It was a typical day at Queens Family Court on Parsons Boulevard in Jamaica on May 3. At 2:00 p.m. over one hundred people were waiting in the second floor reception area for their cases to be called by one of five judges holding court on that floor that day. Family Court is where all decisions regarding children in foster care are made. Many in the crowd, mostly parents seeking return of children, had been waiting since 9:00 a.m. In Family Court there are no official start times for proceedings.
Tanya Granston, 23, arrived at 9:00 despite her lawyer's prediction that her case would not get a hearing until afternoon. She'd been waiting eight months to get her two children, LaTanya, 5, and JaQuane, 2, out of foster care, and she could hardly stand the wait another moment. Charged with medical neglect for failing to take JaQuane to an emergency room the night she picked him up from the babysitter and found a burn on his buttocks, Ms. Granston had yet to have her day in court - had yet, that is, to testify that she had taken JaQuane to the pediatrician the morning after she picked him up.
Shortly after lunch, Ms. Granston's lawyer, Ade Fansanya, approached Ms. Granston and her mother (there to lend support), looking tense. "We have a problem," he began. "ACS's attorney is not here so there's going to be an adjournment." Ms. Granston burst into tears.
This made it the eighth time since July 29th, when Ms. Granston's children were taken into city custody, that her case had been adjourned. The list of reasons for delay ran the gamut. On July 30th, the case was adjourned to give the Administration for Children's Services (ACS) time to find a kinship home for the children. On August '0th, it was adjourned because ACS had not searched for a home. On September 30th, it was rescheduled because the judge was called away. Almost a year into the case and there had been just one short stretch of fact-finding, back on November '8th, '999.
As devastating as the May 3rd setback was for Tanya, it was hardly unusual, according to lawyers, social workers, and judges who work in New York City's family courts. A new study by Pubic Advocate Mark Green substantiates the magnitude of the failure of New York City Family Courts to deliver justice on time. (Go to http://www.nyc.gov/palist.cfm and click on Reports and Investigations.) According to the report:
Because of new timelines established by the 1997 federal Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), court delays are now a serious threat to family reunification. ASFA mandates that agencies begin proceedings to terminate parental rights when a child has been in foster care for 15 of 22 months.
Mr. Fansanya tried soothing Ms. Granston as he explained what was likely to happen that afternoon, but in fact he was exasperated himself. "If this were any other case in any other place this case would be dismissed if the petitioner were not ready to proceed," he said.
As it turned out, the hearing in front of Judge Stephen Bogacz produced one positive result, even though it was adjourned almost as soon as it began, as predicted. Mr. Fansanya won permission for Ms. Granston to have unsupervised overnight visits with the children. First he had to convince Judge Bogacz to accept a mental health evaluation of Ms. Granston prepared by the children's private foster care agency in place of a City assessment. The City's assessment, though ordered by the court, was not yet ready. After a ten minute break to allow ACS officials to read the private agency's report, Judge Bogacz granted Ms. Granston the extended visits with her children.
A 1996 study by the state's Office of Court Administration (OCA) shows how common delays are in New York City child welfare proceedings. Of 590 abuse and neglect cases reviewed by OCA, 425, or 72%, were adjourned four or more times. In over half the cases, 307, there were six or more adjournments. With 40 to 60 cases on their calendars every day, judges find it difficult to reconvene cases quickly. Generally six to eight weeks are lost every time a case is adjourned. Ms. Granston was lucky. Her hearing wasn't a victory but it was a small step forward. Her hearing was then adjourned for another month.
Peggy J. Farber is freelance journalist specializing in children's issues. Her reporting on conditions of NYC children has appeared in City Limits Magazine as well as on National Public Radio.
Images of armed federal agents in riot gear storming through the Miami home of Elian Gonzalez's relatives dominated news coverage on the weekend of April 22nd and 23rd. In one swift move, at the orders of Attorney General Janet Reno, Elian was torn from the home of his great-uncle, Lazaro Gonzalez and returned to his biological father. Members of the Gonzalez family, national political figures and Sunday morning talk show regulars were left with nothing to do but puzzle over questions that always come up when child custody issues are at stake. Public discourse on Elian Gonzalez and on all child welfare cases would be considerably advanced if the public understood that the Supreme Court has already ruled - repeatedly - that a child's best interests are not a matter for courts or the government to consider unless the child's parents have been found unfit.
One of its most definitive rulings comes straight from a 1982 New York State child welfare case, Santosky v. Kramer, in which the Court declared that the due process clause of the Constitution requires that parents be found unfit before states can move against the fundamental legal bond between children and parents. "You cannot talk about best interests unless you've determined that a parent is unfit. You can not presume the interests of parent and child are opposed until you decide that parent has fallen down on the job," said Bruce A. Boyer, a professor in family law at Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago. "And that's a principle that applies across the board."
In the eyes of the Supreme Court, in other words, when parents are fit, protecting a child's interests means keeping child and parent together.
The Elian Gonzalez case highlights another recurring theme in child welfare cases: It is difficult for adults to conceive of what the world looks like from a child's point of view.
"Six-year-olds see the world in very concrete here and now ways," explained Dr. Flemming Graae, interim director for child and adolescent psychiatry at New York Presbyterian Hospital's Westchester campus. Abstractions that adults take for granted - that people we've never met, for instance, can be members of our families - are impossible for young children to manage. From Elian's point of view, Lazaro Gonzalez and the Miami relatives may be no more relevant to his sense of safety than a group of kind strangers.
