The foster care crisis in Massachusetts: common sense solutions, not ideology, are needed

An investigation by the Boston Globe’s Kay Lazar has drawn public attention to the foster care placement crisis in Massachusetts. The opioid epidemic has led to a spike in the demand for foster homes, but the Department of Children and Family Services (DCF) has been unable to recruit and retain enough foster parents. Therefore, children newly removed from their homes often have no place to spend the night, sometimes spending it in a car with a social worker awaiting a call to say a bed is available up to 100 miles away.

And the trouble doesn’t end with the first overnight placement. One third of foster children in Massachusetts were moved at least three times during their first year in the system. According to one social worker quoted, relatively healthy children come out of care with behavioral problems and attachment issues due to their devastating experiences in foster care.

Lazar and her paper are to be commended for making the public aware of these unacceptable flaws in the Commonwealth’s treatment of its most vulnerable citizens. But by interviewing only a small group of child welfare experts with similar perspectives, Lazar missed some of the obvious common sense solutions to these problems.

Take the lack of emergency foster homes, which results in many children spending their first night in foster care in a car waiting for a bed. There is an obvious solution, and that is to establish temporary regional shelters so that every child can find a warm bed and a welcoming hug on what may be the most traumatic night of their lives.

So why was this solution not mentioned? Many states have seen their emergency shelters become warehouses for children for whom a placement cannot be found. As a result, some states have closed these facilities–instead of improving them. But these closures don’t solve the problem that homes are not available.

Smarter jurisdictions, often working with nonprofits, use emergency shelters for children newly removed from their homes. A nonprofit called Amara operates temporary shelters for children who have just been removed from their homes in Seattle and Tacoma, Washington. The shelters are a haven for traumatized children where they receive loving care from staff and volunteers. And they offer social workers a much needed three to five days to find a foster home that is the best match available–not just the first to answer the phone.

There is a no obvious solution to the overall shortage of foster home beyond the first few nights of a placement. Lazar rightly draws attention to the bad treatment that foster parents receive from an agency that fails to provide information about the children who are placed with them, does not provide the therapy and services the children need, pays them too little to support the kids, doesn’t train them in caring for traumatized children, and requires them to adhere to conflicting and outdated regulations. By all means these problems must be fixed–for the sake of the children as well as the foster parents. But it is unlikely that they will rectify the shortfall of foster homes. More creative and courageous solutions are necessary. 

Providing free housing and/or salaries for foster parents might help increase the supply of foster homes. An Oklahoma nonprofit is building larger homes where foster families can live rent-free in exchange for taking in larger sibling groups.  SOS Children’s Villages Illinois operates several foster care communities in which full-time professional foster parents care for large sibling groups of up to six children. Child welfare agencies should work in partnership with local nonprofits to develop such programs. 

But Massachusetts needs to face the facts. There will never be enough high-quality foster homes for all the children who need them. As Stan Rosenberg, former President of the Massachusetts Senate and a former foster youth, wrote in the Globe,  many foster parents are loving and caring but others are in it for the stipend and the children placed with them will suffer the consequences. A high-quality group home or residential facility can be much more nurturing and family-like than a low-quality foster home.  More such facilities (often known as “congregate care”) are needed in order to prevent our abused and neglected children and youth being re-traumatized by repeated moves between foster homes.

Children who have trouble finding permanent placements tend to be older and/or have more severe behavioral, neurological and cognitive problems which stem from many years of trauma, deprivation, and often in utero substance abuse. Some of these children cannot thrive in traditional foster homes, which are not trained to deal with their difficult behaviors. There are many high-quality group homes around the country where dedicated staff devote their lives to changing the trajectories of these wounded children.

But the political climate has been opposed to such facilities for a long time, as Child Welfare Monitor has often discussed. Congregate care facilities  have been closing for years as states have deprived them of funding and stopped sending children there–even if they have to be left in dangerous homes, placed in barely-adequate foster homes, or bounced from home to home. The percentage of children in Massachusetts placed in congregate care facilities decreased from 22% in 2007 to 17% in 2017. 

The bias against congregate care has been enshrined in the Family First and Prevention Services Act, (FFPSA) passed as Title VII of the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018. Under FFPSA, states will no longer be able to draw upon federal funds for congregate care except for children who have been judged too disturbed to thrive in a foster home by a “qualified professional.” These facilities must meet new criteria for licensure, and congregate care placement will be reviewed at every court hearing. Moreover, a child cannot remain in one of these placements for more than 12 consecutive months (or 6 months for a child under 13) without written approval from the head of the child welfare agency.

Sadly, ideology is reinforced by the reluctance of public officials to ask their taxpayers to find room in their hearts to fund high-quality facilities to these neediest of all children. Such facilities are much more expensive than foster homes and many have been starved out of existence around the country.

Instead of discussing the need for more congregate placements, Lazar quotes advocates who state that more children could be maintained in their own homes if adequate services could be provided to their parents. Yet, as she herself states, about 80% of the children in DCF’s caseload are living at home while the agency attempts to help their families avoid foster care. A spate of deaths of children in DCF-supervised homes since 2014 has distracted the agency from any attempt to reform foster care. Do we really want to put more children at risk to avoid spending money to nurture and house our most vulnerable children?