How to prevent more Hart cases

In my last post, I discussed the tragic case of the six children adopted by Jennifer and Sarah Hart. The entire family perished in the crash of their SUV off a cliff in California on March 26. Multiple system gaps resulted in the failure to rescue these children before their tragic death. Below are some suggestions for filling these gaps so that children do not continue to suffer and die in abusive homes.

Improve Vetting of Potential Adoptive Families. The second set of Hart children were adopted despite the fact that the parents were investigated for abuse of one of the first set of children. Moreover, Minnesota staff told Oregon DHS staff that Texas arranged many adoptions through a particular agency, even when not supported by Minnesota’s child welfare agency. We need to know more about how adoptions could be organized against the wishes of the child welfare agency in the adoptive child’s state, and whether such adoptions continue to occur.
Monitor adoption subsidy recipients. The Harts received almost $2,000 a month in adoption subsidies–money that clearly enabled them to live. All agencies paying adoption subsidies should verify periodically that the children are alive and well and still living in the adoptive home. Submission of an annual doctor visit report, and/or an annual visit by a social worker could be used for such verification.
Regulate homeschooling. The Harts removed all their children from school after their child abuse case was closed in Minnesota. The Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE), an advocacy group for homeschooled children, recommends barring from homeschooling parents convicted of child abuse, sexual offenses, or other crimes that would disqualify them from employment as a school teacher. CRHE also recommends flagging other at-risk children (such as those with a history of CPS involvement) for additional monitoring and support and requiring an annual assessment of each homeschooled child by a mandatory reporter.
Adopt universal mandatory reporting and educate the public about reporting child maltreatment. The Harts’ neighbors in Washington witnessed clear indicators of maltreatment months before the family went off a cliff. If they had reported their observations earlier, the children might have been saved. However, Minnesota and Oregon reporters were more conscientious, and the children were failed by CPS; hence the next recommendation.
Revamp the investigative process. We have seen that social workers in Minnesota and Oregon had a very clear idea of the dynamics of the Hart household, and how the parents manipulated professionals to shift all blame to the children. Nevertheless they were not able to act on this knowledge to protect the children. There are several reasons that arise from the characteristics of child protective services in most or all states. First, action such as opening an in-home case or removing a child is contingent on the abuse allegation being confirmed. But that is very difficult to do, especially when children deny the abuse, as abused children often do. It is likely that many actual cases of abuse are not substantiated. Research has found little or no difference in future reports of maltreatment of children who were the subject of substantiated or unsubstantiated reports. We need to move away from substantiation as a trigger for action to protect children. Another problem is the bizarre distinction between risk and safety which is made in most or all CPS systems. That children could be labeled “safe” even when at risk, as happened in Oregon, is obviously ridiculous. This false distinction has contributed to the deaths of Adrian Jones in Kansas, Yonatan Aguilar in California, and doubtless hundreds of other children around the country.
Establish stricter criteria for case closure. In Minnesota, one or two cases were opened and the Harts were required to participate in services. We know in retrospect that none of the services worked to change the Harts’ parenting style. It appears that the parents continued their pattern of abuse and food deprivation while the services were being provided. State and local agencies need to revise their criteria for case closure to make sure that they are not leaving the children in the same unsafe situation they were in before the case opened. Agencies must be required to do a rigorous assessment of the children’s safety, which includes checking in with all service providers as well as the children and other professionals who have contact with them.
Encourage doctors to err in the direction of protecting children. The similar response from doctors in Minnesota and Oregon to these malnourished children (saying that they don’t know if there is a reason for concern because lack of historical data) suggests a pattern of reluctance by medical professionals even to express concern that abuse or neglect may be occurring. For a doctor to say that he or she has no concerns because of the lack of information is backwards. Pediatricians need to express concern until given reason to believe otherwise. The American Academy of Pediatrics should issue guidance to this effect, but this needs to be followed up by consequences for doctors who fail to protect their patients.

The Hart children can be seen as victims of a “perfect storm”–adoption by unqualified parents, home schooling, neighbors who failed to report, history not shared between states, and inadequate investigations. But it only takes one system failure to kill a child or scar one for life. All of these systemic gaps must be addressed, so that all children can have a real childhood and grow to be happy, productive adults.

This post was updated based on new records from Minnesota discussed in a later post on April 27, 2018

Multiple System Failures Allowed Hart Children to Die

On March 26, an SUV filled carrying a family plunged off a cliff. The car belonged to Jennifer and Sarah Hart. Their bodies, and those of three of their children, were found on the scene. Three children are still missing although another body found in the ocean may be one of the children. Initial coverage focused on the fact that the family consisted of two white mothers and six adopted black children. The family had had an earlier brush with fame when one of the boys was in a viral photograph hugging a police officer at a Ferguson protest.

