Public Notice Detail

Chief Justice Kathleen Blatz
San Antonio, Texas
July 22, 2003

Thank you Judge Edwards for your very kind introduction and for your remarkable leadership.  It is great to be here with you in San Antonio.  I have enormous respect for the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges and am honored to be with you.  I respect you because you have earned a reputation as a group that “gets things done.”

Conferences such as this are a wonderful opportunity not only to “regroup” but also to exchange information and perspectives.  Further, conferences allow us to use each other as sounding boards.

One of the greatest benefits of a sounding board is finding out whether we’re on the same page.  Hopefully, you will have time to discover that during this conference.  Because being in one room doesn’t even insure it, even when we are in the same room listening to the same presentation, we sometimes hear a different message.   

A friend of mine who teaches sixth grade had a couple of great examples of this.  All of her students studied for the same social studies test.  They had the same teacher, the same textbook, and they all studied the same basic material.  Yet, when you look at the answers they submitted on their tests, you had to wonder if they were on the same planet --- let alone in the same classroom!  Let me share a couple of the answers submitted.

• Who is Benjamin Franklin?  One child wrote:  “Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity by rubbing two cats backwards and forwards and declared, ‘a horse divided against itself cannot stand.’  Franklin died in 1790 and is still dead.”
• In response to the question, “Who was Beethoven?” another child wrote:  “Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf.  He was so deaf he wrote loud music.  He took long walks in the forest even when everyone was calling for him.  Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died from this.”
• One of my favorites came from a student who also wrote about famous musicians.  He wrote:  “Bach was the most famous composer in the world and so was Handel.  Handel was half German, half Italian, and half English, so he was very large.  Johann Bach wrote a great many musical compositions and had a large number of children.  In between, he practiced on an old spinster he kept up in his attic.”

While I can’t tell you what page my friend’s students were on, I believe that we are on the same page in terms of our appreciation of how important our work is.  We know that what we do impacts real people and that we share common challenges in trying to improve the justice systems that we work in.

As a former trial court judge – who loved being a part of the trial court – I want to tell you how truly honored I am to be here with you.  The heavy lifting in the judiciary is done by the trial courts, and it is the trial courts that are the laboratories of experimentation, innovation, and change – because of the creativity, energy, and leadership of those of you in this room – be you trial judges, lawyers, CASA members, guardians ad litem, or social workers.

This morning I want to focus my remarks on the challenges we face as leaders, with a specific focus on child protection.  In so focusing, I will also share with you what we have tried to do in Minnesota to meet the challenges.  While many of you work primarily in family court or in the area of juvenile delinquency, I believe that much of what I’ll say is applicable to all of our work.  Applicable to all of us because we share in the challenge of improving and changing the systems we work in.  To that end, I think my comments can be generalized to our common experiences in bringing about needed change.

So let me turn to the topic of child protection.  In Minnesota we’ve tried to meet the challenges by making three primary changes:

1. We opened up child protection proceedings and records to the public,
2. We are reforming our Guardian ad Litem system, and
3. We’re in the process of instituting a statewide Children’s Justice Initiative to re-engineer the handling of child protection cases.

So what was the impetus to make us want to change in Minnesota?  It’s really not that complicated. 

We all know the facts of child protection too well.  You see the truth everyday in your courtrooms.  Nationally, 70 to 80 percent of prison inmates have been involved in the child protection system.  In my home county in Minnesota, 90 percent of the juvenile delinquents have previously been involved in child protection.  Forty percent who’ve graduated out of the system without adoption are on welfare.  And roughly 15,000 foster children a year turn 18 without a permanent family.

It is against this backdrop that the National Commission on Children issued a major report about the state of child protection in America ten years ago.  The report of the National Commission on Children boldly stated the following, and I quote:

“If the nation had deliberately designed a system that would frustrate the professionals who staff it, anger the public who finance it, and abandon the children who depend on it, it could not have done a better job than the present child-welfare system… Marginal changes will not turn this system around.”          

While it is true that much innovation has occurred since the release of this national commission on children report, it is equally true that much of the positive change in our respective states is concentrated in one model court.  The problem with this is that the shortcomings of the system are not limited to one court, but spread throughout our entire state systems.  And I say this as a person steeped in the system.  I am not placing the blame on someone or something else.

Prior to being appointed to the Minnesota Supreme Court, my career took many turns, many of which involved me with the child protection system.  I was a social worker, and then an attorney who spent several years prosecuting child protection cases.  As a legislator, I chaired the House Crime and Family Law Committee, which is comparable to most states’ judiciary committees, and I authored many child protection laws as a legislator.  And as a trial court judge in Minnesota’s busiest and most diverse county, I spent a part of my time working exclusively in the juvenile court on child protection and delinquency cases.

