TrustLine: New Way to Check out Babysitters

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Hearst Examiner Article, Sunday November 16th, 1997 Vicki Haddock, Hearst Examiner Staff

CALIFORNIA – Moraga mother Mary Beth Phillips sat in stunned silence as a Justice, in the eyes of the former Alameda County Superior Court Judge Martin Pulich, called for the nanny to pay a $100 fine and perform 2,000 hours of community service. No jail time. Just probation. In fact, reasoning it would be wrong to deprive the nanny of a means to support herself, he approved her new job as another family’s live-in baby sitter. judge passed sentence on the neighbor’s nanny, just convicted of felony child abuse for shaking Phillips’ 6-month-old daughter so violently that baby Elizabeth lay partially paralyzed and permanently blinded.

An outraged Phillips vowed to herself and to Elizabeth that she would change things.

It was 1985, 12 years before the nation would lock in bitter debate about the case of a convicted au pair and the baby who suffered at her hands.

Phillips united with two others grieving under similar circumstances: a Temecula woman and a Fremont mother, Bonnie Reeves, whose baby shared a room with Elizabeth at Oakland Children’s Hospital. She lobbied long and hard to tighten California’s loose system for license-exempt child care givers.

The result of the efforts is TrustLine, a state government hot line that allows parents, usually for a fee, to run criminal and abuse background checks on potential baby sitters, nannies and au pairs. Since 1994, TrustLine has given California parents access to the nation’s most comprehensive research on child care providers. And anybody can use it.

The catch is, most people don’t even know about it.

And it’s pricey – $90 per screening.

Yet for parents apprehensive about hiring someone to watch their children – a trepidation heightened by last week’s sentencing of British au pair Louise Woodward for shaking to death a baby boy in Massachusetts – TrustLine holds the promise of a baseline assurance.

Spreading the word

Now, its founders have won a grant from the Pacific Mutual Foundation to pay for a spring public service campaign tentatively keyed to the theme “When you need to rely on more than your instincts.”

“We’re trying to figure out how to really get the word out,” said Phillips, who would love to see the service heralded on utility bills, milk cartons, billboards.

“Right now, TrustLine really is the best kept secret in the state of California.”

It works like this: Parents wishing to research a particular applicant can call TrustLine to see whether the individual already has passed the background screening. If not, they can order one for $90, so long as the applicant agrees to provide a fingerprint. Sometimes, providers submit their own names and pay the research fee in order to offer themselves as precertified by TrustLine.

And if parents are low-income and qualify for subsidized childcare, the state does the TrustLine check for free.

Experts say the incidence of “shaken baby syndrome” nationally has increased to 1,300 cases in 1995 from 800 a decade earlier, perhaps partly because of doctors’ increased awareness.

TrustLine is administered by the state Department of Justice, which contracts with the California Child Care Resource and Referral Network to handle inquiries – about 500 per week. Next year, TrustLine will go under the jurisdiction of the Department of Social Services, with wider investigative powers – for example, the opportunity to consider a pattern of arrests without convictions, and to screen for convictions in other states via the FBI.

To date, 27,000 child-care givers have been investigated by TrustLine. Some 22,000 qualified applicants appear on the database, meaning their past is unmarred by substantiated child-abuse allegations or significant criminal convictions in California and, where an FBI check is requested, nationwide. The remaining 5,000 applicants either are in the midst of the approval process, have withdrawn from consideration or have been rejected.

“Believe it or not, about 5 to 6 percent of applicants are disqualified,” said Cindy Swanson, program manager for TrustLine at the California Child Care Resource and Referral Network, in San Francisco. “We’ve had convicted murderers apply, we’ve had people with 10- to 15-page rap sheets – it’s quite amazing.”

That doesn’t even count the nanny and baby sitter wannabes who lose interest in a job when they discover a parent wants to check them out on TrustLine. Others suddenly get honest, like the applicant who said, “I suppose this might be a good time to tell you that I’ve had my own children taken away for neglect . . .”

Parents and agencies who run checks on applicants will receive simple yes-or-no notices from the state. Rejected applicants will receive detailed letters from the Justice Department explaining the decision. Accepted applicants remain on the TrustLine Registry, which is updated continually.