As the days passed, disturbing details came to light. Days before the crash, Washington Child Protective Services (CPS) had opened an investigation of the family after a neighbor called the child abuse hotline. We eventually learned the family had a history of abuse reports. Then we learned that the crash appeared intentional, and probably triggered by the CPS report.

With each new discovery, we learned of another systemic failure to protect these vulnerable children. The Hart case brings together several common themes found in many cases of severe child maltreatment. Each of these themes highlights a different gap in the system that is supposed to protect our children.

Adoption: All six Hart children were adopted from foster care in Texas: three in 2006 and the next three in 2009. It is not that being adopted makes children more likely to be abused. Indeed, one Dutch study indicated adopted children were less likely to be abused than children growing up in their biological families. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that adopted children are overrepresented among children who are severely abused or neglected, at least in homeschool settings. Many of these cases involve common elements, including locking children up in a room, withholding food, and isolating the child by homeschooling or other means, all of which were present in this case. One possible explanation for this pattern focuses on the traumatic backgrounds of many adoptive children, which may lead to behaviors that adoptive parents are not prepared to deal with. While they may start out with good intentions, they end up resorting to punitive and eventually abusive parenting to control the undesired behaviors.

Writer Stacey Patton has described a “white savior attitude” among some white parents who adopt black children from the U.S. or abroad. These parents “wear their transracial adoption as a status symbol.” These adoptive parents often post on social media about their extraordinary efforts to deal with their children’s emotional and intellectual challenges that they attribute to the deficiencies of their birth parents.” The Harts fit this pattern. According to the Oregonian, the Harts often said their children suffered a multitude of early childhood behavioral and developmental issues that made parenting a challenge. Jennifer Hart also polished her image as an ideal mom who gave her underprivileged children a beautiful life. She frequently posted on Facebook portraying an idyllic family life full of trips, celebrations, community service, and events like the Ferguson rally in which Devonte sported a sign offering “Free Hugs.” When adoption is all about the parents, and the children become part of their public image, a bad outcome is not surprising.

There is reason for concern about the vetting process the Harts received when adopting the children. The Hart kids were among the 300 to 400 Texas children adopted each year by out of state foster parents, often because they are harder to place because they are in large sibling groups or have special needs. The Harts would have been vetted by a Minnesota agency, which would have submitted their home study to Texas for approval. After a child visit, the children would have probably moved in with the Harts for a six-month trial period. A Texas agency spokesman told the San Antonio Express-News that during the trial period for out-of-state adoptions, the out-of-state agency would be monitoring the family and reporting back to Texas. But in September 2008, probably during the trial period for the second adoption, Hannah Hart was asked about a bruise in her arm. She reported that her mother hit her with a belt. Police and social services interviewed the mothers, who denied the beating and said she had fallen down the stairs. Nevertheless, the second adoption went through. We need to know whether Texas was informed of this investigation.

Once the adoption was finalized, there was nobody monitoring the Hart children, even though Texas continued to pay for their care. The San Antonio Express-News reports that Jennifer Hart received nearly $1,900 per month in adoption subsidies from the State of Texas. The paper estimates that she collected a total of $270,000 from the state for caring for the six children during the time they lived with her. Unfortunately, children who receive adoption subsidies are not monitored to ensure that they are being properly cared for, are still in the home, or are even alive. Such monitoring has not been imposed even in the wake of cases in which adoptive parents like Renee Bowman and Edward and Linda Bryant have fraudulently collected adoption subsidies after killing–or allegedly killing–their children.

Home Schooling. On April 11, 2011, Sarah Hart made a plea agreement a week after pleading guilty to physical abuse of a six year old child. The next day, all six children were removed from school, never to attend again. The Harts joined a long line of abusive parents that removed their children from school after a brush with CPS. The notorious Turpin family, who gained worldwide attention this winter when one of their 13 malnourished children escaped confinement in their home, who also liked to dress their children in matching tee shirts. As the Coalition for Responsible Home Education points out, Pennsylvania is the only state that bars convicted child abusers from homeschooling, and then only if the conviction is in the past five years. No state has any mechanism to identify cases where parents remove a child from school after a child protective services case is closed, or after a series of child abuse allegations.

