Congress Should Not Kill Lifesaving Options for Foster Youth

Jamal* is a teenager in foster care whom I met through an organization pairing Washington D.C. foster youth with volunteer mentors..

He is a spirited young man who bounced through five foster homes in less than a year due to his defiant behavior. When I met him, Jamal had ended up at a Boys Town family-style group home and was finally happy, stable and doing well.

If the supporters of the Family First Prevention Services Act have their way, the option of a supportive group home will no longer be available to most young people in foster care who cannot thrive in a family setting. Federal dollars will not be available to help states pay for group home placements beyond two weeks without a special assessment and court hearing, and the facility must be accredited by a specified agency and meet other criteria that may be burdensome and expensive.

The bill’s sponsors and supporters often cite a belief that most children do best in family settings.

Yet, this is not always the case. Jamal is not the only young person who needed a group home to find the support and nurturing he needed.

Lorenzo Mauldin, a linebacker with the New York Jets, was shuttled from home to home due to his mood swings and violent behavior, the legacy of a traumatic childhood. He credits the house parents from his Atlanta group home for the fact that he is playing football and not on the streets or in prison today like his mother.

Thomas McCrae entered foster care at the age of 11. He lived in 22 foster homes, suffering abuse, neglect, and multiple changes of school and neighborhood. He reacted with anger and aggression, leading to further disruption as foster parents refused to keep him. Thomas finally ended up in family-style group home, where he stayed eight months with the intercession of his attorney to let him stay longer. Thomas credits his house parents for his becoming “the man I am today.” He went on to college and a summer internship in the U.S. Congress.

As a social worker in the District of Columbia, I saw older youth boomerang from home to home after being ejected from each home due to behavioral problems. With few group homes available, the only choice was to find yet another foster home that they had not yet been expelled from. Unfortunately, many of these homes were little more than boarding houses, providing barely adequate food and shelter and no nurturing or emotional support.

Even if the bill’s authors were correct that all group homes should be closed, closing them before appropriate foster homes exist to take their place is foolhardy at best. States around the country are reporting foster home shortages, with children having to stay in offices until they can be placed. The hardest to place are older youth with behavioral problems. With group homes closed, this problem will only worsen.

The attempt to close group homes without providing an alternative is eerily reminiscent of the closure of institutions for the mentally ill in the 1960s. These hospitals were supposed to be replaced with community health services that were never funded. We are still reaping the consequences with the abundance of mentally ill people sleeping on the streets of America’s cities.

It is clear that there is something else behind the draconian prohibition on group settings beyond a concern about children. Legislators want the savings from eliminating these options to offset the increased costs imposed by the expansion of Title IV-E to include preventive services. As a matter of fact, they did such a good job of cutting costs that theCongressional Budget Office has estimated that the Family First Act will actually save money.

The two states with the largest numbers of children in foster care – New York and California– oppose the Family First Act. Together, these states represent 19 percent of the children in foster care in the United States. The State of Washington has expressed its opposition to the bill as well. The head of Texas’ child welfare agency said the Family First Act could worsen the state’s “already worrisome shortage of foster care beds” in an article in The Dallas Morning News.

The Family First Act is on the right track with its other major provision in allowing foster care funds to be spent on preventive services to keep families together, although there areconcerns about the way the act does this. But this important reform should not be achieved at the expense of a life-saving option for some of our most wounded children.

Moreover, the Family First Act does not address the aspect of foster care financing that most needs reform—the so-called AFDC “lookback” for children in foster care. Currently the federal government pays a share of foster care costs only for those children who would have qualified for the defunct Aid to Families with Dependent Children (cash welfare) program, which was replaced by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families in 1996. This ridiculous standard requires states to spend millions of dollars annually determining eligibility for a defunct program — money they could spend helping children.

Aside from a pair of hearings that were orchestrated by the bill’s sponsors to support their vision for the legislation, there have been no hearings or floor debate on the Family First Act. It passed the House by voice vote, and its Senate sponsors tried to get it through without a vote before going on summer recess. They failed, thanks to courageous Senators who cared about children enough to resist pressure from the powerful coalition supporting the bill.