So, in essence, I am the poster child for the system, and therefore own the problems of the system.  Indeed, it is from the totality of these varied perspectives that I have come to the conclusion that we – and by we I mean all of us working in the system – that we simply must do a better job with abused and neglected children when we first have the chance. 

The children and families who appear before us are depending on us.  Real children – not just nameless and faceless case files.  Let me tell you about one boy who came into Minnesota’s child protection system.  I will call him Jacob.  Jacob was 8-years-old and was beaten by his mother and stepfather.  According to the court records, they beat him and his 4-year-old sister with belts and extension cords – sometimes, because the parents were angry with each other, and sometimes, just to see the children cry.

The boy and his sister slept on the floor – without a mattress, with rats biting them at night.  And according to court records, the mother had “minimal emotional attachment to her children” and a big cocaine problem.  On many occasions Jacob was literally abandoned by his parents.  On one of these occasions, after being brought into an emergency shelter, he told a caseworker that when his mother beats him, he feels like “taking a knife and stabbing” himself.

When we learn about these cases – one child at a time – I’m sure your reaction is the same as mine.  We’re appalled, we’re angry, and our hearts ache for the children.

But sometimes we feel other emotions when we see the delinquent and criminal acts committed by juveniles.  You also know these children.  For example, let me tell you about one 15-year-old boy who appeared in the courtrooms of the county I sat in as a trial judge.  He had been kicked out of six group homes and has been arrested for violently assaulting his classmates and attacking anyone who came too close to him.  He’s been arrested for possession of a dangerous weapon and selling drugs.  By age 15, he was so dangerous that he was placed in a locked unit at a state institution.

How do we react to this story?  “Hopeless?”  “Criminal?”  “Lost cause?”

Usually it’s not that simple.  Too often the criminal was first the abused and neglected child.  Both of these true stories – the abused 8-year old and then the 15-year old delinquent – are about the same Minnesota kid – Jacob.  But In this case, the distance between the “poor kid” our heart aches for and the full-blown “criminal” we fear is just seven years and 36 child protection placements apart.  Thirty-six placements while he was in the system that was supposed to protect him.

I think there is at least one lesson that we must learn from Jacob’s story.  And that is, that the child protection system owes him an apology for never giving him a home he could trust to be permanent and safe.  Thirty-six placements and much of his childhood spent in fear and limbo is torture to a child that needs to feel safe and to be loved unconditionally.

I share Jacob’s story as just one of the thousands of examples that you or I could recite because we need to think about the real children, and not just the stack of files and papers that their cases represent.  I believe that the stories of our children, more than anyone or anything, will be the catalyst for needed change.

We know from the national statistics and from our own personal experiences with individual cases that we are failing too many of our children.  While we are not responsible for the acts of parents that bring their children into our child protection systems, we are responsible for how the system acts when it responds.  Though much innovation is underway, we cannot ignore the fact that much remains the same. 

Albert Einstein once said that the definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.  If we want real change, we have to challenge the current system.  We must be willing to, and have the courage to, shake things up.  But let me tell you, change is really hard.  It is really needed.  And, it is really worth it.

Let me just spend a few minutes talking about change that is underway in Minnesota.

Right after I became Chief Justice five years ago, the Minnesota Supreme Court made a controversial, but what I believe was a needed and positive change; that change was opening child protection matters to the public.

While this was controversial, as many of you know, Minnesota is not the only state to open child protection hearings.  Today 17 states allow the public in, including, Michigan, Colorado, Iowa, New York, and Oregon.

After a three-year pilot project in 12 counties, Minnesota’s judiciary allowed public access to child protection hearings and records statewide to shine light into the process, improve accountability, and help us do a better job for abused and neglected children. 

According to the National Center for State Courts, the pilot project increased attendance at hearings by family members, enhanced professional accountability, and showed that the media responsibly covered child protection cases to which they gained access.  The fear that children will be hurt by openness simply was not actualized.  Don’t forget – parents who are criminally charged with incest or malicious punishment already face open court proceedings in all of our states.  The media – generally speaking – is used to reporting these cases without stigmatizing children.  And I know of no effort to close these adult criminal proceedings to the general public except in very limited circumstances.  So, in Minnesota and I surmise in the other 16 states that have opened hearings, we have concluded that the fears that openness would hurt children were unfounded in the reality. 