Failure to report: At a festival in Oregon, the Oregonian reports that one acquaintance observed the mothers become enraged after she brought Devonte and Sierra back to her parents from a day out, bearing food. Sarah Hart grabbed Sierra’s arm, inflicting a bruise that lasted for days, and both mothers chastised her for “being selfish” and not sharing. Sierra told the woman that she often got in trouble for talking to people her mothers did not know. But the neighbor did not report the disturbing incident. The Hart family’s neighbors in Washington, Dana and Bruce DeKalb, told reporters that they had suspected that something was not right in the Hart household. A few months after the Harts moved to Washington, the DeKalbs reported that Hannah Hart came to their door at 1:30 AM. She had jumped out of a second-story window and ran through bushes to their home, begging them to protect her from her abusive parents. The neighbors noted that she was missing her front teeth and appeared to be about seven years old, although she was twelve. The other children also appeared small and thin when the family came over the next morning.

The DeKalbs told the Washington Post that they considered calling CPS but “tried to overlook the incident.” In the next eight months, the DeKalbs saw Devonte doing chores but never saw the other children outside. About a week before the crash, Devonte began coming to the DeKalbs’ house requesting food and saying that his parents had been withholding food as punishment. The visits escalated from daily to three times a day. It was only after a week of such visits that they finally called CPS, setting in motion the the escape attempt that ended in the fatal crash.The DeKalbs’ hesitation echoes that of the Turpins’ neighbors, who never reported the many red flags they saw.

Biased Investigative Process: As mentioned above, Oregon CPS was unable to substantiate a report from a family friend that the Harts were punishing the children by withholding food and emotionally abusing them. CPS interviewed the children but told the friend that it appeared they had been “coached” to lie, so there was no evidence to substantiate the allegation. The question is, why were the parents given enough warning that the children could be coached? This is only one example of how the system is biased toward parents’ rights over children’s safety.

Multiple systemic gaps allowed the abuse of the Hart children to continue until it culminated in the deaths of the entire family. A variety of policy changes are needed to address the gaps highlighted by this tragic case. I will discuss these in my next post.

Why Kansas let Adrian and Evan die

Image: kansascity.com

Image: cbsnews.com

Dianne Keech, a former Kansas child welfare official and currently a child safety consultant, was asked by the Wichita Eagle and Fox News to analyze case files regarding the highly-publicized deaths of Adrian Jones and Evan Brewer. I asked Ms. Keech to prepare a guest blog post about the factors contributing to the deaths of Evan and Adrian. She prepared a ten-page document, which you can access here. Below, I highlight some of her conclusions.

Calls to the Kansas child abuse hotline began when Adrian Jones was only a few months old. There were 15 screened-in reports for Adrian before he was six years old. Out of 15 reports in total that KCF investigated, Keech found that there was only one substantiated allegation of abuse, and that was based on an investigation by law enforcement. After Adrian was removed from his mother’s custody due to lack of supervision and placed with his father and stepmother, calls alleged that there were guns all over the house, that the stepmother was high on drugs, that Adrian had numerous physical injuries, that he was being choked by his father and stepmother, and that he was beaten until he bled. Adrian’s father and stepmother consistently denied every allegation and the agency did nothing to verify their stories. Adrian’s body was found in a livestock pen on November 20, 2015. It had been fed to pigs that were bought for this purpose. It was later found that Adrian’s father and stepmother had meticulously documented his abuse through photos and videos. They are serving life terms for his murder.

DCF received six separate reports of abuse of little Evan Brewer between July 2016 (when he was two years old) and May 2017. These reports involved methamphetamine abuse by the mother, domestic violence, and physical abuse of Evan. Only three of these reports were assigned for investigation and none were substantiated. In the last two months of Evan’s life, the agency received two reports of near-fatal abuse, one alleging that he hit his head and became unconscious in the bathtub and the other alleging that his mother’s boyfriend choked Evan and then revived him. The first of these reports received no response for six days and the investigator apparently accepted the mother’s claim that the child was out of state. The investigator of the second report also never laid eyes on Evan. On September 22, a landlord found Evan’s body encased in concrete on his property. Horrific photos and videos documented Evan’s months of torture by his mother and her boyfriend. His mother and her boyfriend have been charged with first-degree murder.

Looking at Root Problems

Keech believes that there are three root problems that led to Adrian and Evan’s deaths: a dangerous ideology, the pernicious influence of a well-heeled foundation, and faulty outcome measures used by the federal government. These are discussed in order below.