The Senate will be considering the bill again this September and now has a chance to get it right by amending the bill to ensure that we will not be leaving our most traumatized youth out in the cold.

* The young man’s name was changed to protect his anonymity.

This article was published in the Chronicle of Social Change on August 31, 2016.

Group Home Closure Eliminates Key Option for Most Challenging Foster Youth

I was sad to read in the Chicago Tribune that yet another well-respected institution is closing its doors to foster children as a consequence of the current belief that a loveless foster family is better than a caring residential placement. This time, the casualty is Maryville Academy, which has been serving children and families since 1882. About 70 boys and girls will be moved out of Maryville facilities into foster care by June 30.

Currently, Maryville provides homelike residential settings for boys and girls aged 13 to 20 on one campus in Chicago, and two in nearby suburbs. All of of the campuses serve boys or girls with a history of childhood trauma and mental illness. In some of the homes, clients must have an intellectual disability as well. There is one home that serves pregnant teens.

There are 35 reviews on Maryville’s Facebook page, all or most from former clients, with an average of 4.5 out of 5.0 stars. According to one former resident:

I think MVA was the best thing that happen[ed] to me….I became the man most of my staff thought I would be.

Reports Dennis, from the class of ’65:

I spent 3rd grade through 8th grade there. It was, more than likely, a life-saver.

These two reviews are typical of the testimonials to be found on Facebook.

So why close such a lifesaving program? Child welfare is a business marked by trend. Right now, residential care is out and family foster care is in. Maryville’s executive director reported in a recent statement that Illinois’ Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS) has decided to reduce funding for residential care by $23 million in the upcoming fiscal year.

Maryville has been picking up an increasing share of the costs of residential care as DCFS has reduced its subsidy, and the agency has decided to eliminate these programs.

The problem is that states all over the country, including Illinois, are reporting foster parent shortages. And, as I have written before, many existing foster families are not providing the love, nurturing and supervision that these youth need.

It’s hard to believe that Illinois, like other states, is moving to close residential programs before recruiting the quality foster homes needed to accommodate the children who will be left homeless. But the common belief that residential care is more expensive than foster care makes closing residential care an irresistible option for both sides of the aisle.

Yet it is not clear that all residential care is more expensive than foster care. DCFS’ draft implementation plan, mandated by the court in its ongoing class action lawsuit, calls for a pilot Therapeutic Foster Care (TFC) program as an alternative for children now being served in programs like Maryville.

At least one parent in each TFC home would not be allowed to work outside the home, and no more than two children can be placed in each home. There is no information about costs, but providing a payment to foster parents who care for two or fewer children may not be any cheaper than residential care.

Moreover, many programs like Maryville have a large base of private donors. During the last 10 years, Maryville reports that it has invested $33 million in donated funds in its residential programs because of declining government funding. By losing Maryville, Illinois is losing access to these funds, which enriched services for foster youth.

The DCFS plan calls for a “minimum of 40 youth” to be placed in contracted TFC homes in three counties by the end of the first year of operation (which has not started yet). But the closure of Maryville alone will leave about 70 boys and girls (all qualified for TFC) homeless by June 30. There is something wrong with this picture.

The Illinois story is being repeated all over the country. Residential facilities are closing nationwide with no notion of where the children will go. Many will probably bounce in and out of foster families that are not trained or willing to keep traumatized youth with behavioral problems.

And now Congress is considering following suit by restricting residential care. A nation that failed to learn from the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill population in the 1960s may be on its way to creating a new class of foster youth with no place to go.

This column was published in the Chronicle of Social Change on June 6, 2012.

Kin and Faith: The Right Ways to Grow a Foster Home Supply

May is Foster Care Month, and it is a great time to sing the praises of the many wonderful foster parents who are changing children’s lives every day. As a social worker in Washington, D.C.’s child welfare system until a year ago, I came across several of these super foster parents. Many, though not all, of these foster parents were church members who felt called to share their love with children who needed it.

