Plans for FLDS families are not so individual

Individual family service plans for the children taken into state protective custody in the raid on the Fundamentalist LDS Church's YFZ Ranch are expected to be filed in a Texas court beginning today.

But just how "individual" those plans are is in question.

The plans, which are supposed to include input from the children, their parents and Texas Child Protective Services on what it will take to reunite a parent with a child, are being filed under a Friday deadline. Individual status hearings for the 464 children in state protective custody are scheduled before five judges in San Angelo on Monday.

Attorneys who have received copies of the plans complain that the only thing individual about them is the case number assigned to each child.

"Normally we have input. Normally we talk to a caseworker. Normally we have input with the parents," said Rene Haas, an attorney representing an FLDS father. "This is not normal."

The Deseret News obtained copies of some of the family service plans from several different sources. Each had identical paragraphs and essentially said the same thing. Texas CPS officials characterize it as a "template" that was leaked, and not the official plans that will be submitted to the courts.

"We did use a template on these plans of service and this was due to the large number of plans we are developing," said Texas Department of Family and Protective Services spokeswoman Marleigh Meisner. "Each child in care has their own plan of service. If the mother and father are together as a couple they have their own plan of service. With one child involved we could have three service plans."

Template

In the plans, Texas child welfare officials repeat why they placed the children in protective custody in the first place.

"Interviews with underage girls at the ranch revealed a pattern of underage girls being 'spiritually united' with adult men and having children with these men," it says. "The department's investigation has found an apparent practice of training young girls to submit to this behavior and training young boys that when they become adults it is appropriate for them to become perpetrators, which conduct constitutes sexual and mental and emotional abuse."

CPS says a large number of girls, ages 14-17, have children, are pregnant or both. Several children have or have had suspicious broken bones, and CPS alleges there are indications of possible sexual abuse of young boys.

Haas objected to the blanket forms that portray everyone on the YFZ Ranch.

"You cannot take children away because their parents think something or believe something. You can only take children away for what you can prove parents have done," she said Wednesday. "There is no proof on our family of anything that remotely could be called child abuse."

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