Dangerous Ideology: Signs of Safety is a child protection practice framework that was never officially adopted by Kansas. But Keech alleges that its philosophy has permeated all aspects of child welfare practice in the state. The Signs of Safety framework, according to its manual, seeks to avoid “paternalism,” which “occurs whenever the professional adopts the position that they know what is wrong in the lives of client families and they know what the solutions are to those problems.” Signs of safety links paternalism with the concept of subjective truth, citing “the paternalistic impulse to establish the truth of any given situation.” According to Keech, this implication that all truth is subjective means that investigating “facts” is a worthless task. Workers are encouraged to “engage” parents, not investigate them. Keech gives numerous examples of how this practice approach left Evan and Adrian vulnerable to further abuse. When Adrian’s younger sister was brought to the hospital with seizures, she was diagnosed with a subdural head trauma that was non-accidental. But when Adrian’s stepmother insisted that Adrian inflicted the injury with a curtain rod, DCF believed her and did not substantiate the allegation–not even finding her neglectful for letting the child be hurt. When DCF received a report that Evan’s mother was using methamphetamine and blowing marijuana in his face, they accepted her denials and closed the case with no drug test required.

Along with a new practice framework, Kansas adopted a new definition of safety. As in many other states, safety in Kansas has been redefined as the absence of “imminent danger.” This is in contrast to “risk,” which connotes future danger to the child. As a result, children can be paradoxically found to be at high risk of future harm but safe–which happened twice with Adrian. (He was found to be at “moderate” risk three times.) As long as a child is deemed “safe,” the child cannot be removed from home. The decoupling of risk from safety explains why both Adrian and Evan were found to be “safe” 18 times in total, when they were anything but. This is a common situation in many other states. “Risk,” on the other hand, triggers an offer of services, which can be refused, which is what Adrian’s father and stepmother did when he was found to be at risk. I’ve written about the case of Yonatan Aguilar in California, who was found four times to be at high risk of future maltreatment but “safe.” His parents refused services. He spent the last three years of his life locked in a closet until he died.

Pernicious Influence: Casey Family Programs is a financial behemoth with total assets of $2.2 billion. Its mission is to “provide and improve, and ultimately prevent the need for, foster care.'”Over a decade ago, Casey set a goal of reducing foster care by 50% by the year 2020. Casey works in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, two territories and more than a dozen tribal nations. It provides financial and technical assistance to state and local agencies to support its vision. It conducts research, develops publications, provides testimony to promote its views to public officials around the country. As Keech puts it, “There is not a corner of child welfare in the United States where Casey is not a highly influential presence.” Keech has experienced firsthand Casey’s efforts to pressure Kansas to reduce its foster care rolls. At a meeting in that Keech attended in 2015, Casey used “peer pressure” to “shame one region for having a higher foster care placement rate. Casey adopted and promoted the Signs of Safety approach discussed above.

Faulty Federal Outcome Measures: The Child and Family Services Review (CFSR) is an intense federal review of the entire child welfare system. If a state does not pass the review (and no state has passed, to date) then the state must agree with the federal government on a Program Improvement Plan (PIP) or lose funding. Keech feels that the federal reviews can be manipulated by states to improve their outcomes at a cost to child safety. For example, one of the two measures of child safety is timely initiation of investigations. When a hotline screens out a report (as was done three times with Evan) or a case manager fails to report a new allegation (which was done three times while Adrian had an open services case) the agency does not need to worry about timely initiation of an investigation. Another CFSR outcome is “reduce recurrence of child abuse and neglect, ” which is measured by calculating the percentage of children with a substantiated finding of maltreatment who have another substantiated finding within 12 months of the initial finding. This outcome can be improved by failing to investigate reports, or investigating them but failing to substantiate. Only one of the allegations involving Adrian was substantiated; three of the allegations involving Evan were not even investigated and the other three were not substantiated. By not substantiating allegations, Kansas reduces its recurrence rate.

The factors that Keech discusses are not unique to Kansas and are occurring around the country, in states including most of America’s children. All of these states should consider Keech’s recommendations for protecting Kansas’ children from the fate of Adrian and Evan. Most importantly, states need to prioritize the safety of children over and above any other consideration. The primary goal of child welfare must be the protection of children, not reducing entries to foster care. The artificial division between risk and safety should be eliminated and risk should be allowed to inform safety decisions. States must treat substance abuse, domestic violence, criminal activity, mental health issues, and parental history of maltreatment, as real threats to child safety. Workers must be empowered and required to gather all of the information needed to determine the truth of allegations, not rely on adults’ self-serving denials. And they must be allowed–and required–to request out of home placement when there is no other way to protect a child.

