymakers at all levels and branches of government must unravel the draconian measures undertaken to locate, stigmatize and criminalize countless mainstream fathers that have been arbitrarily removed from meaningful relationships with their children.

This silent practice comes from domestic relations policy that continues to embrace long discredited socialist philosophy. A state-created “custodial parent” is “awarded” with formula-driven welfare payments that have no child-based accountability. The payor, typically a male parent, is marginalized to “visitor” status and suppressed as a “non-custodial” creature of “law” in order to maintain a regular flow of money payments.

Such payments are necessary to support a growing bureaucracy of lawyers, forensic specialists and service providers. Title IV-D of the Social Security Act provides tremendous incentive payments for the states to increase the number and magnitude of “child support” orders mass produced in our state courts. A full range of protections under our Bill of Rights is trampled in the process. Meanwhile, the principal protectors of our Constitution in federal court remain dormant under a host of abstension, deference and state immunity doctrines.

Collectively, this has resulted in a barbaric process unknown to common law. A long-term monetary “award” is offered and potential “custody war” thrust upon all parenting cases regardless of any joint capacity to rear children in a separated environment. A custodial parent is given no incentive under this oppositional framework to involve the other parent meaningfully in his children’s lives out of fear of losing the same children to a “custody transfer.”

Above quoted phrases denote the propoganda employed to sustain this multi-billion dollar child industry. The “best interests” of our children are actually being promoted under a language scheme historically committed to prisons, funerals and lawsuits. Indeed, it influences otherwise model parents to conform to this institutional framework in a manner wholly foreign to a natural order of childrearing.

While it may take a village to strengthen our resolve as a nation, it takes a committed family unit of diverse types to properly raise our children. This requires our leadership to restore the dignity of fatherhood so that men are not fleeing those same villages.

In the words of one progressive Family Court judge, this custodial framework has “outlived its usefulness.” Debtor prisons and parent locator services will not justify the resulting oppression any more than slavery and an underground railroad did in a not-so-distant past.

Leon R. Koziol is a civil rights attorney with a practice in Utica, legal counsel to the National League of Fathers, Inc., and a father of two.

GOOSE CREEK — It took years for retired Charleston longshoreman Kenneth Middleton to get full custody of 16-year-old Joshua.

Maybe it was fitting that it happened just before Father’s Day.

After years of legal wrangling in which Middleton helped cement a new legal doctrine of “psychological parent” rights in South Carolina, Middleton became the boy’s permanent guardian last week after reaching an agreement with the boy’s mother.

A family court judge signed an order giving Middleton full custody of Joshua, whom he has helped raise from childhood even after a paternity test showed that he was not the boy’s father.

“I would recommend it for any father today,” Middleton said of his six-year fight that went as high as the S.C. Court of Appeals. “If you have standing in the child’s life and the child sees you as a parent, it’s worth it.”

Middleton’s courtroom achievement is that he was able to prove a strong psychological bond had formed between the two, arguing that Joshua would be emotionally damaged if his relationship and father-figure role was abruptly removed.

The doctrine has been recognized in other states but not so much in South Carolina until Middleton forced the issue.

“It’s a happy ending, and we don’t see many of those,” said Middleton’s current family court attorney, Nancy Bailey of Florence.

Joshua Rashad Hollington was born in April 1993. Middleton acted as if he were the boy’s father even though he and Joshua’s mother never married. He took him to school and went to his ball games and teacher-parent conferences at school.

When a paternity test taken much later showed that Middleton was not Joshua’s father, Middleton stayed on as the boy’s “dad.”

Tensions later arose with Joshua’s mother. After she had married, she moved to cut Middleton out of their lives, prompting him to go to court, challenging the state’s child-visitation laws.

The first round went against him when a family court judge denied his request for court-ordered visitation.

Under South Carolina law at that time, the fit biological parent — in this case Joshua’s mother — retained the fundamental right to determine whether any third party could visit her child.

And because the youth understood that he had a biological father elsewhere, Middleton could not legally be his psychological parent, the court said, and therefore had no legal right for visitation.

Middleton appealed, and in 2006 his case was argued in front of the S.C. Court of Appeals. The judges backed Middleton and his then-attorney, Margaret Fabri of Charleston, sending the case back to Berkeley County, where a judge approved a visitation schedule.

Middleton’s effort is now widely recognized as pioneering right-of-access law in the state. “It’s a wonderful case because it established a precedent for nonrelated people to continue relationships with a child that may have been disrupted,” Bailey said.

As the boy grew into a young adult, Middleton applied for full custody, which Florence County Family Court Judge Jerry Vinson approved last week, making what had been partial custody status full custody.

Adoption might come later. Joshua is an honor student and rising junior at Stratford High School.

Middleton said the issue is one of fathers sticking with their children, fighting separation and knowing there is a reward at the end.

“The thing that makes me feel good about this is, I got to rescue a young child and help give him the opportunity to be the best he can be,” he said.