It’s not a cure-all

Even so, the system has its limits. Registrants are not required to have training or experience working with children, or to have mastered infant CPR or first aid. A TrustLine check often may take a couple of weeks.

And for now, the $90 screening covers only California – an FBI search of the other 49 states requires a second set of fingerprints and another $24. Likewise, the records of foreign au pairs in their home countries are not accessible through TrustLine, although theoretically such employees cannot obtain green cards through the Immigration and Naturalization Service if they have criminal records in their native lands.

The registry’s most critical shortcoming is that it can never predict first-time offenders. The nanny who so severely injured Elizabeth most likely would have cleared TrustLine before that incident. Only one thing might have raised a red flag: In a bizarre twist to the Phillips saga, the nanny had recently legally changed her name because, unbeknownst to her employer, she was a transsexual man undergoing a sex-change operation.

Like it was yesterday, Phillips recalls going to a neuropsychology class one afternoon 14 years ago and leaving Elizabeth for a few hours with her neighbor’s live-in nanny. When she returned, she was met at the door by the neighbor, who broke the news: “There’s been a little accident.”

By that time, Elizabeth was in the hospital, and the nanny already was attributing her injuries to a mischievous pet Highland terrier – a story the authorities quickly jettisoned.

“I think what’s so remarkable about TrustLine is that it was parents who took their personal and extraordinary pain and said, “This happened to my child, and I want to do everything I can to make sure it doesn’t ever happen to another child,’ ” said Patty Siegel, executive director of the California Child Care Resource and Referral Network. “It’s one tool to ensure that people who’ve abused children before won’t be entrusted with the opportunity to do so again.”

“It was a healing thing for me,” said Phillips, who credits former San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos, among others, for championing her cause during his years in the Legislature. “I know some people would curl up in a closet and never come out again, but that’s not me.”

As for Elizabeth? An honor student who long ago mastered her Braille computer, she has all but vanquished lingering signs of paralysis, has carried the Olympic Torch, plays piano and attends prestigious College Preparatory School in Oakland.

“She’s a miracle child, and her courage keeps me going,” said Phillips. “She once asked me if I thought it was a good thing that she got blinded. I said no, but I do believe that out of that awful thing, we made good things happen.”

TrustLine can be reached at 1-800-822-8490 Mondays through Fridays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

©2000 San Francisco Examiner. Originally printed by the Hearst Examiner. Reprinted with permission.

Lawmakers Respond to a Mother’s Mission

LA Times syndicate article, sunday, september 26th, 1999

melissa healy

Mary Beth Phillips is the mother of a 16-year-old daughter named Elizabeth and state-run child-protection program called TrustLine. Her progeny are linked by tragedy and triumph–and by a discredited nanny named Colette Andrews.

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When Elizabeth Valentine Phillips was 6 months old, her mother returned to her Oakland home from a graduate class in neuropsychology to horrifying news: The baby, left with Andrews for an hour and a half, had been rushed to a hospital comatose and convulsing–the victim of violent shaking by her caregiver. Both her retinas were detached by the abuse. Elizabeth survived her ordeal to become a gifted student, songwriter and champion of children’s causes. But she was blinded for life.

Three years after Elizabeth lay near death from her injuries, Andrews was convicted of felony child abuse. She was fined $100, required to perform 2,000 hours of community service and put on five years’ probation. The judge ignored entreaties from the Phillips family and from Alameda County Dist. Atty. Robert Platt to bar Andrews from working with children again. For a time, at least, the convicted child abuser worked again as a nanny for other families.

So Mary Beth Phillips, then a 30-year-old mother juggling a graduate internship, a doctoral dissertation, a disabled child and a newborn, began a campaign to spare other parents the pain she had experienced. “I was clearly driven,” she said. Descending on Sacramento, she urged lawmakers to create a registry of caregivers whose names and fingerprints would be screened for criminal pasts or histories of abuse. Parents could check the registry before hiring a nanny.

In the years since TrustLine became a reality in 1993, the state has denied its stamp of approval to 3,981 prospective caregivers whose pasts are tainted with convictions of serious criminal misconduct–including murder and sexual assault–or credible allegations of child abuse or endangerment. Most of the caregivers who seek inclusion on the state-certified registry–an average of 2,000 a month–do so because it is required by government programs that pay child-care subsidies to low-income families.