Childhood trauma: Let’s invest in prevention as well as treatment

Oprah childhood trauma — Image: jsonline.com

In the past decade, the world has discovered trauma. More and more “trauma-informed” models of care have been developed, and more and more institutions and government agencies have adopted these models, making a lot of money for their developers. Awareness of trauma and trauma-informed care took a big leap with its discovery by Oprah Winfrey, who highlighted in a 60 Minutes segment the adoption of the approach by her home town of Milwaukee.

Recognizing the impacts of trauma on human development and incorporating this knowledge into education, social services and other areas is important. But I wish we could devote as much attention to preventing trauma as we do to treating its effects.

Oprah’s story started with the case of Alisha Fox. She was removed from her mother at the age of one and placed in foster care. At the age of four, she was placed with her father, “a sometimes construction worker prone to heavy marijuana use and violent bouts of depression, “according to an article in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel which inspired Oprah’s story. For the next ten years, Alisha endured sexual abuse by her father. By the time she revealed the abuse and was removed from her father, she had a full-blown case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Whether Alisha’s trauma could have been prevented is not clear. The child welfare system may have erred in placing her with a deeply troubled and drug-abusing father. Alisha told the Journal Sentinel that she covered up the abuse until age 14. It is common for abused children not to report their abuse. One can’t help but wonder if there were warning signs that were disregarded. There is more awareness now of the signs of child sexual abuse than there was when Alisha was a child. So we just don’t know if Alisha’s years of trauma could have been cut short or if other children in her situation can nowadays be protected better than she was.

But we do know that many other children are abused for years while numerous red flags are disregarded. Nobody called the authorities about the 13 Turpin children as they were beaten, starved and chained for years in two states, even though family and neighbors in two states noted numerous warning signs. Texas neighbors considered reporting but had seen Turpin with a gun and feared “repercussions.” California neighbors perceived a peculiar and private family but claimed not to draw the conclusion that abuse was occurring.

Other traumatized children are reported numerous times but the system never intervenes to help them. We we often hear about these children only after they die. Evan Brewer was killed by his mother’s boyfriend after the Kansas child welfare agency had received eight reports that Evan was living in a home of chronic meth users and that the mother’s boyfriend was choking him until he blacked out. For every Evan Brewer who is finally killed, there must be many more Alisha Roths, who escape after years of suffering. Or like Congressional intern Tonisha Hora who wrote:

At 14 years old, my twin sister and I were removed from a kinship care placement and put in foster care after experiencing severe physical and verbal abuse for ten years…Child Protective Services often visited our home, sometimes multiple times a year, after they received reports from neighbors and teachers who we often asked for food to keep from being hungry or saw our bruises. We were scared children who wanted to run away every day in hopes of escaping. We were aware of how the system continued to fail us by never removing us from our home when they should have. To us, the signs were obvious, yet CPS workers always left us there. The abuse worsened after every CPS visit. That was the problem: they always left without us. Every time. For ten years.

There are things we can do to save the Alishas, Tonishas and Evans of this world before they end up with PTSD or die. We need universal mandatory reporting accompanied by a massive public education campaign about the signs of child abuse and the duty to report even a suspicion of maltreatment. We need enough funding to ensure that CPS workers are qualified and have time to make good decisions. And we need to ensure that the current bias by agencies around the country toward preserving and reunifying families does not go too far and leave children to suffer in silence.

It is great that cities, states and the federal government are investing in trauma-informed care. Lets hope that with the help of citizen input, they soon decide to allocate equal resources to save traumatized children before they suffer as long as Alisha did.

To retain social workers in child welfare, let them do their jobs

March is National Social Work month, and there has been a lot of talk about the importance of social workers. But for all of the gratitude, there certainly seems to be a lack of support for people willing to do the job.

In Oregon, caseworker turnover was 23% in 2016, according to an audit. About one-third of child welfare staff were in their first 18 months on the job. The Pennsylvania State Auditor cites county turnover rates for direct child welfare service personnel of up to 50%. There appear to be no national data on worker turnover, but news articles across the country continue to report high turnover rates as a major problem facing child welfare systems.

I know first-hand the reasons for high social worker turnover in child welfare. I abandoned an easier and better-paying career in policy research and analysis to become a child welfare social worker in the District of Columbia. I worked for a nonprofit agency that provided foster care and case management to children under the jurisdiction of the District’s Child and Family Services Agency. I lasted almost five years before giving up in exhaustion and despair.

At first, I loved my job. I loved the feeling of making a difference in children’s lives. I loved trying to find the right services to meet the needs of the children and their birth parents. I loved teaming with teachers and service providers to help my kids and parents achieve their goals. I was thrilled when I was able to find a family friend or relative who could provide a temporary or permanent home for a child.

