New State Emails Show Officials Ignored Foster Care Abuses for More Than a Decade

New documents show that Instead of protecting kids, state employees ignored repeated fed flags and propped up a troubled foster care provider.

In September 2012, a boy fled a Portland group foster home on Southeast Tenino Court, run by the notoriously troubled nonprofit Give Us This Day.

An employee at the Oregon Department of Human Services reported to her bosses that foster home staff members responded angrily to the boy's flight: One staffer had pushed him to the floor when he misbehaved, and another staffer told him, "Knock it off, you little bitch."

Sally Parker, a DHS caseworker, described the mess to state managers. She backed the staff and dismissed the boy's side of the story, which remains confidential.

"[He] is a habitual liar who has been doing and saying anything that will get him kicked out of placement and back home," Parker said of the boy in a Sept. 19, 2012, email to her supervisor.

That fall, a senior DHS official called Parker's characterization of the boy "completely inappropriate."

But more than 1,000 pages of newly released emails show that DHS officials—from the directors who reported directly to the governor to caseworkers such as Parker—regularly put the financial interests of the adults who ran Give Us This Day ahead of the children they were supposed to serve.

Emails released by DHS last week to state Sen. Sara Gelser (D-Corvallis), chairwoman of the Senate Human Services Committee, provide far more detailed information about the depth of knowledge senior DHS officials had about the dysfunction at Give Us This Day, and how the agency continued to send millions of dollars to the organization in spite of numerous warnings.

The emails show:

• DHS officials ignored children's reports of abuse at Give Us This Day.

• People outside the agency warned DHS that children were not safe at Give Us This Day, to no avail.

• Senior DHS officials believed no later than October 2012 they had proof Give Us This Day was engaged in Medicaid fraud.

In September, WW reported that former staffers said Give Us This Day neglected children, failed to pay taxes and did not properly train or regularly pay employees.

An Oregon Department of Justice investigation subsequently revealed that over a five-year period, Give Us This Day executive director Mary Holden wasted or diverted for personal use at least $2 million. In November, WW reported that then-acting DHS director Jerry Waybrant had long known of Give Us This Day's problems. Gov. Kate Brown replaced Waybrant and ordered an external review.

In December, federal officials launched their own investigation.

The newest batch of emails, first reported by Pamplin Media Group/EO Media last week, show that as early as 2009, then-DHS director Dr. Bruce Goldberg and his deputy and later successor, Erinn Kelley-Siel, knew about serious problems at Give Us This Day, including staffers with criminal records.

"At a site visit last week, numerous concerns arose (on top of the fact that they aren't licensed)—the most serious of which is that every single staff person has a criminal record," Kelley-Siel wrote to Goldberg in February 2009.

That's just a fraction of what these latest emails reveal. They also show that over the years, DHS received dozens of complaints of neglect and abuse about Give Us This Day. DHS had previously refused WW's request for disclosure of those complaints, but this week the agency released a 40-page log of complaints going back more than a decade.

In June, 2011, for instance, Donna Keddy, DHS's licensing director, wrote an email to the agency's top official in Multnomah County.

"Want to give you a heads up that GUTD is now being investigated for 4 allegations of abuse," Keddy wrote. "Off the record I'm hearing that the more children they interview the more consistent allegations they hear."

Children regularly ran away from Give Us This Day, including the boy whose credibility the DHS caseworker dismissed in 2012.

Although Give Us This Day was under nearly continuous scrutiny from DHS abuse investigators for years, emails show some Give Us This Day employees failed to perform basic duties.

In April 2015, for instance, two girls ran away from Give Us This Day. A DHS caseworker said when the girls were caught, one of them reported she'd been sexually assaulted while on the loose.

"Staff did not contact DHS or the police to notify them of the report of abuse," DHS's Winona McGann wrote on April 3, 2015. "The children did not receive timely medical evaluations following the abuse."

A Give Us This Day staffer's response to the girls, according to a DHS email: "That's why you don't run away."

Outsiders regularly communicated to DHS their concern about the organization.

In 2011, for example, a Marion County child welfare supervisor said she was "disgusted" by what she called Give Us This Day's "obvious lack of concern for the safety of the children they serve."

In November 2012, Joe Thornton, an inspector with the Portland Fire Marshal's Office, informed DHS licensing officials that girls staying at Give Us This Day's facility on Northeast Rodney Avenue were in danger because the building had no fire detection system.

Yet over the years, Give Us This Day regularly refused to meet with DHS or answer investigators' questions. DHS continued its preferential handling of Give Us This Day, often paying in advance for undocumented work. Investigators could not understand why.

"We've reached an impasse in our investigation," wrote DHS head of investigations Edward Stallard in an Oct. 9, 2012, email to his superiors, "but believe we have enough evidence to refer it to Medicaid Fraud [at the Oregon Department of Justice]."

Such reports changed nothing. It would be another three years before the DOJ shut down Give Us This Day.

Give Us This Day and the Department of Human Services now face an uncertain future, with Brown's investigation and a federal probe that could lead to criminal charges against the foster care provider and the demolition of an unaccountable DHS structure.

Gelser says DHS's failure to regulate Give Us This Day extended far beyond one foster care provider, infecting the agency's culture and putting kids in other programs at risk.

"It's clear people at the top and throughout DHS knew for many, many years of Give Us This Day's deficiencies," Gelser says. "That's appalling. Absolutely appalling."

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