Was ODJFS Mad At Us?:
The response to our first request for the Anderson complaint
As we have written, in late 2004 we wrote to ODJFS yet again requesting a copy of the audit BBAS was supposed to have filed with their recertification application earlier that year, and the Andersons’ complaint. We expected that they would give it to us as they always had in the past.
But then again we never expected a child we adopted would die on a hotel room sofa next to us. And this time, again, our expectations were shattered, although more to our bemusement than shock.
At the end of the year we received a thin white envelope from ODJFS, instead of the usual thick manila one. Perplexed, we opened it.
Inside was a short letter, signed by an Amy L. Eaton, Chief of the Foster Care Licensing Section in the Office for Children and Families’ Bureau of Accountability and Regulation (but typed by an “L. S.”), explaining why we weren’t getting the usual pile of documents. Firstly, the audit was to be filed next month, after the end of BBAS's fiscal year. OK, we could understand that they can’t give us what they don't have.
But then they issued this curious explanation for why a complaint, for once, couldn’t be shared with us.
At first we were worried that some new legal eagle at ODJFS had looked over our request and found some previously-overlooked statute, or interpretation of statute, that not only negated this request but would do so in the future. Had our success in getting this information from ODJFS been the result of mere legal inattentiveness?
Then we looked up the statutes cited, and found that it was all horse hooey.
It makes sense on the surface. Section 3107.17 (B) (1) is as quoted, and does include “any record kept by the department of job and family services”.
ORC 3107.39-44 govern access to adoption records, and define very narrowly the categories of people who can get it (mostly attorneys, state workers, law enforcement when necessary, and parents and siblings of the adoptee. Section 3107.42, in fact, explicitly exempts the information from disclosure under Ohio's open-records law, Section 149.43. The other range of statute, 3107.60-68, governs open adoptions, in which it would be perfectly understandable that different rules would obtain.
There has been an increasing amount of controversy about the level of confidentiality provided for in most states’ adoption laws. Adoptee-rights groups like Bastard Nation have slowly been winning greater access to records; and while that confidentiality might have been somewhat justified at one point, it may not be so anymore. We’re not going to get into that here, although if you think we tend to sympathize with a viewpoint that the confidentiality (greater than that extended to banks, according to Maureen Hogan) around adoption has much more to do with hiding the sins of agencies than it does with the privacy of birth parents and adoptive parents, you’re getting warm.
But once you look at Section 5103.16, you realize this paragraph is legal claptrap. While it does mention foreign adoptions and a state role in certifying them, and the Section 5103.03 referred to is, indeed, the section under which Building Blocks and every other child-placement agency in the state is licensed, it is quite clearly concerned with the actual process of placing children, not the state’s role in overseeing the conduct of placement agencies. Therefore, to apply the language of 3107.17 (B) (1) to cover the latter would mean that no one in the state of Ohio would be allowed to gather materials to make an informed assessment of how the public agency charged with protecting children was doing its job as far as ensuring the integrity of the adoption process.
Somehow we don’t think this was what the drafters of either 149.43 or 3107.17 intended. And we don’t think that the current Ohio Assembly, regardless of which party dominates it, would like to see those statutes interpreted that way.
The capper was the final paragraph:
Huh? The Andersons live in Tuscarawas County, two counties south-southeast of Medina County. Shouldn’t their county of residence determine which court we were referred to? Since when does the agency’s county control this?
That strongly suggested to us that this response was cooked up by Ms. Eaton or someone else at ODJFS either on their own or at Rick Marco’s behest in response to recent events. Because, around that time, Janet Ostrander’s complaint was heating up. Janet had cc'ed one of her emails to Linda Saridakis to us, and certainly that had not gone unnoticed. Maybe someone was pissed off at us for our frequent implications that they’re toothless (which, as we’ve said, is not entirely their fault); maybe they just didn’t want to appear as if they were colluding with us in case things went badly for BBAS and the agency sued ODJFS.
We thought about appealing, but since we live several hundred miles away and didn’t have legal fees to throw around, we chose not to. Plus, we realized, we might have set an undesirable legal precedent if we’d taken it to court and lost. Better, we realized, to just bide our time, and trust that we were right about this being retaliatory action.
We were. A couple of years later, when we asked for BBAS’s 2006 recertification, we got the Andersons’ complaint without any hassle or comment. So much for the Bureau of Licensing and Accountability and their crack legal staff. Looks like the changing of the guard in Columbus had an effect.