MDHHS Terminated Their Contract With The Children’s Trauma Assessment Center

This is a long, confusing story about an influential social worker, his unorthodox methods, and his failure to be properly licensed which is only now leaking out from behind paywalls.  James Henry is co-founder and director of the Children’s Trauma Assessment Center, also known as CTAC, which is based at Western Michigan University.

https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/2023/07/10/james-henry-oxford-msu-shooting-student-recovery/70386085007/

Michigan stopped sending traumatized kids to his center. Who will suffer the consequences?
Jennifer Brookland - July 10, 2023

To the children and teachers roiling in the anguished aftermath of the 2021 Oxford school shooting, it probably seemed there was no way forward out of shock and grief. A school community had been violently victimized; cherished students and a teacher left aching holes with their unbearable absences. Then, someone came to help.

James Henry, recognizable by his white beard and colorful spectacles, was brought in to lead the trauma response to the shooting. He advised the school to dismantle the memorial pieced together by students. He led a webinar for 500 parents, who gravely logged on to learn how to support their children through the pain, depression and anxiety of what they had experienced.

Seven months earlier, Henry had been sanctioned, reprimanded and fined by the state of Michigan for practicing social work without a license and for negligence.

Oxford Community Schools did not respond to questions about whether they checked Henry’s credentials. But what they would have found might not have mattered.

Even the state of Michigan continued to contract with Henry for two years after it took disciplinary action against him. The Department of Health and Human Services quietly ended its contract with the Children’s Trauma Assessment Center, which Henry directed, this May.

And although Henry did not wish to be interviewed, several colleagues have come to his defense, maintaining that his work and impact outweigh any ethical missteps.

“I do not mean to minimize the license, but ultimately it’s a box that needs to be checked,” said Kristin Putney, a licensed master social worker who has known and worked with Henry for more than 20 years. “Nobody has done more system advocacy in Michigan for trauma-informed care and for assessment of children and understanding their needs than Jim Henry. Nobody.”

‘He was a rare exception’

In its termination letter, DHHS wrote that its contract with the center, which provided trauma assessment services for children in 26 Michigan counties, was terminated “due to practicing with insufficient credentials, noncompliance with assessment protocol, and unauthorized recommendations for service and best interest.”

Henry did operate without a license — for many years. But Putney points out that for a long time a license was not required to do the work Henry was doing, and that he did have a master's degree in social work. He got his licensure in March 2020, before the state disciplined him.

DHHS would not elaborate on the circumstances of the contract termination, but the state regulatory agency responsible for professional violations lists no additional violations. Children who would have been sent to Henry and his team will now be fanned out to different centers, predominantly Easterseals.

Easterseals’ vice president of communications Lindsay Calcatera said her organization was not informed as to why Henry's CTAC was being removed as an option, but that they would not have a problem picking up the slack.

“We’ve certainly been able to continue meeting the need, as we always have,” she said.

But some are lamenting the loss of what they viewed as the gold standard of trauma assessment for children in Michigan.

Henry “is one of the most informed experts on trauma in the country and has devoted his life and career to serving kids and families,” said Vivek Sankaran, a University of Michigan law professor who directs the Child Advocacy Law Clinic and Child Welfare Appellate Clinic. “He is a true asset to our foster care system and we are a system that struggles to get high-quality service providers to do anything. And he was a rare exception.”

Henry assessed the center's most troubled kids

According to Henry’s bio on the CTAC’s website, which has since been removed, he spent 17 years as a child welfare and protective services worker and 15 years as a professor at Western Michigan University. The center he co-founded has brought in more than $10 million in federal grant funding and Henry has spoken nationally and internationally, published a book and trained more than 50,000 professionals, caregivers and community members on trauma-informed practices and child maltreatment.

Henry worked to change the way the system interacted with children in the child welfare system, says his CTAC co-founder and retired occupational therapist Ben Atchison. “It really was about developing a comprehensive approach that looked at children through various lenses of different disciplines,” he said.

“He’s a transformative spirit, that’s how I would describe him,” said Putney. “Many times it would be like, ‘This is a "Jim kid," because if there’s a kid who suffered for their whole life being misunderstood, going through abuse, being traumatized by systems that are broken and distrustful of anybody, Jim can sit down with them eye to eye and create a safety and a respect and a level of compassion that many of them have never, ever, ever experienced.”

