BURLINGTON, Vt. (WCAX) – A Vermont woman who says she was wrongfully taken as a child from her mother by state social workers, is speaking out against problems at the agency, including a decades-old computer system, staffing shortages, and lies. The long-running issues are part of a sweeping overhaul in a bill before Governor Phil Scott.
Mercedes King was just a child when her father got so drunk that he pushed her into a broken laundry basket at the trailer they lived at in Enosburgh. King’s mother, Sarah Lefebvre, tried to take custody of her children, but they say a DCF caseworker thought her relationship with the father made her incapable and refused.
Reporter Laura Ullman: How can people even begin to understand what it’s like to have your kids taken from you? What does that feel like?
Sarah Lefebvre: Death. It feels like you’ve died, but you’re still here and you still have to try to stay alive so someday you can see them again.
DCF placed King in her father’s sister’s house but King says her aunt was even more physically abusive than her father. “We didn’t feel like we were going to make it out alive,” she said. King says she then circulated through a series of foster homes, group homes, and secured facilities. “I ended up moving about 30 different times from the years of 2017 to about 2022.”
Through that time, King and her mom tried to reconnect. She says in her late teens, she met with new DCF case workers and together they realized that a decade earlier the department had made a huge mistake — King’s mother’s name ended up on another woman’s file. a DCF caseworker issued an apology to King and her mother. “In the end, it was kind of mean. It felt awful to hear that because the damage is already done to the kids, to me,” Lefebvre said.
Over the past few years, more stories like King’s have come to light. A report by the Vermont Parent Representation Center shocked Bill Young, the former commissioner of Social and Rehabilitation Services — now called DCF — out of retirement. “After about two months, I realized oh my god, it’s true. These stories are true,” he said.
Young says the story that struck him the most was that of a seven-year-old girl taken into custody by a judge after she got a bruise on her back from sledding. DCF was convinced the mother was abusive even after the sledding story was corroborated by the school nurse. “{We} have a situation where people begin to think, you know, in the interest of protecting a child, you can skew the evidence a little bit, something that people who raised me would have called lying.”
In just over four years, all 30 abuse substantiations appeals the Vermont Parent Center representation took up were overturned or dismissed. “And that doesn’t happen unless the system has real problems,” Young said.
Young says the incentive for DCF workers to take children into custody relates back to a case in 2014 when a child was killed. “You begin to see the numbers of children in custody going up because of that risk-averse reaction,” he said.
DCF officials say the problems stem from staffing shortages and extremely high caseloads for social workers. “We have 178 family services workers in the field today. Thirty of those positions are vacant and 17 of them are filled by workers who are in their first six months on the job,” said DCF’s Brenda Gooley.
At least four months of training is required for workers to enter the field, and Youg says the current labor shortage means the surplus gets dumped onto someone else. “Once the caseload goes above a certain point, everything breaks down and they begin just responding to the crisis du jour, and they really can’t be held accountable if things go really wrong,” he said.
Young says because much of DCF’s focus is on economic services — 80% to be exact — accountability for family services can fall by the wayside. “Because when you make mistakes in the child protection business, you increase the risk that the child or the parents — oftentimes both — will be harmed,” he said.
King’s mother was one of many parents placed on the Child Protection Registry. “I couldn’t do it anymore at all. And it kind of couldn’t even go to a grocery store and see someone with their kids,” Lefebvre said.
“If they’re placed in the in the Child Protection Registry, they’re probably not going to be hired by about 30% of the jobs in Vermont,” Young said.
The mixed-up files that caused the 10-year separation between King and her mother are part of a 32-year-old child protection database, one of the nation’s oldest. “It is so old that you wouldn’t use a mouse, you would tab right or left to navigate that database,” Gooley said.
Workers use piles and piles of code sheets, manually entering numerical codes for words. Caseworkers often encounter technical difficulties. DCF has applied for funds to replace the database but they say it will take years to complete.
State lawmakers are working on legislation to make sure what King went through never happens to anyone else. “It’s proposing that there is a centralized committee that would review whether or not all the steps that needed to be taken to decide that needs to be substantiated occurred,” Gooley said.
H.661 also proposes lengthier means of consideration for whether a parent’s name should be added to the Child Protection Registry. The bill is awaiting the governor’s approval.
“The last year or so, I’ve really worked on healing and becoming my own human being and living in the real world,” King said.
These days, King works in Montpelier advocating for children. She credits the reunification of her and her mother to her new DCF case workers, but she says it can’t just be dedicated workers holding the state system together. “There has to be things implemented in the big system, because it can’t just be individual people,” she said.