For the two weeks that the Hackneys' baby girl lay in a Pittsburgh hospital bed weak from dehydration, her parents rarely left her side, sometimes sleeping on the fold-out sofa in the room.
asked them not to discuss the confidential conversations. Two said they also feared professional retaliation.With no answers on when they could get their daughter home, the Hackneys’ lawyer in October filed a federal civil rights complaint on their behalf that questioned how the screening tool was used in their case.
People with disabilities are overrepresented in the child welfare system, yet there’s no evidence that they harm their children at higher rates, said Traci LaLiberte, a University of Minnesota expert on child welfare and disabilities. Before algorithms were in use, the child welfare system had long distrusted parents with disabilities. Into the 1970s, they were regularly sterilized and institutionalized, LaLiberte said. A landmark federal report in 2012 noted parents with psychiatric or intellectual disabilities lost custody of their children as much as 80 percent of the time.
As child welfare algorithms become more common, parents who have experienced social workers’ scrutiny fear the models won’t let them escape their pasts, no matter how old or irrelevant their previous scrapes with the system may have been. Chandler-Cole’s fellow commissioner Wendy Garen, by contrast, argues “more is better” and that by drawing on all available data, risk scoring tools can help make the agency’s work more thorough and effective.Even as their models have come under scrutiny for their accuracy and fairness, the developers have started new projects with child welfare agencies in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, and Arapahoe County, Colorado.
Meanwhile, foster care and the separation of families can have lifelong developmental consequences for the child.
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