CHILD CARE AT HALE HOUSE IS CRITICIZED BY ADVOCATES

The children at Hale House were always described as unwanted -- "Cast Off
Babies" in the words still used on the charity's Web site. At the
beginning, said Dr. Lorraine E. Hale, a co-founder of the legendary Harlem
institution, the infants taken in were babies born addicted to drugs or
alcohol. Later the home accepted newborns infected with the AIDS virus.

But the crack epidemic waned. New medications prevented transmission of the
AIDS virus in childbirth. The crisis that had overwhelmed the city's foster
care system in the late 1980's subsided, and the foster child population
declined.

As a result, Hale House officials say, a vast majority of the children in
their care today -- as many as 18 last week, though licensing limits the
number to 13 -- were born to women serving prison sentences for drug offenses.

For the women in prison, many of whom wanted desperately to keep their
children, the appeal of Hale House was considerable: by giving their babies
to Dr. Hale and her staff, they could avoid putting them in formal foster
care with its risk of losing them permanently. Under recent child welfare
laws, parental rights may be ended if a child stays more than a year in
foster care.

But according to interviews with social workers and advocates, the
arrangements between imprisoned mothers and Hale House have not always been
happy. There have been complaints that the staff fails to work with
mothers, and several mothers have said they were left for months without
visits from their children or written reports of their progress.

In one case, said two Roman Catholic nuns who run a residential program in
Queens for newly released mothers and their children, Dr. Hale personally
delayed returning a year-old baby girl, who was prominently featured in a
promotion for the charity on its Web site. The child is still on the Web
site, but now lives with her mother in Queens, Sister Tesa Fitzgerald said.

Lloyd Kaplan, a spokesman for Hale House, asserted that children were taken
to visit their incarcerated mothers once a month. Dr. Hale said the
program's primary aim was to return babies to their mothers, and blamed the
behavior of the mothers for any delays.

The latest complaints come after three weeks of newspaper reports that
raised questions about the private charity's financial dealings and the
quality of care given to the children at the home on West 122nd Street.

Yesterday, it was reported that Hale House had for years been caring for
more children than its license permitted, and that complaints about
inadequate staffing had been made to state officials. Such complaints
echoed similar ones made by city child welfare officials in the 1980's,
before the administration of Mayor David N. Dinkins ended the charity's
$370,000 foster care contract, saying bluntly that group care had been an
undesirable last resort in a crisis that was over.

State officials said yesterday that Hale House had recently given them
differing figures for how many children were at the home at any given time.
William Van Slyke, a spokesman for the state Office of Children and
Families, said that Hale House had been licensed by the state to operate as
an agency boarding home, which is allowed to house no more than six
children. But he said that on March 20 the state had reclassified the home
as a group residence that could take as many as 13 children.

Even so, Mr. Van Slyke said, the state learned this week that Hale House
had been housing as many as 18 children. Hale House officials said that
several children had been or would be removed by next week, in most cases
given to parents or other relatives.

In an interview yesterday, Dr. Hale acknowledged that Hale House was not in
compliance with the state's limit.

"Are we guilty of having more children than we should have?" she asked. "I
have a hard time saying no. If a mother comes to me and says she has no
place for her child, my tendency is to say yes."

She said that three children, ranging in age from eight months to 2 years,
would be returned to their mothers by Tuesday. She said the process of
reuniting the children with their mothers had been in the works for some
time and was not a reaction to the recent scrutiny.

But an official with the state Department of Corrections said it had been
notified only this week that one imprisoned mother would have to find
another solution for her child.

Sister Tesa, who directs Our Children, a private residential program for
mothers and babies run by the Sisters of St. Joseph, said she was deeply
upset this week when Hale House abruptly told Nancy Burke, a prisoner at
Bedford Hills, to make other arrangements for her two- month-old baby. The
mother, who is due for release in June, was faced with the prospect of
placing the baby in foster care.

"I said I would take the baby," the nun said, "because I think what has
happened to her is cruel. With Hale House's resources, they could have done
better."

Sister Tesa recounted three other troubling cases involving Hale House's
relationship with imprisoned mothers. One mother of twins who had been
transferred to Beacon Correctional Facility has not seen her children for
months, Sister Tesa said.

Another mother, whose son was born blind and with cerebral palsy while she
was at the jail on Rikers Island, came to her in tears at Taconic
Correctional Facility in Bedford Hills recently saying she had been unable
to see her baby for seven months or even to get a photo of him, though a
friend said that the baby had appeared on television with Mayor Rudolph W.
Giuliani during a charity event.

In another case, according to Sister Tesa and her colleague, Sister Celia
Gandia, a third woman, who was qualified to keep her child in the prison
nursery, had to place the baby at Hale House because of her own need for
surgery after childbirth. After completing a drug program and classes for
parents at Taconic, she left prison on work release, with the written
agreement that she would retrieve her daughter and live with her in a house
run by the nuns. But, the nuns said, Hale House officials delayed the
return, and Dr. Hale demanded that the mother leave the baby at Hale House
and attend classes there.

The nuns said the child was returned to the mother at their insistence, but
without clothing, toys, birth certificate or medical records.

Mr. Kaplan, the spokesman for Hale House, said he could not immediately
respond to the accounts offered by the nuns, but he reiterated that Hale
House's aim was always to reunite mothers and babies.

Hale House has long enjoyed the support of celebrities and politicians, and
it collects millions of dollars in donations each year. But the type of
child care it provides -- three shifts of paid caregivers, known as
"congregate care" -- has long been considered problematic by child welfare
experts.

Mr. Kaplan said that of 43 employees at Hale House, 24 worked directly with
the babies.

In the early 1980's, Hale House was the only program offering such care,
and it had strong neighborhood and political support, said John Courtney, a
senior child welfare official for the city at the time. He said Hale House
repeatedly fell short of requirements that it work with parents toward
reunification and allow children to see the parents regularly. He added
that the home periodically lacked adequate staff coverage under the rules
of its licensing.

"They weren't working well with families," he said.

Nevertheless, in 1986, when the crack epidemic began to leave hundreds of
"boarder babies" languishing in hospital wards, and the city could not
license individual foster homes fast enough, officials gratefully turned to
Hale House as a resource and soon created 16 more baby shelters, in part by
contracting with large foster care agencies.

In some shelters run by the city and foster care agencies, though, children
were found to be at real risk, ill-served by a changing cast of untrained,
sometimes overworked caregivers.

The city decided in 1989 to close them all, and Mayor Dinkins and his top
welfare administrators -- Barbara Sabol and Robert Little -- agreed that an
exception would not be made for Hale House. It, and the shelters run by
other nonprofit groups, lost their city contracts in 1990.