Every day I came to work with a long to-do list. But I never knew if all my plans would be derailed by one of the frequent crises that characterize foster care. A foster parent was fed up with a defiant teenager and wanted her out today. A client said she wanted to die and had to be taken to the hospital, where we would wait for seven hours for her to be seen and evaluated. A client was sick and the foster parent couldn’t (or wouldn’t) pick her up from school. The best foster parents do the emergency pickups and doctor visits, but the need for foster parents meant the agency tolerated those who do little but provide room and board.

A huge part of my job involved driving. Some of my clients lived as far as 30 miles–over an hour’s drive in the congested Washington D.C. metro area–from the office. One was at a juvenile justice placement 90 miles away, just under the 100-mile limit so that I was still required to visit him twice a month.

When foster parents said they could not leave work and our overworked paraprofessionals were unavailable, I had to take my clients to the doctor, dentist, therapist, and for family visits. I spent as much as 10 hours a week driving and I logged as many as 300 miles per month. I don’t see how it makes sense for a person with a master’s degree in social work to serve as a paid driver.

Finally, there was the endless list of things I had to do that did not help my clients at all. All of these requirements stemmed from a reasonable goal but they were often badly designed and became ends in themselves.

A case in point is the Youth Transition Plan (YTP). This arose from the valid concern that many youth were becoming homeless after aging out of foster care. The YTP was supposed to be a road map that would be modified periodically by a youth’s team starting at the age of 15, to ensure that the youth would age out with education, skills, and a job. When I first started as a social worker, these plans were actually useful. For each area (like education and employment) the plan listed specific actions, who was responsible, and the deadline. When I met with my clients we would go through the plan and make sure we were on track, and it served as a basis for our periodic team meetings.

Unfortunately, the child welfare agency (CFSA) decided in 2014 that we had to use a new “Transition Toolkit,” which was 36 pages and consists of over ten separate forms. It is so complicated that the agency eventually distributed at two-page guide to social workers outlining all the steps involved in preparing a transition plan for a youth. Using the plan was so difficult that CFSA eventually stopped requiring completion of the individual forms and instead allowed workers to cut and paste a short section of each form together, essentially recreating the previous template, in a much more cumbersome and time-consuming form.

Another required but useless task adopted partway through my tenure was the “Child Needs Assessment” (CNA), a tool that collected information about the child’s characteristics and needs that is designed to match the child with an appropriate placement. This new requirement apparently stemmed from the realization that children were not being adequately matched to placements, resulting in frequent disruptions. Agency policy required that these be completed for every foster child after 30 days in care, then every 90 or 180 days, regardless of whether the child needed a new placement. Unless the worker happened to have a client needing a new placement exactly 90 or 180 days after the last “CNA” was filled out, she would also have to complete another one whenever a new placement was needed.

I do not know how many times I had to stop doing something important in order to spend an hour on the phone with a placement specialist in order to complete the “CNA” on time. The form was then filed away, never to be seen again. Three or six months later, the process started again with the same questions, because the placement workers started with a new form each time. The sad thing is that these frequent exercises did nothing to prevent the continued mismatches that occurred because a child came into care or was told to leave immediately–and was placed in the first or only available home.

A major priority of CFSA is to ensure that its wards get proper medical care. Butbecause this concern was taken far beyond its logical conclusion, wards of the city often were medically screened many times a year, or even several times a month, resulting in missed school for the clients and wasted time for staff. All children who come into foster care were screened before placement at CFSA’s in-house clinic to determine if they had any immediate medical needs. They had to return to the clinic within two weeks for a “comprehensive screening.” This is basically an annual physical without the shots, so a child also needing shots had to be brought in for a physical at a clinic or doctor’s office as well. Unfortunately, that physical could not be used to substitute for the screening at CFSA. Even if a child had had a physical within the last year and documentation had been obtained, the child was still required to have a the comprehensive screening at CFSA within 14 days of entering care.

Wait, it gets better. Every time the child changed placements, even if for a “respite placement” of a few days, he or she had to be screened again! One one occasion, a client entered a respite placement that was supposed to last for a month while her foster parent recovered from heart surgery. The respite changed into a regular placement when the original foster parent suffered complications and could not take the child back. Because the placement changed from respite to regular, the client had to have another screening at the clinic, even though she remained in the same home! And of course she had to miss school, and a social worker or family support worker had to spend four hours taking her.