These great foster parents had several things in common. Most importantly, they treated their foster kids as their own children. They took them to the doctor, school meetings and parental visits, rather than asking overwhelmed social workers to perform these functions. They participated in the children’s therapy, the only way it can possibly work. The children accompanied them on family vacations, and became part of their extended families.

Many of these stellar foster parents worked closely with the birth parents, and offered to be a continuing resource to these families once the children returned home. But if reunification did not work out, many of them were ready to step in as adoptive parents.

Unfortunately, for every super foster parent, there was more than one who rarely or never visited the child’s school or talked to teachers, refused to take the child to medical or therapy appointments or even pick them up from school when sick, and avoided meeting the birth parents. These people were fostering for one reason only: the money that helps pay their monthly bills.

Why did these bad foster parents keep their licenses? The answer is simple. Foster parents were, and are, in short supply. That may explain the occasional stories about abusive foster parents who keep their licenses despite frequent complaints until they actually kill or injure a child.

With the foster care population increasing, the reluctance to fire bad foster parents will only increase. In the meantime, the harm to the children from these loveless placements may last a lifetime, and we will all pay the costs.

A recent briefing, co-sponsored by Fostering Media Connections, which publishes The Chronicle of Social Change, and the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute, convinced me that these bad foster parents can be replaced. The increasing need for foster care can be met through kinship care and church-based recruitment programs.

Kinship placements provide a number of advantages. Relatives or family friends (also considered to be kin) may have a previous relationship with the child, thus lessening the trauma to the child. They are likely to be more invested in continuing the relationship with the parent and facilitating reunification. And they are more likely to be available as permanent caregivers if reunification fails.

In Allegheny County (home of Pittsburgh), Penn., 55 percent of foster youth are in kinship care, as opposed to 29 percent nationwide according to data from 2014. How does Allegheny do it? As described in The Chronicle of Social Change, Allegheny’s child welfare agency contracts with A Second Chance, a nonprofit that handles 95 percent of the county’s relative caregiver placements.

A Second Chance leaves no stone unturned in helping relatives get licensed. It provides financial assistance if necessary, and then provides the continued wraparound support they need to successfully foster the children until reunification or permanency can be achieved.

Not all jurisdictions will be able to place more than half of foster children with kin as easily as Allegheny County, where housing is not a problem. In my experience in the District of Columbia, housing was one of the biggest obstacles for relatives wishing to care for children in foster care. Jurisdictions may have to get creative in enabling relatives to take custody of foster children, particularly large sibling groups.

For example, why not buy or build an apartment building or neighborhood of large homes to shelter large sibling groups? These homes could be offered rent-free or at below-market rents to relatives or non-relative caregivers who otherwise could not take in these siblings. These “foster care neighborhoods” would allow families to help each other out, and activities and services to be provided on site.

The forum also highlighted the work of Project 1.27, which works with the State of Colorado to recruit and train foster parents through churches around the state. The Colorado project has trained over 800 foster families since its creation in 2004.

Affiliated organizations are springing up around the country, including DC127, which was recently profiled in The Chronicle. Foster parents recruited through these projects are motivated by their faith to love and shelter children who need a family.

Despite the foster parent shortage, we need to remember that we are looking for more than a place to put kids. We are looking for the love and commitment to permanency that are best provided by kin or those very special unrelated foster parents who can often be found through church-based recruitment programs.

This column was published in the Chronicle of Social Change on May 18, 2016. 

The Liberal Dilemma in Child Welfare Reform

I’ve always considered myself to be a liberal, and a left-leaning one at that. As a liberal, I believe that government has the ability and the obligation to protect all of its citizens from suffering.

I believe this obligation is particularly strong when it comes to children, both because they are not able to protect themselves and because their suffering may compromise their physical, emotional and intellectual development.

But even before entering the field of child welfare, I had an inkling that the dominant voices in child welfare reform, though liberal, did not agree with me in prioritizing the protection of children. I learned that some of the most prominent child advocacy organizations actually place a higher priority on keeping families together than on ending the suffering of maltreated children.

