By Chris Powell
Success and failure alike were marked last week as Governor Lamont visited Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families.
The governor congratulated the department for being on the verge of release from federal court supervision, which began in December 1989. The department has hired more social workers, reduced to about 15 the number of cases each social worker handles, and has sharply reduced foster care placements and sharply increased placement of children with relatives when their home isn’t safe for them.
Most families involved with DCF now are visited by a social worker twice a month, so cases of repeated abuse and neglect have been much diminished.
The failure marked last week was that it has taken state government 32 years to transform DCF from a horror show to relative competence — a failure for which past governors and legislatures, far more than the department itself, are responsible.
In a larger sense the failure endures, quite without any attention from the governor and legislature, insofar as increasing DCF staff isn’t the only way of reducing child neglect and abuse. Neglect and abuse also could be reduced by reducing the self-inflicted and government-encouraged and -subsidized poverty that still abounds in Connecticut, where policy presumes that social worker visits are adequate substitutes for parents and that it is OK that a third or more of the state’s children, and most children in the cities, grow up without a father in their home.
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Meanwhile last week the General Assembly doubled down on its irrelevance to criminal justice for juveniles.
Democratic legislators want to throw more social services at troublesome kids, as if that long hasn’t been state government’s prescription for them. Republican legislators advocate more social services too, apparently differing with the Democrats only insofar as they would divert from juvenile court to adult court the few juveniles accused of the most serious felonies.
Neither Democratic nor Republican legislators would make it possible for themselves or the public to discover what is really going on with juvenile justice. That is, no one proposes to make juvenile court public to comply with the state Constitution, which requires: “All courts shall be open.”
So under what is passing for juvenile justice reform, there will be no telling whether any new social services actually work, just as there is no telling whether any work now. There would continue to be no accountability for both juvenile offenders and the administrators of juvenile justice. As now, no one will ever have to answer for the juvenile crime outrages that occasionally break through the secrecy.
Most of all, there will be no putting the crucial question to any authorities in government or to the governor and legislators themselves: Where are all the messed-up kids coming from?
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Almost as difficult as running a child-welfare agency is running a school system as it tries to recover from the catastrophic damage to education done during the virus epidemic.
According to the state Education Department’s annual report on the condition of public education in Connecticut, issued two weeks ago, school enrollment in the state fell sharply last year, by 3%. While enrollment long has been falling, until last year it had been taking five years to fall by that much.
Apparently many kids just don’t go to school anymore. Chronic absenteeism rose from 12.2% to 19%, most involving racial minorities and the poor.
Predictably enough, students who got “remote” learning instead of in-person learning didn’t learn much at all, and performance on college and career readiness tests fell sharply, with just 36% of students meeting standards.
The high school graduation rate rose slightly to 89% but this means nothing amid social promotion, since everyone who just hangs around graduates. Far more telling about the future is that the percentage of students earning basic credits by ninth grade was the lowest in seven years. But they’ll all graduate anyway, educated or not.
This disaster will harm minority and poor children most, since the report says fully half of Connecticut’s students now are from racial minorities and 43% are from poor households.
But at least school employees needn’t worry. Despite the collapse in enrollment and performance, school spending is sure to keep going up.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government in politics for many years.
Chris Powell column 