Series: FRONTLINE
National Airdate: April 28, 1992
Network: PBS
Description: Looks at the children who are damaged and “lost” inside Arkansas’ troubled foster care system and the political battle between children’s advocates and Governor Bill Clinton just as he launches his Presidential campaign.

Hector Galán: Writer, Producer, Director, Editor

Who Cares About Children Press Review

Documentary examines child-welfare crisis in Arkansas
AUSTIN AMERICAN STATESMAN, April 18, 1992
by Diane Holloway

Is it investigative reporting, news analysis or Clinton-bashing?

Those are the questions viewers will have to ask themselves when they watch tonight’s edition of Frontline (at 9 on KLRU, Channel 18 Cable 9), which focuses on the child-welfare crisis in Arkansas, the home state of Democratic presidential candidate Gov. Bill Clinton.

Austin documentary filmmaker and frequent Frontline contributor Hector Galán was asked last year by the PBS program to look into the problems of foster care in America. He talked with experts across the country and learned that just about every state is either already in or fast approaching a crisis.

But several people, including a judge in El Paso, told Galán to look into the crisis and its accompanying legal and political battle in Arkansas, where the Center of Youth Law in San Francisco was planning to file a class-action suit, similar to one that had been successfully litigated in Maryland, to force child-welfare reform.

“When we first started working on this story, we looked at several states, ” Galán said from his Austin office. “As a matter of fact, we started here in Texas. But then I found out about the litigation in Arkansas. It was an unfolding, ongoing story since the entire state was being sued.”

Galán pointed out that he and his team were researching in Arkansas last summer, long before Clinton announced his candidacy in October.

“We weren’t really looking at Clinton but he has been governor there for 11 years and we were looking at what the state had done over the past 10 years,” Galán said, “We hadn’t intended to focus on Clinton’s record, but he grew into it because we were there for six months.”

In July, Bill Grimm, an attorney with the Center for Youth Law, filed a class-action suit against Clinton and the State of Arkansas, accusing both of failing to protect the state’s children.

Grimm’s documentation, repeated and illustrated in Galán’s program, points out cases of abuse and the state’s failure to investigate such abuse. The program also notes how children are moved from home to home and the many instances of terribly overworked and under-qualified case workers.

The documentary mentions almost in passing that child welfare and foster care problems are prevalent everywhere, but it does not make clear that Arkansas’s manner of dealing with them or ignoring them is the rule rather than the exception.

The difference in Arkansas, of course, is that the governor is running for president. And the irony is that child welfare is an issue Clinton and his wife Hillary have championed and campaigned on for years. In the 1970s, for example, Hillary Clinton founded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families and sued the state over its foster care policies.

Hinting at political motivations regarding Clinton’s presidential campaign, the documentary notes that Clinton called a special session of the Arkansas legislature a few days after the New Hampshire primary to consider a $57 million bill proposed by the governor to reform Arkansas’ child-welfare system. The proposal settled Grimm’s lawsuit and gave Clinton a new bill to crow about.

Galán probably could have made a similar case against any number of states and their governors. In fact, the Frontline episode probably would have been a stronger program and a more ringing indictment of America’s child-welfare system if it had not zeroed in so tightly on a presidential candidate.

Nevertheless, Galán’s work, as usual, is powerful.

Galán said he set out to look at some of the abuses he had heard about in foster homes but found out that such cases were “the exception and not the rule. A lot of foster parents get abused by the system. I was convinced of that after doing all this research.”

Galán said he sees Arkansas as a microcosm of a serious national problem and hopes viewers will see his program the same way.

“People need to look at this problem carefully,” he said. “The whole child-welfare system should be revamped. The government shouldn’t focus on keeping dysfunctional families together. Congress has passed laws to preserve families, which means a lot of these children are put back into families only to return to foster again.”