I’ve puzzled over this seeming paradox for a long time. Now, a recent issue of the William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal has helped me understand it. In March 2015, a group of scholars got together to discuss “The Liberal Dilemma in Child Welfare Reform.” Papers based on these talks, along with a discussion by Daniel Heimpel, publisher of The Chronicle of Social Change, are included in the March issue of the Journal.

All of the participants in the symposium agreed that America’s child welfare system is parent-centered rather than child-centered. We bend over backwards to keep children in their homes, even when their lives are in danger. The result, as the Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities report suggests, is that at least half of the families of children who die from maltreatment were previously known to CPS agencies.

In the 1990s, the majority in Congress was convinced that the bias toward family preservation had gone too far. Laws were passed to rectify the balance and ensure that children could be removed from unsafe situations. But as symposium participant Cassie Bevan explained, these laws have not been fully implemented because of opposition to this approach by child welfare agencies and judges.

Elizabeth Bartholet, director of the Child Advocacy Program at Harvard Law School, wrote about a “corrupt policy-research merger whereby programs chosen on the basis of ideology are then supported by research designed not to test, but instead to prove, the programs’ efficacy.” For example, the extreme emphasis on family preservation in the 1980s was bolstered by evaluations of these short-term programs that were later shown to be flawed.

Of course, children should be kept at home or returned there if there are services that can be put in place to address the threats to their safety. But anyone who has worked in the child welfare system knows that many of these parents have deep-seated mental health and substance abuse issues that cannot be resolved within the time frame required by law and a child’s need for permanency.

The symposium participants disagreed about where the parent-centered emphasis in our child welfare system comes from. But several participants, including Bartholet and William and Mary Professor James Dwyer, agreed that it stems from the nexus between poverty, racism and child maltreatment. Liberals are reluctant to further penalize parents whose problems in parenting ultimately stem from poverty and racism by taking away their children.

I believe that society has a deep moral responsibility to put an end to poverty and racism. But in the meantime, true liberals cannot advocate holding abused and neglected children hostage in homes where they are suffering and cannot thrive. A child suffering from maltreatment should not be penalized by having to remain there because of being poor or black. Leaving such a child in such a home when services to correct the problems are not provided or do not exist will only prolong the cycle of poverty-related abuse and neglect into the next generation.

This column was published in the Chronicle of Social Change on June 15, 2016.

ICWA Puts Tribes’ Interests Ahead of Children’s

On November 26, 2013, a Spirit Lake Indian reservation woman was sentenced to 30 years in prison for throwing her step-grandaughter down an embankment and killing her. Lauryn Whiteshield and her sister had been removed from a non-Indian foster family and placed with her grandfather and his wife, despite her long history of child neglect.

That’s because the Spirit Lake Sioux Tribe had invoked their powers under the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) to place the children on the reservation.

Congress passed ICWA in 1978 to alleviate a national crisis, the wholesale separation of Indian children from their families. But in attempting to right a wrong, Congress created a new threat to the safety and well-being of Indian children. It established a weaker set of protections for Native American children and subordinated their best interest to that of the tribe.

The problem with ICWA begins with how it defines an “Indian child.” Any child who is either a member of an Indian tribe or is eligible for membership in a tribe, and is the biological child of a tribe member, is considered an Indian child. While some tribes require a certain percentage of Indian ancestry, others (like the nation’s largest tribe, the Cherokees) will accept those with any amount of Indian blood.

There is no requirement that the child or parent has any connections to the tribe or its culture. That’s how tribes end up deciding the fate of children whose Native American ancestry is less than two percent and who have no social or cultural connection to a tribe.

ICWA gives Indian tribal courts jurisdiction over child custody cases involving Indian children living on a reservation. For other Indian children, the state court is required to transfer the case to the tribal court if either parent, or the child’s Indian custodian, requests it.

If the case remains in the state court, the tribe also has the right to intervene at any time in the proceedings, and can request transfer to tribal court. That’s what happened to Lauryn Whiteshield.

ICWA requires a higher standard of proof to remove an Indian child or terminate the rights of an Indian parent. An agency requesting that an Indian child be placed in foster care or adoption must prove that “active efforts” were made to prevent the breakup of the family.

