By Steve Kemme
The Cincinnati Enquirer

HAMILTON - The new executive director of Butler County Children Services starts work today, taking over an agency that until recently was facing financial disaster and had been criticized as being too quick to remove children from their homes.

Jann Heffner takes over for Kathy Vallance, who guided the agency through its initial reforms before going on a medical leave in May and then retiring last month.

It's an agency emerging from a period of censure - from officials and the public it serves.

The agency's critics complained that too often it urged the courts to yank children from their homes without solid reasons, shipped children to out-of-county foster homes, and insensitively treated families and the general public.

"The days of grab-and-snatch are going to stop," said the board's acting chairman, Hall Thompson. "We probably had one of the worst reputations among Children Service agencies in Ohio. We had one of the highest removal rates for a county our size."

Voters shoved the agency to the brink of financial disaster by rejecting Children Services' levies in elections in 1998 and May 1999. After the agency's top two administrators resigned, the levy finally passed in November 1999.

Since then, changes have been made in response to critics and recommendations from the Ohio Auditor's Office, which examined the agency at the county commissioners' request.

Even Children Services' toughest critics concede there have been improvements. But the transformation of this agency of 160 employees has been slow.

"The progress has been measured in inches," said Butler County Commissioner Mike Fox, who has led the charge to reform Children Services. "But we're hoping there'll be some quantum leaps. We're trying to create an organization that's more enlightened and open and more integrated with the families they serve."

The hiring of Ms. Heffner is one reason Mr. Fox is optimistic about the future of an agency he has battled for years.

`A living nightmare'

Ms. Heffner, who had been executive director for the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption in Columbus, said she strongly believes that Children Services needs to be accessible to the public and to the families it serves.

"We need to open the agency up more," Ms. Heffner said. "We need to be there for people in the county when they have questions and want them not to be afraid to call us."

The agency board's acting chairman, Mr. Thompson, himself got involved in the reform effort after he was falsely accused of verbal child abuse in 1998.

The agency's caseworkers and supervisors treated Mr. Thompson from the beginning as if he were guilty, he said, and his children were placed in foster care.

After a grueling legal battle that cost Mr. Thompson more than $20,000, the allegations were dropped and he received sole custody of his children - and an apology from the assistant prosecutor who worked on the case.

"It was a living nightmare," says Mr. Thompson, who lives in Fairfield and manages the auto title office in Hamilton for the Butler County Clerk of Courts. "I was treated like an abject criminal. They nearly destroyed a family over allegations that were never substantiated."

Mr. Fox began laying the groundwork for reform shortly after he became a county commissioner in 1997. The former state legislator pushed for a more accountable, open agency.

In January 2000, Mr. Fox and fellow commissioners Courtney Combs and Chuck Furmon asked for the resignations of all 11 Children Services Board members. They appointed 10 new ones and re-appointed one of the former ones. Two months later, Ms. Vallance was promoted to executive director.

Visions of guerilla warfare

But the road to reform has been filled with potholes - many of them created by a handful of former and current Children Services employees.

The early reform efforts pitted some old-guard employees, who dubbed themselves "cockroaches," against the reformers, who became known as "exterminators."

The antireformers adopted the cockroach nickname from Mr. Fox's public statement, "When you shine the light of public scrutiny on a bureaucracy, the cockroaches will run for cover."

Nancy Cooper, who was hired by Children Services in May 2000 as director of quality assurance to make the agency more accountable and responsive, says she experienced first-hand what Mr. Fox calls intra-agency "guerrilla warfare."

Vandals cut the electric lines at her house and threw a brick through the bedroom window of her daughter, then 15 years old. Twice while her car was parked in the Children Services parking lot, vandals struck her car with a baseball bat and scratched it with a key.

Earlier this year, someone deflated the car tires of former board chairman Mike Francis in the agency's parking lot.

No one was charged in any of these incidents.

Because of safety concerns, Ms. Cooper moved out of Butler County. But she decided to stick with her job.

"I'm committed to this work," she said. "I'm not out to hang the employees, but I want accountability. I want the families we deal with to be heard. These are their children."

"We're looking at a huge cultural shift," Mr. Thompson said of the antireform workers. "If you don't want to be more open, more family-friendly and family neighborhood-based, this is not going to be a good place for you to work."

Criticism over custody tactics

Children Services has drawn the most fire in recent years from critics for the large number of children it has caused to be removed from their families.

In 1997, the agency had 944 children in its custody. Because of criticism from county officials and others, that number has dropped 28 percent to 680 last year.

But Butler County still takes about twice as many children into its custody as three Ohio counties of comparable size, Lorain, Mahoning and Trumbull.

Under the previous philosophy, the quick removal of children from their homes was a primary tool for protecting them. Critics say that philosophy led to the removal of some children from their homes when it wasn't necessary. Children were separated from their families and languished in foster homes while waiting for juvenile court rulings.

"Many removals were not justified," said Dennis Yavorsky, a Bridgetown resident who has belonged to groups critical of Children Services agencies in Butler and Hamilton counties. He led a campaign against the Butler County Children Services' levy proposal that was defeated in May 1999.

"Butler County Children Services would say that dirty dishes justified the removal of children because it projected future child abuse," he said.

Mr. Yavorsky and Mr. Fox both cite a case in which a Hamilton woman's two children were placed in foster care because she had failed to pay her electric bill and her electricity was shut off. The utility company later discovered it had overcharged the woman by $960.

"The agency should have paid her utility bill, not placed the children in foster care," Mr. Fox said. "Foster care costs were more than her utility bill."

During the past two years, Children Services has taken several steps to prevent the premature removal of children from their families:

• New mediation and grievance procedures help ensure parents and other family members are heard in abuse and neglect cases.

• Families receive copies of caseworkers' reports at least 15 days before court dates so families can point out errors and omissions. "They were getting them the day of court or not at all," Ms. Cooper said.

• Children Services seeks second medical opinions. In a recent case, a doctor diagnosed a child as "failing to thrive," which could be cause for removal from the family. But a second doctor cited a digestive problem, not parental negligence, as the problem, Ms. Cooper said.

• A team of Children Services supervisors and caseworkers, not individuals, make life-altering decisions, such as whether to recommend that children be removed from their homes.

• The agency now reviews decisions made by police to remove children from homes.

• New programs have been set up to help families cope and work out problems.

Mr. Fox noted a recent case in which all five children in one family had no beds and were sleeping on the floor. Instead of recommending the children's removal from the home, the caseworker suggested that Children Services buy five beds from Goodwill for the children.

"Prior to the policy changes, that would have been an automatic removal," Mr. Fox said.

When the agency determines children need to be removed from their homes, it attempts to place them with relatives when possible.

"There are more checks and balances in place now," Mr. Fox said. "Now if there are problems, they can be addressed early on."

"Change is hard," Mr. Thompson said. "Children Services used to be a dark, Draconian place. There's been a sea change. One thing I can say for certain is that in a year, Children Services will be a much better place. It will be better for families and for kids."

E-mail skemme@enquirer.com

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