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THE NEW YORK AMSTERDAM NEWS

September 25 - October 1, 2008

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Parents rally to get children back from ACS

By DEMETRIA IRWIN

Amsterdam News Staff

About a dozen protestors with signs and bullhorns stood outside the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) offices in Lower Manhattan on the first day of fall to protest what they characterize as the “kidnapping of children”. The lunch time hour of the rally, combined with the narrow sidewalks, created something of a captive audience for the event, as herds of office workers squeezed by. There was really no way to avoid the tragic tales and words of caution spilling from the bullhorns of the protesting parents. At one point, the police officers interrupted the rally to inspect the sound permit, but seeing that everything was in order, the event proceeded without further incident.

Vanessa and Marvin James have been very vocal about their frustration and anger over their 6-year-old daughter, Amber, being in the foster care system, where she has been for the past year. Mrs. James says that she was accused of having Munchausen’s Syndrome and though that diagnosis has since been proven wrong by other specialists, Amber is still in foster care.

“ACS is manufacturing disabled children. My daughter was fine before she entered the system, but now they’re telling me that she has some dead brain tissue and she has a speech impediment. We have a trial on September 26, and I’m not even sure what they are accusing us of doing,” said Mrs. James, who claims that she was arrested and thrown into a psychiatric ward in April, where they diagnosed her with personality disorder even though she didn’t speak to a doctor.

The stories from the parents at the protest are nothing short of incredible. One mother said that her daughter was taken away from her shortly after she had given birth because of bizarre allegations that she had sex in the maternity ward with the child’s father and that the child’s father had masturbated in the ward. Another parent Sonny Southerland, who is several years into a federal lawsuit, said that his six children were taken away from him in 1977 after an accusation that his teenage daughter was consuming paint. The kids lingered in foster care for almost 10 years.

Rolando Bini of Parents in Action had his son taken away from him eight years ago when his son was just 7 years old. His son, Daniel was in the system for seven months because ACS accused Bini of educational neglect. Daniel is one of the lucky ones because most of his time away from home was spent in the custody of his uncle. “It was like having a knife in my chest 24/7 for the whole even months he was gone. It’s a pain I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. It’s a criminal, white-collar enterprise that preys on people who offer the least resistance. ACS picks on Blacks and Latinos and immigrants and other minorities,” said Bini.

Johana Scot, executive director of the Parent Guidance Center in Austin, Texas, was also at the protest and noted that New York’s foster care system issues are not unique. “The systems would rather spend a million dollars putting children into a foster care system that abuses them instead of spending a couple thousand dollars to help the family get a leg up. People make money on every kid that goes into the system. They have to keep having kids coming into the system in order to support all these different organizations and agencies. That’s why things have to change at the federal level. They give adoption bonuses, but not family re-unification or preservation bonuses.”

ACS disputes the parent’s claims that the agency is more interested in money than the welfare of children. “ACS is very much committed to keeping children safe within families. When that is not possible, in many cases we will provide services to the family to resolve and correct an unsafe environment for the child. If services do not improve the safety of the home, or a Family Court judge agrees that a child must be placed in foster care, ACS will continue to work with families to bring about the reunification of that family once it’s determined that the children are returning to a safe environment,” said ACS spokesperson Sheila Stein in a statement to the AmNews.