This standard is more difficult to meet than the “reasonable efforts” required for all children under Title IV-E of the Social Security Act. This makes it more likely that Indian children will be left in dangerous homes.

If the court orders a foster care or adoption placement, ICWA establishes an order of preferences, with a member of the child’s extended family being the first choice for both foster care and adoption. For an adoption, the second choice if a member of the extended family is unavailable is other members of the child’s tribe and the third choice is other family members.

This makes it easy for tribes to take children away from adoption-minded foster families that may have raised them from infancy.

ICWA is often used to override the preferences of one or both parents about who will raise their child. In 1985, twin babies were born to Choctaw parents living on a Mississippi reservation. The parents drove 200 miles to give birth, hoping to escape tribal court jurisdiction, and chose a non-Indian adoptive family. The tribe brought the case to the Supreme Court, which upheld the jurisdiction of the tribal court.

Ultimately, the tribe returned the babies to the adoptive family chosen by the parents. But the tribe’s right to overrule parents on custody for their children continues in effect.

New guidelines issued by the Bureau of Indian Affairs attempt to dispel any doubt about whether the child’s best interests should play a role in Indian child welfare proceedings. They state that courts should not “conduct an independent analysis of the best interests of the child” in making decisions about foster care or adoptive placements, because placement in an Indian home is presumed to be in an Indian child’s best interests.

The Goldwater Institute recently filed a class-action suit in Arizona that “challenges the constitutionality of ICWA requirements that make the best interests of an Indian child less important than the desires of an Indian tribe when deciding foster care or adoption placements.”

ICWA is an example of a well-meaning policy with unintended consequences. Instead of protecting Indian children, ICWA subordinated their interests to that of the tribe.

Earlier this month, the Obama Administration announced its continuing commitment to robust enforcement of ICWA. It’s unfortunate that it did not instead propose amending ICWA to give Indian children the same protections as their non-Indian peers.

This column was published in the Chronicle of Social Change on May 10, 2016.

Residential Schools: A Promising Alternative to Foster and Group Homes

In her book, Garbage Bag Suitcase, former foster youth Shenandoah Chefalo describes her childhood of abuse, followed by three years in foster care with a family that was more stable, but no more caring or supportive, than her birth family.

In her final chapter, she suggests an alternative to the standard model of foster care that is failing so many young people: boarding schools for foster youth. As an example, she cites the Crossnore School, a nonprofit residential foster care home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina that was founded in 1913.

Crossnore supports children from the ages of one to 21, and is known for accepting large sibling groups. Currently, 83 children live in 11 cottages, each supervised by professional “cottage parents,” and three new cottages are under construction, which will bring the capacity up to 110. This new “Young Children’s Village” will include a ropes-based adventure playground, which will provide a full-body workout while kids are having fun.

Crossnore residents attend the public charter school on campus along with students from the community. All students receive therapy and medical care on site. Many students receive tutoring as well. In the summer, there is a full slate of activities, including day trips, special classes like hiking and baking, and a one-week beach trip.

The school offers 19 kinds of therapy, including Trauma Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, play therapy, family therapy, group therapy and equine-assisted therapy. Each cottage has a dog, so residents can experience the therapeutic effects of nurturing a pet. A case manager for each student serves as the hub of her team, mediating between the many adults involved with the child, taking her to appointments and supervising visits with birth families.

In 2014, Crossnore adopted the Sanctuary Model, and became one of 100 certified Sanctuary Organizations worldwide. The Sanctuary Model certification process is designed to “strengthen an organization’s commitment to the maintenance of a trauma-informed culture.”

Crossnore’s quality program pays off. Nearly all of its seniors graduate every year. Of last year’s nine graduates, three are working, four are in community college and two are in four-year college. 

Crossnore is not the only residential school that also serves as a foster care placement, but there aren’t many. The Children’s Home in Winston Salem provides a similar program, and recently merged with Crossnore. The Boys and Girls Home of North Carolina is another residential school and foster placement. California’s San Pascual Academy is a residential campus for foster teens with a capacity to serve 184 youths.

