11th contempt citation filed against DCFS director
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[May 21, 2022]
By BETH HUNDSDORFER
Capitol News Illinois
bhundsdorfer@capitolnewsillinois.com
SPRINGFIELD – On Thursday afternoon, a Cook County judge found Illinois
Department of Children and Family Services Director Marc Smith in
contempt of court for the 11th time for violating court orders to move
children to proper placements.
The 11-year-old girl at the center of the case has been in the care of
DCFS since she was five. In those six years, according to the Cook
County Public Guardian who represents the girl in court, she has been
placed in an abusive foster home, emergency foster homes, psychiatric
hospitals, residential placements, shelters and emergency rooms.
On April 12, the girl was at school and said she wanted to kill herself,
according to a news release from the Cook County Public Guardian’s
office. When she got home, she made a noose and tried to slip it around
her neck. She was taken to a hospital.
After she had been in a hospital emergency room for two days, a judge
ordered DCFS to take her out of the hospital and put her in a
psychiatric hospital or a secure residential facility.
Despite that court order, the girl stayed in the emergency room for two
more days before she was moved to a temporary shelter where she remained
on Friday.
During her four days in the emergency room, the girl repeatedly made
suicidal statements, tried to run away and became physically aggressive,
the release stated. Medical staff administered five medications to calm
her.
This child joins 10 others whose cases are the basis for contempt
citations.
The judge in each case ordered DCFS to move the children to appropriate
settings where they could receive treatment and services, but they
remained in inappropriate settings despite those court orders and the
agency’s own recommendations.
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Four of those contempt citations have been purged, meaning those
children have been moved into the recommended placements.
“This youth is no longer in a psychiatric hospital and DCFS has, in
fact, placed this youth in a clinically appropriate setting where she is
receiving supportive services and is attending school every day,” DCFS
spokesperson William McCaffrey said in a statement. “DCFS is in constant
contact with its network of providers and foster parents in an ongoing
effort to place children in clinically appropriate settings.”
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Capitol News Illinois file photo
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Last week, a child that Capitol News Illinois identified as “Leah” to
protect her identity was a subject of a case that led to the 10th
contempt citation against Smith. Leah remains in a locked psychiatric
hospital.
While the 40 or so children on the “beyond medical necessity” docket
make up a small number of the 20,000 children in DCFS care, the contempt
citations have brought much attention to the plight of these children.
The details of these cases demonstrate that children who have a
diagnosis of psychiatric and medical conditions, developmental delays or
some combination thereof complicate the placement. Smith has said that
the elimination of specialized care during the previous administration
has left the agency scrambling to rebuild services.
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During COVID-19, the need for psychiatric services for children grew.
The state lagged in providing supportive services for children ready to
be discharged from a hospital to residential care or family-like
settings. Children lingered in these restrictive settings rather than
step down to less restrictive settings with the help of supports and
services.
Nearly a third of these children did not enter the psychiatric
facilities while under state care. They were admitted into the
psychiatric facilities by their parents or guardians who then did not
have necessary services to bring them home after discharge.
“Because it is doing everything possible to place these children, DCFS
has taken and continues to take the legal position that these contempt
orders are not appropriate and has appealed to a higher court to
overturn these orders as expediently as possible,” McCaffrey said.
In the 11 contempt cases, Murphy fined Smith $1,000 per day for every
day the children remain in the improper placements. In all the cases
that have not been purged, the fine has been stayed by an appellate
court.
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news
service covering state government that is distributed to more than 400
newspapers statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press
Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation. |