Setting kids up 'for failure': Child welfare agency raises concerns about Manitoba’s emergency placements

weakness to cover when a baby is missing, sending kids to school day in soiled clothes and refusing to take how to treat a little girl's medical condition are just a few of the concerns being raised by a Manitoba child welfare agency about emergency placement staff.

The agency’s response details dozens of concerns with those placements, including workers not showing kids how to brush or floss their teeth, sending them to school with “highly inadequate” lunches and refusing to take them for free outings, such as trick-or-treating on Halloween.

Longtime foster mom Jamie Pfau says hearing about the conditions some children experience in emergency placements breaks her heart — especially knowing some end up staying there much longer than the intended 30-day limit.

“These children are being raised in a residential facility. They're not celebrated when they get a good grade in school. They can't have a birthday party like everybody else,” said Pfau, who’s also president of the Manitoba Foster Parent Association.

“We're just setting these children up … for failure.”

Emergency placements are supposed to be stopgaps in Manitoba’s child welfare system — a last resort used for a short period of time in particular situations, such as when a child is first apprehended or because social workers need time to find a placement with specialized support.

Concerns about those placements come as the province tries to stop child welfare agencies from overusing them by charging hefty daily fees for kids left in those spots too long — a policy advocates say will further strain agencies whose resources are already spread thin.

Animikii Ozoson says it only puts children in emergency placements after making “extensive effort” to find a foster home or another place to stay, when a child needs a placement urgently at the end of a business day and when there aren’t other options available.

Other concerns the agency raised about those placements include staff not properly watching kids, “resulting in children AWOLING from the home” — and not always following requirements to report them as missing when that happens.

In one case, a girl who was cognitively delayed and starting puberty was sent to school for days wearing her sister’s extra-small white T-shirt with no training bra. In another, a girl’s belongings — including underwear with menstrual stains on them — were dumped on the floor in a common area of an emergency placement to take inventory of what she had when she arrived.

Lack of supervision, especially at night, also came up — including a case where children used an iPad to make inappropriate videos for about 20 minutes while “no one was checking in on them.”

The agency said there’s “not a lot of nurturing towards the children placed in [emergency placements],” describing a “steady decline” in the ability of those placements to supportively care for kids over the past six years, and staff who don't have proper training or experience.

CFS agency raises concerns about Manitoba's emergency placements

Staff will also use the fact that the placements are intended to be short-term as a reason not to engage with the kids in their care — such as refusing to walk them to school, “reportedly due to staff perceiving [it] as a long-term commitment,” the agency said.

For Joshua Nepinak, who spent years as a teen bouncing between emergency placements, some of those concerns mirror what he experienced.

“It brings up a lot of my struggles as a young person,” he said, his eyes filling with tears. “I’d go from placement to placement to placement with, like, a little garbage bag of clothing.”

Nepinak, now 25 and a father to a young girl, said he’s learned building a family happens “around the table, in the backyard and in these moments that you spend with your kid” — something that feels far from what he experienced in his teens."

“There's just none of that that happens, because you're not somebody's kid — you're somebody's job,” he said.

Pfau, who’s also a former group home worker, said she would be “shocked” if most of the staff in emergency placements knew reporting a child missing was their job — and she’s not surprised to hear other concerns being raised about those workers who she says get little training.

“They go into it with good intentions. Very quickly, I think, they're overwhelmed and are probably shocked at the behaviours and the lack of resources and supports,” she said.

Pfau says in her experience, many who work in emergency placements aren’t familiar with the history of colonization in Manitoba — something she calls a problem, especially in a child welfare system where 91 per cent of children in care are Indigenous.

“When we are staffing these homes with minimum-wage staff, some who have absolutely no idea of the history of this province, we're just setting everybody up for failure.”

Jennifer Hedges, an assistant professor in the University of Manitoba’s faculty of social work and a former social worker, says situations where emergency placement workers are sending kids to school in dirty or inappropriate clothes or not teaching them how to brush their teeth shouldn’t be happening — and if they are, it’s important to find out why.

“Is this a result of these overarching issues of lack of staff, lack of resources, lack of oversight? All of those things need to be addressed,” she said. "If kids are going into a placement because they're unsafe somewhere else, they should not be experiencing further situations that continue to be unsafe. "

Hedges says other issues including lack of supervision, not reporting properly when a child goes missing and not taking kids for free outings such as trick-or-treating could be the result of unclear standards for staff or a lack of resources.

And examples such as staff refusing to do training to care for a child’s eczema strike her as a “classic” example of kids “falling through the cracks” when there isn’t a clear understanding of who is responsible for what within the child welfare system.

Manitoba Families Minister Nahanni Fontaine says agencies that have concerns with an emergency placement need to report them to the province.

“It is incumbent on them to report it to the department so that the department, one of our specialized licensing investigators, can look at the concerns that are being raised,” Fontaine said.

Animikii Ozoson Child and Family Services said in a statement it has reported concerns about kids’ care, supervision and needs in emergency placements to the province.

Nepinak says the issues the agency raised, including many he experienced first-hand, make him wonder what the purpose of those placements is supposed to be — and whether there's a better way to care for kids who have nowhere else to go.

“Why do we have them, if they're not doing what they're meant to do?” he said.

Reporter

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