DHS ordered to stop placing children in Tulsa shelter
Citing an alarmingly high rate of maltreatment, out-ofstate experts overseeing Oklahoma’s child welfare reforms have ordered the state to stop placing children immediately in Tulsa’s Laura Dester shelter.
State DHS officials have asked for more time to address the situation, saying many of the children at Laura Dester exhibit extremely violent behaviors and they currently have no other place to put them.
The Oklahoma Department of Human Services has confirmed seven complaints of maltreatment involving 10 children over a recent 12-month period, the three out-of-state monitors said in a March 5 letter to DHS Director Ed Lake.
Forty-six other child maltreatment complaints were investigated and either ruled out or couldn’t be substantiated, and an additional 53 complaints were screened out, the overseers reported.
“Currently, there are 44 children placed at the Laura Dester shelter,” the monitors said. “Despite DHS’s past or ongoing plans, the Laura Dester shelter continues to present an unreasonable risk of harm to children placed there.”
The overseers set an April 1 deadline for DHS to submit a plan to place all children out of the Laura Dester shelter by no later than June 30.
The out-of-state monitors were brought in to oversee Oklahoma’s child welfare reforms as part of a 2012 settlement to a Tulsa federal classaction lawsuit over the abuse and neglect of children in state care. The overseers have the option of going to court to try to have their directives enforced if they believe that is necessary.
Director Lake and Tom Bates, special adviser to Gov. Mary Fallin on child welfare matters, said Oklahoma officials are very aware of the issues at Laura Dester. The problem is figuring out what to do about them.
DHS has some children who nobody wants to take because of their violent behavior, Bates said. These include children who can’t be prosecuted through the juvenile justice system because of their low intellectual functioning, he said. Many have a mental illness. When that is combined with histories of abuse and neglect, they act out in extreme ways.
Lake said children with extreme behaviors typically have represented about half of the children at the shelter at any given time. The other half are children housed there short-term due to emergency situations — like when a child has to be removed from a home in the middle of the night because of safety concerns and no foster home or other safe alternative is readily available, he said. Those children are housed in separate living arrangements from the more violent children.
Bates said many of the instances of maltreatment at the Laura Dester shelter cited by the monitors involved children being able to abuse other children due to a lack of supervision.
There also were “some incidents where staff used improper restraints or holds” to control violent behavior, he said.
Offending staff members were disciplined, he said, adding, “we take this very, very seriously.”
An examination of DHS disciplinary records by The Oklahoman confirmed one such situation.
In October, DHS fired a shelter worker for failing to watch a resident who required one-onone supervision when the resident was awake because the boy had a history of sexually acting out.
While unattended for 18 minutes last August, the boy had a sexual encounter with another boy, according to disciplinary records.
Bates said three of the shelter’s former residents were so violent that DHS had to go out of state to find a place that would take them and the agency is working on a similar placement for a fourth resident.
Oklahoma is paying in the upper $400’s to $600 a day for the residents who are being cared for out of state, Lake said.
Oklahoma officials know they need to come up with a way to pay more for in-state options, but doing that is challenging due to the state’s current financial challenges, Bates said. In a letter to the three out-of-state monitors,
DHS officials said one option they are pursuing is persuading a contractor to take over the operation of a portion of the Laura Dester shelter to care for children with violent behaviors.
DHS also outlined a number of steps it is taking to beef up staffing and supervision at Laura Dester.
Lake said he wants the state ultimately to get out of the business of operating a children’s shelter, but believes following the out-of-state monitors’ directive to immediately cease all new placements at Laura Dester could put children in danger.
“Absent imminent danger to children, a directive to immediately
cease placements is problematic and troubling,” Lake said in his letter to the monitors. “Real world circumstances must be considered.”
DHS officials said their goal is to reduce the shelter’s population to fewer than 20 children by June 30 and “cease shelter operations altogether in November of this year.”
In the meantime, Lake said the agency plans to continue to examine each child placement on a case-by-case basis, but that children will continue to be placed at the shelter if that appears to be the safest alternative.