The economics of Crossnore explain why there are not many more such programs. The program spent about $5.5 million in fiscal year 2015, of which only about $3.5 million came from government payments. Private donations covered the rest.

A residential school like Crossnore has multiple advantages over a foster home. Professional house parents combined with case managers give children the support they need. The size of the cottages allows large sibling groups to be placed together. Coordination between home, school and mental health services is assured. Rather than the poor schools and mental health providers that are often their lot, foster kids receive quality services tailored to their needs.

We need more programs like Crossnore, but the current climate in most states and at the federal level is not friendly to residential schools. The bias against residential placements (which provides a convenient excuse for spending less) is getting stronger and may soon be enshrined in federal law.

The current focus on preventing the need for foster care, while extremely important, has beendiverting attention from the need for healing placements for those who must be removed.

The expense of these programs is another barrier. Yet the savings from increased educational attainment and decreases in crime probably far outweigh the increased cost. It is my hope that governments and private funders will see the need for and lifesaving potential of these programs and will choose to invest in starting new ones.

This column was published in the Chronicle of Social Change on May 2, 2016.

Child Maltreatment Prevention Should Start Before Conception

April is Child Abuse Prevention Month, and the recent report from the Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities (CECANF) urges the nation to stop waiting for a child to be maltreated before intervening with services and supports.

But when talking about child abuse prevention, CECANF and most others miss one of the most crucial opportunities: before a child is even conceived.

Sarah Brown, founder of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, gave a lecture last December that made this point forcefully. She reports being struck by “the total absence of pregnancy planning, spacing and prevention in virtually all discussions of how to improve overall child and family well being …” As she put it, many groups concentrate on services after the child is born, but rarely do they mention the time when decisions about whether and when it should take place.

There is no lack of research on the connection between pregnancy timing and child maltreatment. There is a strong association between child maltreatment and the mother’s age at the birth of the child. California researchers Emily Putnam-Hornstein and Barbara Needell found that babies born to mothers who were under 20 were twice as likely to be reported to child protective services (CPS) by the child’s fifth birthday as those born to mothers 30 or older.

Among children referred to CPS by age five, almost 18 percent were born to a teenage mother and 50 percent were born to a mother younger than 25. Among children with no CPS contact, only 8 percent were teen births and 30 percent were born to a mother under 25.

There is also strong evidence that family size and child spacing are correlated with child maltreatment. Putnam-Hornstein and Needell found that children who fell third or higher in the birth order were more than twice as likely to be the subject of a report as first children. Moreover, a large study published in 2013 found that women who gave birth to another child within 24 months of the previous child were 80 percent more likely to have a substantiated CPS report.

And setting the research aside for a moment: Anyone who has worked for or with CPS, or in foster care, knows the prevalence of larger families with closely-spaced children in the system.

So if it is not the lack of research, why do supporters of child maltreatment prevention usually fail to include family planning and contraception in their suggestions? In part, Sarah Brown says of child advocates in general, it may be that they simply don’t think of it. But in large part, says Brown, it is because they fear getting in trouble and becoming mired in controversy. In addition to the fear of bringing abortion into the discussion, this discussion makes many people uncomfortable because of fears of conjuring up past attempts to control the population of poor or minority groups.

But family planning and contraception need to be included in the child maltreatment discussion. We know so little about what works after birth to prevent child maltreatment, but we have made great progress in teen pregnancy prevention. Many factors, including economic recession, MTV shows, and fear of HIV may have contributed to the decline in teen pregnancy and parenthood.

But public and private initiatives to provide education and availability of effective contraception have probably played a part as well. Imagine if we could expand that work to focus on young adult women as well. Imagine a public health campaign explaining the benefits of planning, spacing and timing pregnancy to prospective mothers “so that your children can be healthier and have a better chance in life.”

CECANF Commissioner Judge Patricia Martin is to be commended for including teen pregnancy prevention, especially in high-poverty neighborhoods and among youth in foster care, as one of the recommendations in her dissenting report. She stresses the inclusion of young men in these efforts. It is too bad the main report did not include this recommendation.

This column was published in the Chronicle of Social Change on April 26, 2016.