Sankaran says the assessments provided by CTAC were highly detailed — produced to an exceptionally high standard. “There’s nothing like that, that I’ve ever seen in my work in Michigan,” he said. “It’s a real shame because this is not a department right now that’s providing high-quality services to families. And so, it’s a big step back and I’ve yet to hear how or what their plan is to replace this loss.”

More than a paperwork problem

Those decrying the state’s decision to terminate its contract with the Children’s Trauma Assessment Center don’t understand why one man’s administrative mistake would lead to eschewing the entire team and center.

“I can understand from the state’s perspective that licensure is an absolute must and not having that is seemingly, some people would say, negligent,” said Atchison. “But knowing Jim, his whole focus is on what children need. … I think it was just an act of omission that he probably didn’t think a lot about until somebody challenged him and said, ‘You need to have this.' ”

But not everyone would agree that Henry’s faults were simply in being too committed to kids to bother with paperwork.

Six psychologists who attended trainings he provided in 2016 in seven Colorado counties submitted a complaint to their state’s professional regulatory agency about his practices, calling them substandard and outside his area of competence.

“Numerous aspects of this training raised our concerns regarding ethical violations committed by the two trainers,” they wrote in the complaint letter. Besides being unlicensed in either Colorado or Michigan, they said, Henry violated norms of informed consent and patient confidentiality, drew conclusions about a child’s intellectual functioning based on a brief screening that contradicted earlier, more complete testing, and did not follow any standardization in his administration of many psychological tests.

They raised alarm bells over what they saw as incomplete psychosocial assessments and a subjective, leading approach to interviewing — and were deeply concerned that these brief encounters were used to make unsubstantiated recommendations about where children should be placed.

“Dr. Henry continues to train in this non-traditional method throughout Michigan and Colorado with no evidence that it is effective,” they wrote. “Dr. Henry should not be supervising licensed psychologists and licensed social workers in how to conduct psychological testing when he is unable to demonstrate competence in this area of practice.”

Henry received a cease and desist letter from Colorado’s state board of registered psychotherapists in 2017.

'He took the love of our life from our home'

Many in Michigan seemed unaware that Henry had been ordered to stop practicing in Colorado. But one woman found out. Connie Franzel says she dug into Henry’s background in 2018 after he wrote a letter to a judge advising her son be removed from her custody. She says Henry had never spoken to the boy.

Franzel says Henry based his letter — and later his testimony — on DHHS reports written to cover up the unprofessional actions of caseworkers who called her names and discussed the case in front of her child and failed to intervene when they witnessed him being abused by his mentally ill sisters.

“That’s something a professional would never do,” Franzel said. “When he did that, we dove into his credentials and realized he didn’t have them.”

Michael Cafferty, the attorney who tried the case on behalf of the Franzels, said Henry also led everyone to believe he was a medical doctor. Cafferty said he was shocked when he looked into Henry’s background and discovered he didn’t have a license to practice.

Expert testimony does not necessarily require a license, he says, but he’d never seen it in more than 30 years of practice. “This guy is basically making life or death decisions for children,” Cafferty said. “The damages can be extremely real.”

They were for the Franzels, who are still fighting to get their son returned to them.

“He destroyed our life,” Franzel said. “He took a child from us that we had since he was 5 weeks old, that we loved with all our heart. … He took the love of our life from our home.”

In the Franzel case, the Michigan Court of Appeals decided that, indeed, a license was not a prerequisite to be considered an expert. “It was dismaying to see that he got away with it,” Cafferty said. “I’m glad he lost the contract. He should have never had it in the first place.”

By the time Henry advocated removing Franzel’s adopted son from her home, he reported having worked with 4,000 children and testifying in court cases for 200 of them.

What is the future of CTAC?

The Children’s Trauma Assessment Center did not respond to an interview request. It isn’t clear what the path forward will be for the center, whether it will attempt to renegotiate a state contract that doesn’t include Henry.

Putney heard that DHHS agreed to work with the center if Henry didn’t personally provide assessments, but then pulled out. She doesn’t know why. Then again, she’s not a current employee and isn’t privy to those conversations.

Though Putney hasn’t worked at CTAC for the past three years, she remembers the way Henry provided a center for the staff, as Earth’s metal core pulls inward while our planet spins through the darkness of space.

“He keeps showing up wholeheartedly and teaching the rest of us how to do it,” she said. “Teaching the rest of us how to let our hearts break and hold each other through the pain and keep loving the kids and loving the work. ...

“It's a sacred journey,” Putney said. “And he's been the guide for so many people for so many years.”