Just to make things even more fun, the CFSA clinic closed from 1:00 to 2:00 for lunch every day no matter how many children are waiting. The last time I was there, it was with four children who were moving from a foster home to a kinship placement and we got there at 11:00—a bad choice. We waited for an hour before one of the children was seen. The clinic then closed for an hour. We could not go out to lunch because we might lose our place on line, but we were not allowed to eat at the facility. (We did anyway). I think we got out at 4:00. I certainly envied the clinic staff. They might be idle all morning until a client comes in at 12:30 but they still get to go for lunch at 1:00. I did not get many lunch breaks as a social worker.

Things were at their worst whenever one of my colleagues left the job. I would then get two or three more cases and things became totally out of control. For the next two to three months, until a replacement was hired and trained, proactive case management took a back seat to crisis management, and the stress became almost unbearable

I received frequent praise from supervisors, attorneys, and judges because my clients got the services they needed and my cases actually moved toward permanency. But after five years, I could no longer maintain the brutal pace and the constant stress.

For most child welfare social workers in D.C. around the country, there are simply not enough hours in a day to do the work that matters plus the work that is required, as described brilliantly in a column about a social worker in Maine. Too many hours have to be spent doing things that others should do, or completing meaningless forms that don’t help the clients.

At the same time, the proliferation of standards and requirements has engendered top- heavy bureaucracies, with a proliferation of managers and specialists to ensure that the standards get met. All of the specialists were supposed to be there to help us but they seemed to be more likely to make burdensome requests for information. I have not seen data on this, but it seems that the ratio of client-serving personnel to those who do not serve clients has been decreasing every year.

I worked in a private agency which had a supervisor and a program manager to manage five social workers and three case aides. I assume that a ratio of two managers to eight client-serving staff is hardly an approved model taught in schools of public administration. Of course the managers did not spend most of their time managing us. Instead, they were busy preparing performance reports and responding to demands for information from the CFSA.

To what extent is increased funding necessary to retaining social workers? Clearly it depends on the state or county. In many jurisdictions, the ridiculously low salaries and high caseloads can be remedied only by increased funding. In better funded systems like the District, a reallocation of resources away from managers and specialists, shiny new projects and initiatives, along with an elimination of meaningless requirements and paperwork, might allow for a great improvement without increased funding.

In addition, social workers must be relieved of the burdens that more properly belong to paraprofessionals and foster parents. While this would represent a more efficient use of taxpayer dollars, it might require increased outlays to ensure there are enough paraprofessionals and foster parents who are willing to act as parents and and not expect social workers to do their job for them.

Child Welfare Myths: Foster Care Is Worse than Remaining Home

As a field, child welfare seems to be particularly vulnerable to myths and misconceptions, which are often backed up by inaccurate interpretations of research. Unfortunately, these myths and misconceptions, when promoted by powerful and wealthy advocates, can be perpetuated and enshrined into policy. This is the beginning of an occasional series in which I attempt to deconstruct some of the most common myths. We start with one of the most common and potentially destructive–the myth that children left with their families always do better than they would if placed in foster care.

This myth was recently exhibited in all its glory by the Arizona Star as part of a major series on child welfare in that state. Here is how reporter Emily Bregel describes a frequently quoted study.

Research indicates that children left with their own troubled families fare better than those brought into the foster care system. A 2007 study found children whose families were investigated for abuse and neglect but remained home were less likely to become teenage parents or juvenile delinquents than similarly abused children who were removed from home. Those left at home were also more likely to have jobs as young adults, compared with children of similar backgrounds who were put in foster care.

This oft-misquoted study was published by Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Joseph Doyle in 2007. Doyle’s study has been used relentlessly–and often inappropriately–by advocates of reducing foster care placements. Doyle used a creative method to estimate the effects of foster care on Illinois children ages 5 to 15 who were receiving welfare and who were investigated for maltreatment for the first time between July 1, 1990 and June 31, 1991. He compared long-term outcomes (delinquency, teen motherhood, and employment) for the children assigned to investigators with higher removal rates to outcomes for those assigned to investigators with lower removal rates.

By comparing the outcomes for the two groups, Doyle could estimate the effects of being placed in foster care for children who were on the margin of placement–those who might have been placed by one investigator and not by another. For those children, Doyle found large differences favoring those children who were not removed from their homes. Doyle’s results say nothing about the children whose cases were unambiguous and who would have been placed (or not placed) regardless of the investigator.¹

Obviously, we cannot do a controlled experiment in which the same child is both placed and not placed in foster care to get at the true difference that it makes in children’s lives. Perhaps the best we can do is ask the children themselves. Researchers at the University of Chicago’s ChapinHall research center surveyed 727 sixteen and seventeen year olds who had in foster care in California for at least six months. When asked about their treatment by their parents or other caregivers before entering foster care, 36% reported that they were hit hard with a fist, kicked or slapped; 32.4% reported that a caregiver threw or pushed them; 28.4% reported missing school to do chores or care for a family member; 28.3% reported having to go without things they needed because the parent’s paycheck was spent on “adult interests,” 26.4% reported that their caregiver beat them up; and 24.9% reported that their caregiver failed to protect them from harm by someone else. A shocking 29.7% reported sexual molestation and 20.7% reported rape. Horribly, 18.6% reported that their caregiver tried to choke, smother or strangle them and 16.9% reported being locked in a closet or room for several hours or longer.