So, on July 1, 2002, we opened Children in Need of Protection cases to the public statewide and gave Minnesotans a window on the welfare of our children.  We wanted the community to better understand the system and to support its continued improvement.  There are too many cracks in the system today, and innocent children are often the ones who pay the price for system failures, sometimes even with their lives. 

Opening child protection hearings is about greater accountability, and by accountability I mean to everyone --- but mostly to the children.  There is a growing assessment by the public and by many in the system that children are not protected to the extent they should be.  With a closed court, nobody with objective eyes can be present. 

And, one’s critics can often be the most help.  Critics or, at least objective observers, ask questions like:  Why do so many children lack Guardians ad Litem?  Why does it take so long to get permanency?  Why were children placed in five, or six, or fifteen different foster homes?  They can’t ask those kinds of questions if they aren’t allowed to be there.

In my view, the bottom line is that government works best under the scrutiny of the people it serves.  A system that serves some of our most vulnerable citizens – our maltreated children – certainly needs to be the best that we can offer.

As I said before, while we are not responsible for the harm that forces these children into our courtrooms, we have a responsibility to ensure that the system doesn’t contribute to or exacerbate the problems.  And one way to help ensure we don’t unwittingly exacerbate problems facing our children is to have more openness.  I say this recognizing that openness in and by itself is not a solution to the problems, but rather a conduit through which problems can better be solved.

The second step we took in Minnesota was to fundamentally reform our Guardian ad Litem system.  Two years ago, 40 percent of child protection kids had no Guardian to speak for them.  The parents were represented.  The social workers were represented.  But nearly half of the allegedly abused kids were not --- even though appointments of GALs for every child has been federal and state law for a quarter of a century.  I often had to ask myself, how do we dare call this a child protection system when almost one-half of the children had no one speaking for them?

In the last two years, we have re-engineered our Guardian ad Litem program from a patchwork quilt of 56 different programs into a single, consistent, and accountable program statewide that has a statewide structure of supervision and oversight, and pre-service and continuing training.  Most important, we have implemented practice reforms and reallocation of resources to increase coverage from 60 percent to 90 percent.  We expect to move to 100 percent coverage within the year.

Finally, and most importantly the third change we have launched in Minnesota is our Children’s Justice Initiative, or CJI as we call it.  As you know, in many states, individual model courts and programs are making a big difference for children.  In 2001, Minnesota decided to take the lessons learned from these models --- which some of you in this room created and now work in --- and we began what we believe is the country’s first statewide reform of the child protection system.

My colleague, Judith Kaye, the Chief Justice from New York, and I often joke about her “shaming method of motivation” in this regard.  In one of our family and children committee meetings at the National Conference of Chief Justices, where we reviewed states with model juvenile courts, she pointed out to everyone in the room that Minnesota didn’t have one.

I responded that it was my plan to have a model state, not just a model court.  So was born the Children’s Justice Initiative, which strives to move children into safe, permanent homes faster.  The five-year initiative is a joint effort between the Judicial Branch and the Minnesota Department of Human Services.  This kind of collaboration at the state level has been key and has sent an important and clear message to the system players at the local level.

We started with 12 pilot counties, at least one in each of our 10 judicial districts, and I personally selected an opinion-leading  trial judge to serve as the project champion in each participating county.  This was probably the most important element – finding respected and committed judges who were willing to take on the challenge.

The lead judge in each county formed a team made up of representatives from juvenile courts, social service departments, district or county attorneys’ and public defenders’ offices, Guardian ad Litem programs, and other organizations involved in child abuse and neglect cases.  A baseline audit was undertaken in each county to assess how its county processes child protection cases in comparison to state and national permanency guidelines and timeframes.  The teams then prioritized problems, and worked across disciplines to find solutions, and issue-by-issue, implemented improvements. 

The Children’s Justice Initiative is based upon three principles:

• First, the philosophy of looking at the system and case timeframes through the eyes of the child.  In other words, basing our actions on what is best for the child and not necessarily what is best for the adults or the system.  Most importantly, a guiding principle we embrace is that time matters to kids.  A routine 90-day continuance is an entire summer vacation to a child, and multiple placements can mean that half or more of an entire childhood can be lost without a permanent family.
•  Our second principle was to more quickly provide permanent homes for children through reunification with their families or placement with a new family.
•  And the third CJI principle embraced was the goal of providing Guardian ad Litem coverage in 100 percent of cases involving child abuse and neglect, and termination of parental rights.

Currently, 27 of 87 Minnesota counties are participating in the initiative and the remaining counties are expected to come on board within the next two years.

