THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 23, 1996 TAG: 9606230106
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY NANCY LEWIS, CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: 143 lines
On a high shelf of a bedroom closet in Alice O'Grady's home sit two large plastic storage boxes containing mementos of her granddaughter.
Except for a one-hour weekly supervised visit, it's all she has left of the sparkly-eyed 10-year-old she has raised and loved from infancy.
One box holds a white, heart-shaped valentine with its randomly glued colored construction paper squares interlaced with red glitter zigzags. The valentine's two layers are sewn together with pink yarn, and on the front is a picture of the second-grader. The grandmother touches the photo gently, then smiles.
``These are the things I keep of hers,'' she says, sorting through one of the boxes and pulling out a pair of pink booties.
But tears come quickly when the grandmother begins to talk about how the child was taken from her by the Virginia Beach Department of Social Services.
``I was stunned,'' said O'Grady, 58. ``I couldn't believe that they were taking (her) away from me.''
On April 9, social workers came to O'Grady's home and took the girl into their custody. The granddaughter now lives in a foster home.
On Monday, O'Grady will go to court to try and win the 10-year-old back.
Her case isn't about violent physical abuse or cruel forms of discipline that make headlines in other cases where children are removed from a home. O'Grady's failings, according to Social Services officials, are that she lacks sufficient parenting skills. She can't control her granddaughter at times, and that, they say, constitutes a form of neglect and emotional abuse.
Among the verbal threats that the Social Services department contends O'Grady used against her granddaughter and that were considered abusive was that she would be put in a foster home if she didn't behave.
``If they can take children away just because you can't always control them, they'll be taking a lot of them,'' said O'Grady, who lives in Colony Trailer Park on Virginia Beach Boulevard, one mile west of the resort area. ``And if they want to take kids who get hollered at sometimes, they'll have to take all of them in this trailer park.''
One day after O'Grady's granddaughter was taken from her in April, a judge signed an emergency removal order giving the Department of Social Services permission to do so. The attached affidavit states that O'Grady neglected her granddaughter in that she is ``limited in ability to provide structure (and) control.''
At a hearing a week later, during which O'Grady says she was not given the opportunity to be heard, Social Services was granted temporary custody. The girl was placed in a foster home.
Candace Feathers, spokeswoman for the Department of Social Services, said recently that neglect and abuse allegations against O'Grady were determined to be unfounded, but the department has recommended that the child remain in foster care.
Removing a child from a family member's home remains a last resort for Social Services.
Last year, the department investigated 2,411 cases of alleged abuse and neglect. Of those, 80 - or 3.3 percent - resulted in foster care placement.
The number of children in foster care at any given time has remained steady at between 185 and 195 for the past three years, according to statistics furnished by the department.
In O'Grady's case, said Feathers, the Social Services spokeswoman, ``There were all kinds of abuse toward each other. There could have been serious injury or death. The risk factors were high.''
``There were threats to do bodily harm to each other, . . . and three or four times a day'' O'Grady called social workers for help in handling the child, Feathers said.
O'Grady denies that she abused or neglected her granddaughter, and contends that the department's action was based more on financial considerations than out of concern for the child's welfare.
The department took custody, O'Grady said, several months after she began receiving welfare.
In February, O'Grady said, she gave up her job of more than 20 years as a motel maid so that she could better deal with her granddaughter's escalating behavior problems.
To get help for the child, she had used services such as the city's Camp Pendleton Child Services Center, Comprehensive Mental Health and the Tidewater Psychiatric Institute.
Also in February, the frequency of the visits of an in-home social worker the department had been providing since last November dropped sharply, O'Grady said. Intensive in-home services are a step the department takes to avoid putting children into foster care.
``We looked at the entire history,'' Feathers said. ``The involvement of the family for a long time with Social Services and other agencies. . . . It looked like even intensive in-home services couldn't help Alice follow through with structure. We needed more data from Mental Health on her capacities for caring for (the child).''
Feathers said, though, that workers were impressed with O'Grady's abilities to provide a clean and neat environment, and clothing and home-cooked meals for her granddaughter. She said, too, that the fact that O'Grady had sought professional help for her granddaughter spoke in her favor.
But, Feathers said, the relationship between the girl and her grandmother had grown so stormy that O'Grady had hidden her kitchen knives out of fear of the girl.
O'Grady denies this, and says that she customarily puts all of her knives away out of sight because of the potential danger to all of her grandchildren who visit.
O'Grady received $157 a month in AFDC welfare benefits. For about the past year, she said, she also had received $470 monthly in Social Security disability benefits for her granddaughter, who has been diagnosed as having attention deficit disorder.
It costs about $300 a month to keep a 10-year-old in a foster home, Feathers said. The money is a mix of federal and city funds, with about 45 percent coming from local tax dollars.
In this case, the girl's Social Security stipend now pays for the foster care. The balance is used for the girl's expenses.
Intensive in-home services typically run the department about $1,000 a month. In such cases, workers spend up to 20 hours a week in the home at a cost to the department of $41 an hour.
So far this year, in-home services have been used in 20 cases.
The money comes from the department's foster care prevention fund, which also pays for such things as utility bills and respite day care when the help may enable caretakers to continue to provide for a child, thereby lessening the likelihood that foster care will be needed.
O'Grady said that beginning in late February, the frequency of the in-home visits fell off dramatically. The worker came to her home eight times from then until the child was removed in April, staying for about two or three hours each time.
Now, with her welfare and Social Security benefits cut off, O'Grady finds herself unable to pay the bills in the home she had provided for the girl from birth.
O'Grady had custody of her granddaughter from the time the girl was about 1 year old. She got custody because neither the child's father, O'Grady's son, nor the child's mother was able to care for the infant, O'Grady said.
The couple had lived with O'Grady, and O'Grady had cared for the child. When the parents split up, they willingly gave custody of their daughter to her grandmother.
Both parents live in the area, and both now have other children.
For the first month after Social Services took custody of her granddaughter, O'Grady said, she was not allowed to see her. She has since visited with the girl for an hour each week under Social Services supervision. During two of those visits, the child sat on her grandmother's lap and whispered into her ear that she wanted to come home, O'Grady said.
``They keep telling me it's a pattern,'' said O'Grady, who herself lived in nine foster homes as a child. ``It's a pattern they're making.''
Her own two children also were placed in foster homes, she said, because she had difficulty providing for them after her divorce from their father.
``I don't understand,'' O'Grady said, returning her boxes of mementos to the closet shelf. ``They pull these kids out of our homes and say they're keeping families together.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo by D. KEVIN ELLIOTT, The Virginian-Pilot
Alice O'Grady contends that Social Services put her granddaughter in
a foster home because she went on welfare. Social Services says
O'Grady failed to control the girl. by CNB