In re H.C.
| Decision Date | 05 July 2018 |
| Docket Number | No. 17–FS–892,17–FS–892 |
| Citation | 187 A.3d 1254 |
| Parties | IN RE H.C.; K.C., Appellant. |
| Court | D.C. Court of Appeals |
Thomas C. Devlin, Washington, for appellant.
Rhondalyn Primes Okoroma, Assistant Attorney General, with whom Karl A. Racine, Attorney General for the District of Columbia, Loren L. AliKhan, Solicitor General, and Stacy L. Anderson, Senior Assistant Attorney General, were on the brief, for appellee.
Before Glickman and McLeese, Associate Judges, and Ruiz, Senior Judge.
This is a mother's appeal from an order changing her neglected child's permanency goal to adoption. The decision was made after an evidentiary hearing, as required by In re Ta.L. , 149 A.3d 1060 (D.C. 2016) (en banc). The Magistrate Judge found that the mother's intellectual disability and mental health needs rendered her incapable of properly caring for the child, even with the parental training and other assistance she had been receiving and despite the government's reasonable efforts for over a year to help her ameliorate the conditions that led to her child's removal and achieve a safe reunification. An Associate Judge of the Superior Court reviewed and affirmed the Magistrate Judge's findings and conclusions.
On appeal to this court, the mother does not dispute her impaired ability to parent her child, and she finds no fault or insufficiency with the constellation of services provided to help her overcome that obstacle to reunification. She contends, however, that in changing her child's permanency goal to adoption despite the availability of those services, the Superior Court violated her rights under federal law—the Americans with Disabilities Act ("ADA") and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973—to reasonable accommodations of her intellectual disability that would enable her to parent the child.
We disagree with this contention. The ADA and the Rehabilitation Act do protect parents with disabilities, including intellectual and psychiatric disabilities, from discriminatory curtailment of their parental rights. The statutes require the provision of reasonable accommodations in order to afford such parents the same opportunities as other parents have to achieve family reunification. But where, as in this case, the evidence supports a finding that a mentally impaired parent poses a significant risk to a child's health and safety that cannot be eliminated by reasonable accommodations, the ADA and the Rehabilitation Act permit the court to decide against pursuing reunification and in favor of a permanency goal of adoption or another suitable placement in the child's best interest. We therefore affirm the order on appeal.
Appellant K.C. gave birth to H.C., the child respondent in this appeal, on December 14, 2015. H.C.'s father is unknown; K.C. has been unable to identify him. Because H.C. was at risk of having contracted a life-threatening disease from her mother in utero, she was prescribed an antiretroviral medication when she was born. This medication would need to be given to H.C. once every twelve hours for three to six months after she went home from the hospital.
H.C. remained in the hospital for several days following her birth. During that time, the Child and Family Services Agency ("CFSA") received a hotline report from a caller at the hospital expressing concern that K.C. would be unable to care for H.C. The caller advised that K.C. had been diagnosed with psychiatric disorders (Major Depressive Disorder
with psychotic features and Post–Traumatic Stress Disorder ) and intellectual disability, and that she received services from the Department of Disability Services ("DDS") and resided in a supportive housing program run by Frontline Community Services ("Frontline"). The caller also mentioned that K.C. had a history with CFSA that included the removal of her several prior children.
Herbert Carr, a CFSA investigative social worker, went to meet with K.C. at the hospital. K.C. denied she had a mental-health diagnosis or cognitive limitations. She was unable to explain why DDS provided her with services. Mr. Carr then spoke with K.C.'s court-appointed guardian, who was empowered to make legal, financial, and medical decisions for K.C. because she could not make them for herself. The guardian confirmed that K.C. had intellectual deficits, suffered from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder
, and received round-the-clock supportive services through Frontline. Next, Mr. Carr participated in a discharge planning meeting for H.C. at the hospital and met with hospital staff and personnel from DDS, Frontline, and the Georgetown Parenting Collaborative ("GPC")1 to evaluate K.C.'s ability to care for the new-born child. Concluding that K.C. lacked that ability, Mr. Carr decided to remove H.C. from K.C.'s care. In the absence of an available kinship placement,2 CFSA placed H.C. with foster parents when she was discharged from the hospital on December 22, 2015. The following day, CFSA filed a petition in Superior Court alleging that H.C. was a neglected child within the meaning of D.C. Code § 16–2301 (9)(A)(iii) (2012 Repl.) because her mother's intellectual disability and mental health needs rendered her incapable of discharging her parental responsibilities.