Now Phillips and the registry’s administrators want to expand TrustLine’s customer base to middle-income and affluent parents. So far, fewer than 200 caregivers a month submit to the background check on their own initiative or at the urging of parents who want to employ them. In an effort to encourage parents to ask job-seeking nannies if they have been approved by TrustLine, the program’s administrators have launched a statewide campaign to increase public awareness. They are pressing pamphlets on new parents as they leave maternity wards, posting signs in pediatricians’ offices and advertising on supermarket bags.

A Push to Take Program Nationwide

And, at a time when few Californians know about TrustLine, Phillips also wants to take the program national. Congress in recent years has taken steps to make it easier for states to institute criminal background checks on caregivers. But lawmakers have shied away from debating a national registry–a far more ambitious goal.

To bring TrustLine to life in California, Phillips and her allies triumphed over civil libertarians, skeptical lawmakers and wary bureaucrats. If a national registry of caregivers is ever to take shape, Phillips warns, proponents will have to prevail over the same critics. Chris Hansen, an attorney with the ACLU’s national office in New York, acknowledged that criminal background checks for any prospective employees raise hackles among civil rights activists. “You always have to be somewhat uncomfortable about the notion that we have to investigate everyone in order to catch one bad apple,” said Hansen, who added that those turned away from registries often are given insufficient information and recourse.

To such objections, one can add a more intractable obstacle: balky criminal-records computers that cannot share information from state to state. Phillips keeps pressing, however. “We need someone like [software mogul] Bill Gates, with lots of money, lots of energy and lots of computer resources, to figure out how states can talk to each other. . . . It’s not impossible. It takes will and, more fundamentally, it takes collaboration between departments within and between states that have never worked together before.” Honored last year at the White House for her work on TrustLine, Phillips has pinned her hopes on First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, with whom she has discussed the program at length. If Mrs. Clinton were to win a Senate seat in New York, Phillips believes that she would have the clout and the commitment to rally the political will and find the funds for a national registry of caregivers.

But Phillips also knows that if the TrustLine model is to take hold elsewhere, it will be because of parents like her. No politician, Phillips said, has the passion–or effectiveness–for the job that parents of abused children do. “I think, truly, if Elizabeth had come through OK, I never would have gone to Sacramento” to fight for the program, Phillips said. “I wouldn’t have had that angst, that agony.”

One of Phillips’ earliest allies in fighting for TrustLine was Cheri Robertson of Temecula, Calif., whose son, Bryan, was shaken violently by a caregiver at the age of 10 months. In the days before Phillips was to appear before a state legislative committee, she called Robertson for support. The next day, with her baby on her hip, Robertson flew to Sacramento to testify alongside Phillips. As they struggled to bring TrustLine to life, Robertson coordinated visits and letters from parents of babies abused by their caregivers, while Phillips talked to legislators.

Mobilizing an Army of Angry Parents

Working both sides of the Legislature helped, Phillips said. The addition of an appeals process for rejected applicants helped to quell early opposition from Democrats, who raised concerns about the rights of those rejected by the registry. Republicans were also skeptical, fearing that TrustLine would create an unwieldy bureaucracy. As legislation setting up TrustLine neared a crucial first vote in 1986, Phillips recalled, the state’s Republican caucus urged its members to vote against the bill, a move that mobilized a small army of angry parents and established a pattern of lobbying that the group would use again and again.

“We were going door-to-door through the Legislature, marching into these offices,” Phillips remembered. “We just walked up to the person in the office who had a picture of a kid on his or her desk. And we’d say: ‘Here’s what we’re trying to do, and your guy is not supporting it. Can you drag him out so we can talk to him?’ And they did! It was cool!”

Today, TrustLine is a state-funded program touted on supermarket bags across California. Daughter Elizabeth Phillips is soon to be the keynote speaker at a statewide conference on child abuse prevention. Her mother falls into unaccustomed silence when she ponders whether TrustLine or her daughter is the greater miracle.

“Just an amazing journey,” she said.

Copyright Los Angeles Times, 2002. Reprinted with permission.