Since the time the CJI was kicked off, it has led to many improvements.  Let me tell you about a few:

•  Many child protection court calendars have been staggered so cases are processed one at a time, rather than in large “cattle calls” that cause delay and frustration. 
•  A “one judge-one family” model is being used in many counties to improve a judge’s knowledge of each family’s situation.
•  Many judges are employing policies of no continuances to keep cases on track, and issuing orders in the courtroom immediately following each hearing to ensure that all parties are clear on the next step of the process.
•  CJI also has broken down communication barriers among those who work in child protection.  All participants are on the team and meet regularly to analyze and resolve system problems.  Instead of protecting turf, participants are working together toward the best interests of the child without compromising their important and different roles.

As the judges here know, the power accorded to the position of judge is just amazing.  When a judge calls a meeting, people come.  Long-serving social services directors tell us that the CJI team is the single most important system improvement they have experienced in their entire careers.  Even more gratifying is that after several years, these lead judges tell me how honored they are to have the opportunity to work on an initiative they know will be the most important work of their professional lives.

I offer you our Minnesota experiences not to suggest that we are doing anything better or novel.  In fact, our project was launched and has been sustained with the invaluable help and encouragement of Judges Bill Byars of South Carolina, Patricia Macias of El Paso, Texas, Nancy Salyers of Chicago, and Judge Richard FitzGerald of Kentucky, based on their much earlier efforts.

Nor do I suggest that what works in Minnesota necessarily will work elsewhere.  But I offer our experience to say that a statewide approach is possible and that collaboration with other stakeholders is essential if broad-based change is sought. 

You have your own success stories – I hope you’ll share them with each other in the next few days.

We all learn from each other’s experiences, ideas, and feedback.    I say that knowing that all feedback is not always helpful.  Let me give two examples of candid feedback I got while on the trial bench.

A defendant appeared before me on a gross misdemeanor charge in one of our suburban courts.  The gentleman didn’t seem to be taking the process very seriously and I was making an extra effort to be very stern to get his attention.  In the gravest way I could, I told him that if he didn’t clean up his act and follow the conditions of probation that I ordered, I was going to make sure he appeared before me for his revocation hearing and that it wasn’t going to be pretty.  I stressed that he would be coming to the “downtown courthouse” to see me if he “messed up.”  Normally, suburban cases stay out in the suburban courts.

His response?  Well, he sounded like he just won the lottery.  He said, “FAAAAAAAAN-tastic, your honor!  It would be great to see you again!!!

I really put the fear of God into that guy!  The next week I received a letter from him.

It said:  “Dear Kathy, This is just to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.  I hope to see you again.”

Needless to say, he did.  He was back before me in no time at all for violating probation.

On another occasion, I received a letter from a defendant.  It was after I had sentence him on a fairly routine matter (and incidentally, this guy had been around the block a few times).  He later wrote me a letter. 

It said, “Dear Judge Blatz, next to Judge Solum, you are the dumbest judge in Hennepin County.”  You can about imagine how I felt the next year when Judge Solum retired!

Seriously, feedback may not always be what we want to hear, but it is necessary if we are hoping to step outside the status quo and improve the system.  We also must be willing to disagree with each other in our commitment to move forward.

I was recently asked to appear on Frontline, a national television documentary and panel discussion, on the topic of child protection.  I have to tell you – it was one of the most frustrating experiences of my professional career, in part because it exemplified the philosophical weariness of some of the system’s leaders.  It was a wake-up call to me about the need to change our thinking and our actions.

Although the Frontline discussion was supposed to be about child protection, every question seemed to lead into a discussion about the poor quality of care after children were removed from their birth homes.  Instead of focusing on how to better improve the entire system for children, the debate focused on the question of which was better: abusive homes or foster care homes?  While it’s more than a little troubling to think that in some situations, there may be few differences between them, the unsaid but clear implication of the debate was that maybe children shouldn’t be removed from their homes because the alternative is so bad.

I do realize that there are numerous aspects of the child protection system that are in need of improvement – including foster care – but this argument is both specious and dangerous.  The logical conclusion of this reasoning simply is that the solution to the problem of child abuse and neglect is so bad that the problem itself has somehow become more palatable.

This is like saying that you desperately need surgery to survive, but that because some operating rooms aren’t clean enough, we won’t perform the surgery.  The answer to the problem is not to avoid surgery, but to clean up the operating room.  And the answer to the problem of abuse and neglect isn’t to leave children with their abusers; it is to address and improve the places they go when the law says they must be removed from their families.