The CFSA social worker then assigned to the case was Kristina McTigue. Ms. McTigue, a former special education teacher, had experience working with persons with intellectual and learning disabilities. In determining what reasonable efforts could be pursued to make it possible for H.C. to return safely to K.C.,3 Ms. McTigue confirmed the services that K.C. already was receiving through DDS. In addition to the help K.C. received from her legal guardian and the individual support provided by Frontline in conjunction with her residential placement (a two-bedroom apartment), these services included psychiatric medication management; other mental health services from a psychologist; enrollment in a day program (known as "Health Tech") that provided job training and instruction on managing daily tasks and activities; and collaborative parenting assistance from GPC and Mary's Center for Maternal and Child Care ("Mary's Center").4 At the initial hearing in the neglect case on December 24, 2015, Ms. McTigue requested and the court ordered a psychological evaluation of K.C. to assess her current level of cognitive, emotional, and parenting functioning. Pending further developments, the court granted K.C. supervised visitation with H.C. on a schedule of at least twice a week.
K.C.'s psychological evaluation was performed by Dr. Michael Gilliard, a forensic clinical psychologist in the Assessment Center at the District of Columbia Department of Behavioral Health. He diagnosed K.C. as having moderate intellectual disability as well as a major depressive disorder
with a history of psychotic symptoms and post-traumatic stress disorder. K.C.'s overall cognitive functioning was in the extremely low range,5 her overall adaptive functioning was borderline (with variation in her individual skills from extremely low to average),6 and she displayed a range of depressive symptomatology and serious emotional limitations. Dr. Gilliam found that K.C. possessed "limited" and "impaired" emotional and interpersonal resources and functioning. She displayed "a limited degree of responsibility," "limited self-reliance [and] limited ability to consider the short term or long-term consequences of her actions," "limited temperance" (i.e., self-control and emotional modulation), and "limited empathy," among other deficiencies. Dr. Gilliam also reported that psychometric testing designed to evaluate parental functioning and the potential for child abuse indicated that K.C. had an unrealistically high evaluation of her own abilities and unduly "rigid" attitudes about children. He concluded that K.C.'s deficient cognitive, emotional, and interpersonal resources would make it "significantly challenging" for her to "attempt to successfully independently parent."
In light of this report and the services already being provided to K.C., Ms. McTigue concluded that K.C. was not in need of any additional or alternative services as part of her case plan. K.C. has never disagreed with that assessment or sought other services or modifications of her programs. K.C. continued to have visits with H.C. twice a week, which Ms. McTigue supervised. The goal of CFSA's case plan was for K.C. to acquire and demonstrate the ability to parent H.C. safely and effectively with the resources and support provided by DDS and her court-appointed guardian, so as to permit reunification. To achieve this goal, in recognition of her intellectual deficits, the plan envisioned (among other things) that K.C.'s service providers and her CFSA social worker would engage with her through repeated behavioral modeling, prompting, and training exercises to help her modify her behavior and learn parenting skills.
The neglect trial was held on March 25 and March 28, 2016. The court received testimony from Dr. Gilliard, Mr. Carr, Ms. McTigue, representatives of Frontline, GPC, and Mary's Center, and K.C. herself. By this time, K.C. had had approximately thirty supervised visits with H.C. The witnesses were in general agreement that K.C. struggled with the basic tasks of parenting and was not able at that time to independently and safely care for the child, though efforts were being made to assist her and tailor parental training and the method of presenting information to her individual capabilities. K.C. herself did not dispute that she lacked parental skills at that time. The court found H.C. to be a neglected child within the meaning of D.C. Code § 16–2301 (9)(A)(iii) because K.C.'s intellectual disability and mental health needs rendered her incapable of discharging her parental responsibilities. At disposition, the court committed H.C. to the care of CFSA and set reunification as the permanency goal. It found that...
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