CHILDREN'S RIGHTS INC

In each failing child-serving system of care in which Children’s Rights is involved, the organization’s goal is for that system to function as it is intended: as a time-limited and positive intervention in a child’s life that results in that child achieving safety, well-being and a permanent home. To that end, Children’s Rights’ campaigns pursue improvements across many areas, so that children experience:

• Greater likelihood of safe reunification with families;
• More just and racially equitable systems of care;
• Better access to appropriate treatment, education and health care;
• Enhanced safety and well-being for LGBTQ+ youth in out-of-home care;
• Better conditions and treatment for unaccompanied immigrant minors;
• Higher likelihood that kids in juvenile justice systems are treated with dignity and humanity;
• Lower likelihood of being abused while in state care;
• Fewer moves from foster home to foster home while in foster care;
• Fewer temporary and institutional/congregate care placements;
• Greater availability of well-supported foster homes;
• Greater likelihood of being placed with siblings while in foster care;
• Shorter stays in foster care; and
• Better trained caseworkers with more time to devote to individual children.

The results of Children's Rights' advocacy are measurable. For example, when we brought our reform campaign in Tennessee, children were routinely warehoused in emergency shelters and holding facilities for upwards of six months at a time; today, shelter use has ended. The number of annual adoptions increased from 425 in 2000, to between 1,105 and 1,223 per year between 2012 and 2016, addressing the state's longstanding difficulties placing children in adoptive homes. The percent of children in state custody for more than two years has been reduced by a third, and the number of children placed in 10 or more foster placements while in state custody—a terrible trauma for children already removed from their homes—was reduced from 23% of the child population in 2000 (over 2,000 children) to 1% of children in care today.

Following in the long tradition of the civil rights organizations that have advanced major social justice movements in the United States, Children's Rights has developed a highly effective model for compelling reform that uses litigation to establish children's constitutional rights to be protected from maltreatment and raised in safe, healthy, permanent homes. We work with local child advocates and thoroughly investigate state and county child welfare systems when it becomes apparent that they are putting children at risk of abuse or neglect. We then take legal action to force system-wide reform, building cases that document the problems, bring them to public attention and recommend ways to fix them. Children's Rights establishes court-enforceable performance standards and then monitors, works with and pressures the systems for as long as it takes to ensure that reform is achieved.

An investment in Children's Rights yields multiplied returns. Our reform campaigns prompt states to invest far greater financial resources in their child welfare agencies. Nationwide, our campaigns have secured billions of dollars in additional child welfare funding and initiated improvements to ensure that those funds are spent more effectively to help abused and neglected children. Furthermore, a child welfare system that does not cause additional harm to children will save taxpayers countless dollars, because children who grow up without permanent families are more likely to strain public systems as adults—from public health care and unemployment benefits to prison systems and homeless services. In contrast, children who receive the care and support they deserve are likely to lead more productive and fulfilling lives. Every dollar contributed to our campaigns translates into $100 of new state investments in effective, efficient improvements in child welfare systems.

Children’s Rights is a nationally recognized systems change leader with 25 years of experience. We have won more than 90% of our cases against dysfunctional child welfare systems and secured an additional $3 billion in state funding for the protection and care of vulnerable children. Transparency and accountability measures are embedded in all of our reforms. Since our founding in 1995, we have secured court orders mandating top-to-bottom child welfare reform in over a dozen jurisdictions, including Arizona, Connecticut, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, New Mexico, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, metro Atlanta, Milwaukee and Washington D.C. With a staff of approximately 36 fulltime employees, a lean, resourceful and experienced team drives reforms of complex systems in multiple states.

Children's Rights' leadership includes:

Sandy Santana, Executive Director, joined Children's Rights as Chief Operating Officer in 2012 and became Executive Director in 2015. From 2006 to 2012, Mr. Santana served as Managing Director and General Counsel of Legal Outreach, a law-related college prep organization. Prior, he served as a corporate associate at Goodwin Procter LLP (2004-2006) and in the New York office of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton LLP (2001-2004).

Ira Lustbader, Chief Program Officer, has been with Children's Rights since 1999, and is involved in overall organizational management, the direction of Children's Rights' national program of campaigns to reform failing child welfare systems, and the development of national partnerships and coalitions. Prior to joining Children's Rights, Mr. Lustbader practiced law at Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz, LLP. Mr Lustbader is currently a Member of the leadership of the Children's Rights Litigation Committee of the Section on Litigation of the American Bar Association, the National Lawyers Guild, and the National Association of Counsel for Children.

Samantha Bartosz, Deputy Director of Litigation Strategy, joined Children's Rights in December 2003 following 17 years of law practice. She served as General Counsel at the Office of Administration within the Executive Office of the President during the second term of President William Jefferson Clinton, where she provided counsel to senior White House officials and represented the Executive Office of the President in a wide range of congressional, independent counsel and Justice Department investigations. Prior to joining the Clinton Administration, Ms. Bartosz was a partner at Cahill, Christian & Kunkle Ltd.

Adriana Pezzulli, Chief Development Officer, joined Children’s Rights in 2017. For seventeen years she was the Director of Development for NYC’s Lower Eastside Girls Club, a national leader in youth and community development. During her tenure, Ms. Pezzulli created and spearheaded the organization’s individual, corporate, and foundation giving programs.

Children's Rights' legal campaigns have proven uniquely effective at producing change in otherwise intractable, poorly-performing child welfare systems that lack the transparency, accountability, leadership and resources necessary to identify and fix problems that often have plagued them for many years. Thanks to Children's Rights:

• In Milwaukee, fewer children languish in state care. In 2003, 44% of children remained in state custody for at least two years; by 2016, 86% of children spent less than 24 months in state care. The rate at which children were abused and neglected in foster care was reduced tenfold between 2000 and 2014, and allegations of maltreatment, which used to sit for months, are now referred and investigated within days.

• Connecticut decreased the number of institutionalized children aged 12 and younger by 93%, from 201 children in 2011 to 14 in 2020. Congregate care has been completely eliminated for children 5 and under. The state has also reduced 15-fold the number of children maltreated while in state custody.

• The use of a brutal torture device called “the wrap” has been eliminated at the Iowa Boys State Training School. We also brought an end to the use of windowless solitary confinement cells and ensured that youth have access to trained mental health counselors.

• Our Putting Children First COVID-19 Command Center distilled our most useful COVID learnings into child-focused solutions to pandemic-related policy questions. Our Command Center’s recommendations met a desperate community need; they were widely available to child welfare systems and crafted with COVID’s disproportionate impact on children of color in mind.

Our 2021-2022 docket includes an ambitious array of four class action cases in active litigation, five investigations, seven major advocacy projects, and thanks to a remarkable string of victories for kids, we are monitoring reforms as counsel for thousands of children in eleven states. We also expect to file suit in at least two more states by the end of the year.

We are also beginning work to reduce the child welfare system’s reliance on congregate care, and dismantle the policies and practices that subject Black families across the U.S. to unjust scrutiny, surveillance, and separation. In late March 2021, Children’s Rights released, “Fighting Institutional Racism in the Front End of Child Welfare Systems: A Call to Action to End the Unjust, Unnecessary, and Disproportionate Removal of Black Children from their Families”. This Call to Action builds on our “Families Over Facilities” report and describes the racist underpinnings of the child welfare system’s so-called, “front-end”. The report proposes legal strategies with the potential to make the child welfare system more racially equitable.