The same goes for adoption.  We cannot leave children in dangerous living environments because there aren’t enough people who are waiting to adopt.  Instead, we must work to improve the adoption system.  We need to be able to recognize these kinds of challenges and embrace them.  Not distance ourselves from them or find someone to blame.

Former General Norman Schwartzkopf visited the Twin Cities a few years ago and talked about the hallmarks of leadership.  He said something then that has become a mantra for me professionally.  To paraphrase him, General Schwartzkopf said that weak organizations only talk about their strengths, while strong organizations are willing to talk about their weaknesses. 

I agree with him.  And to do that, we must focus on the results.  I am not afraid of the responsibility placed on our shoulders.  In my view, to be able to say we have problems and challenges that need to be addressed is empowering.  Giving away our responsibility by blaming others makes us feel powerless.  We can and must do better.

And in bringing about change, we must focus on how we do what we do, as well as the results.  In fact, process often controls results. 

This concept was brought home to me by a sign on a small shop I saw a couple of years ago driving through some back roads in Kentucky.  It said, “Billy Bob’s Veterinary and Taxidermy Service – either way you get your dog back.”

Contrary to what Billy Bob may think, results really do matter and so does the process.  They matter not only to those of us who work in the justice system and want to do our jobs better, but to the people who are victims, defendants, family and community members.  People are asking us to be more effective, to try new approaches to old problems, and to look more closely at the outcomes.

And the longer I am part of working on a vision for change, the more I am convinced that the starting point for bringing about such change is to help people see the status quo as totally unacceptable. 

It is human nature to want to cling to the status quo.  Sometimes we do because it’s comfortable.  Other times because we think we’re too busy to break out of a routine.  But often it is because, as we shift from one way of doing things to another, there is a fear of losing something – whether it is control, power, funding, or influence.  Which is why it seems to be human nature that we view change with suspicion.

A couple of years ago, I attended the Conference of Chief Justices in Seattle and had the opportunity to hear a powerful speaker by the name of Louis Tice.  He spoke about the challenge of change and encouraged us to approach it with a fresh perspective.

As he pointed out, if you have ever walked into a room where a picture on the wall is tilted, you will feel compelled to straighten it.  Similarly, people just can’t stand to see things “out of order.”  We adjust a situation to bring it back to what we are used to.

It is so natural that when we do this, we usually don’t stop to consider why.  We don’t think about whether there are any other options.  We just keep putting things back the way we think they should be.  The way they have always been.

The power of the status quo in our thinking processes is tremendous.  When faced with something new, our brains are actually wired to revert to what we know and even to shut out information that doesn’t fit into our pre-arranged mental categories.

So to achieve change, we must overcome the urge to force things back into their old patterns.  We need to work to insure that the status quo is the tilted picture and that our vision of what can be is the straight picture. 

I encourage you to think bigger than just affording improved outcomes to the lucky children in one circuit or one court in your state that happens to be spearheading reforms.  If we are to achieve real change – a meaningful, long-term plan for improving our juvenile and family courts has to be wider in scope than one special jurisdiction.  In the uniquely critical area of child protection, judges should lead the effort to build a better system of protection for the most vulnerable in our society – our children.  And we cannot afford to let a fear of failure undermine the need to lead.

As President Theodore Roosevelt said:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.  The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena … who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause… [he (or she)] shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

How fortunate we are to have the opportunity to spend ourselves in such a worthy pursuit – justice for children and families.

In closing, let me share with you some information from The SEARCH Institute of Minneapolis.  The SEARCH Institute has identified four assets that are predictors of a healthy child and, I believe, a successful adult.  Four factors of success and health are that a person be:

1. Loved.
2. Have a sense of belonging
3. Feel competent, and
4. Engage in transformation, or in other words, have an impact on the world.

We need all four of these things.

We are incredibly lucky to have our jobs.  Not only can we apply our professional skills and achieve a sense of competence, but we are also members of a helping profession, which so clearly impact other’s lives.  Most of us became judges not to be somebody, but to do something – to make a difference.

And the truth is that when you make a difference in another’s life, you make a difference in your own.  We are all connected – we share one humanity.  And by working to strengthen our justice system, we are building our own lives, and, we are demonstrating in a very real way what it is that we value.

As Cesar Chavez said:  “Talk is cheap.  It’s the way we organize and use our lives every day that tells what we believe in.”  Or to put it even more simply, I’ll use the words of Martin Luther King who said:  “I am where I stand.”

I applaud your service to your courts, to your community, and to your country.  I am so proud to be one among you as catalysts of change.  And I hope that we all seize the moment of today to build a better judiciary for tomorrow.  After all, there is no better place to begin than with our children.

Thank you.