Similarly, adults charged with making decisions for children in the child welfare system often fail to recognize how children think about their worlds. Children entering New York City's foster care system awaken in beds that are unfamiliar, among strangers, cut off from everything that is customary. For many adults this would be a difficult transition. For young children - who tend to see the world in egocentric terms - placement is likely to have considerable impact, for which the child feels some responsibility. Yet child welfare officials rarely speak of placement as a profound trauma.
I ignored the Elian Gonzalez story until the morning after the raid when even moderate voices questioned the Justice Department1s actions. In contrast to early commentators, I saw the raid as a rare good use of force. A slower removal might have produced different results, like a prolonged tug of war with Elian forced to take sides. There is no need for Congressional hearings or public debate; the Justice Department handled a difficult situation well, and deserves public applause.
Peggy J. Farber is freelance journalist specializing in children's issues. Her reporting on conditions of NYC children has appeared in City Limits Magazine as well as on National Public Radio.
Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's battle against the Brooklyn Museum over "Sensation" has turned into the biggest arts/public policy story to hit the stands since Karen Finley's crusade against the NEA. Mayor and Museum are now duking it out in the courts, with the Museum suing the City in Federal court for violating its First Amendment Rights, while in State court City Hall petitions to evict the Museum from the premises it has occupied since 1893.
On 20 October, in the latest in a series of plot twists, Deputy Mayor Joseph Lhota acknowledged under cross-examination in State court that the Brooklyn Museum Corporation - not the City - owns the Museum's 1.5 million artworks, the second largest collection in the country after the Metropolitan's, and, if evicted, could pack them up and take them somewhere else - to Los Angeles, for example.
That the Mayor would desire the dissolution of a collection which took over a century to acquire seems extreme, but his lawsuit calls for a court order to compel the Corporation to "surrender the premises and the building thereon to the City." "I just can't believe he means it," said Frieda Rosenthal, one of the Museum's trustees. "What would the city do with the building? It's all been redone."
Commented another trustee, Barbara K. Debs: "I think it's always been threatening gestures...It's very hard for me to figure out the real motives of any of this. It just strikes me as bizarre."
According to a recent survey of the executive directors of 70 leading NYC cultural institutions, 95% of those polled support the museum in its battles. Many expressed fury with hizzoner. "He is an embarrassment to all intelligent New Yorkers," declared one respondent under the veil of anonymity. Charged another: "The Mayor is fascist and dangerous."
And the Museum? While almost half of those polled believe it put on "Sensation" for commercial rather than aesthetic reasons, few were appalled. As one respondent put it: "Why shouldn't they want crowds?"
Most interestingly perhaps, the survey suggests that the Brooklyn Museum's experience may influence others to take fewer risks. Asked if they thought the controversy would have a "chilling effect," 58% said yes. Offered one pollee: "It already has...All arts groups are terrified of losing city money."
One player who probably isn't suffering financially, however, is Chris Offili, creator of the now infamous Black Madonna, who is currently on a roll with a one-man show in Chelsea. As for "Sensation" - which, incidentally, opened to less than sensational reviews - it can be viewed online on David Bowie's official web site.
One night late last month I splurged and took a cab home from way uptown to our apartment near Union Square. The traffic was terrible - they're making a movie the driver explained - oh god a movie I thought, steeling myself like a proper New Yorker to react with contempt for the biz. (New Yorkers are too cool to turn their heads when a film is shooting down the block - too hip to stop and ask one of the guys with walkie talkies who the star is. This is New York after all: we're about High Art, we're not LA.)
The cab sputtered along and I became more and more restive every time the meter ratcheted up another thirty cents; and then suddenly there we were, swinging past the Flatiron building, onto Fifth Avenue - the entire avenue awash with violet and white light, festooned with Christmas garlands and mistletoe stars. Arnold Schwartznegger look-alikes prowled around looking important. Enormous trailers and sleek Cadillacs lined the sidestreets. Cameras strained overhead and a huge spot poured light onto the scene as though onto the set of Truffaut's "Day for Night."
They're making a movie! I thought - a remake of "Shaft," as it turned out, with Vanessa Williams and Samuel Jackson - and it was as if we had turned a corner, accidentally, into an unexpected and magical world: a world of expanded possibilities.
The police love film shoots for the overtime they pay, the Mayor for the revenue generated: $2.57 billion in 1998 alone from film and television combined. There are, however, other reasons to root for moviemaking in the Big Apple. It makes life here more exciting, sets up a tension on the streets between make-believe and reality, and transforms the City itself into a giant stage-set on which narratives and meta-narratives are created. NYC as an actuality exists side-by-side with a celluloid city - a compound pieced together from the NYC of every movie ever shot in New York from "King Kong" to "Breakfast at Tiffany's" to "Saturday Night Fever." This celluloid city is itself a kind of giant artwork - an historical artifact - and perhaps, in the end, will prove as important culturally as Lincoln Center or the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
So what if filmmaking interferes with parking? Real New Yorkers never park anyway!
Kati Kormendi is a freelance writer and actress; the former Artistic Director of the Magellan Project, a multiarts theater; and the creator of The Serpent's Eye an online eco-art gallery. She has written for Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan, and Talking Leaves magazine.Â