When asked about characteristics of the parent or caregiver they lived with before entering foster care, 48.8% reported inadequate parenting skills, 49.7% a criminal record, 48.3% drug abuse, 48.8 alcohol abuse, 33% reported that a caregiver was abused by or abused a spouse or partner and 25.6% said a caregiver had mental illness. In addition, a total of 56.9% reported that they either agreed, strongly agreed or very strongly agreed with the statement, “All in all I was lucky to be placed in the foster care system,” while only 17.6% disagreed.

The California survey suggests that more often than not, foster care is an improvement over families where children are unsafe, fearful, hungry, unsupervised, or unloved. However, I have learned from my own experience as a social worker that, while some children make the miraculous journey from hell to heaven when they are placed in the best foster homes, many foster homes are only slightly less chaotic and more nurturing than the homes from which the children have been plucked. The beatings, rapes, and hunger may be over but many children and youth continue to be neglected emotionally, educationally, and in other ways in foster care. When combined with the trauma caused by separation from family, it is not surprising that young people whose home lives were on the border between acceptable and unacceptable to an investigator may do worse in foster care than they would have done at home.

Neglect of children in foster care is inexcusable: these children need more than the usual nurturing in order to make up for the trauma and deprivation they may have already suffered in their birth homes. That’s why we need to increase the number of children placed with kin as well as other alternatives to traditional foster care, such as residential schools and hybrid arrangements that combine features of foster and group homes. But what we don’t need to do is abandon children in homes where they are not safe.

The misuse of Doyle’s article has supported the ideas that it is always better to reduce the number of children in foster care and that reduced care numbers are a prima facie indicator of improvement. It has led to many systems, like that of my home town of Washington DC, using reduction of foster care numbers as an outcome in itself–independent of trends in actual maltreatment. Using foster care reduction as an indicator of success fails to recognize that some placements are needed to keep children safe. It also means that jurisdiction, like New York City for example, may be claiming partial credit for the results of gentrification.

The misuse of research and data, especially when translated into policy, should disturb everyone regardless of their feelings about the particular issue. Doyle’s research suggests that when the case for removal is marginal, the default option might be to keep the child at home–with supervision and services by the state. It does not suggest that removal of a child from home is always the wrong decision or that programs should be rated solely on the ability to cut foster care rolls.

Another problem with making inferences from Doyle’s study about foster care today is the age of his data, which are from 1990 and 1991. Child welfare culture and practices have changed greatly since that time and the relevance of research from 25 years ago is questionable. ↩

Early Care and Education: A Missing Piece of the Child Welfare Puzzle

early-childhood-education-texas-tech-teaching-2 — Photo: Texas Tech University

Over the past two decades, the emphasis in child welfare policy has been on keeping children at home with their families instead of placing them in foster care. Starting in the 1990’s, states began obtaining federal waivers to use Title IV-E foster care funds for services designed to prevent children being placed in foster care. The use of these funds to prevent foster care placement has now entered permanent law through the Family First and Prevention Services Act (FFPSA), which became law as part of the Continuing Resolution signed by Donald Trump on February 9, 2018. FFPSA allows states to use Title IV-E funds to pay for mental health services, drug treatment, and parenting training for parents whose children would otherwise be placed in foster care.

But there is something missing in this list of allowed services, and that is services to the children themselves. Most notably, quality early care and education (ECE) holds great promise as a way both to keep at-risk children safe at home and to compensate for the developmental effects of past and ongoing neglect.

Providing ECE for infants, toddlers and preschool aged children involved with child welfare was supported in an excellent issue brief by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which received too little attention when it was published in November 2016. This brief explained how high-quality ECE can help promote both the safety and the well-being of children involved with the child welfare system.

Promoting Safety: For a parent to receive services under Title IV-E under FFPSA, the child must be a “candidate for foster care,” which means that the child is at imminent risk of being placed in foster care but who can remain safely at home provided that the parents receive the parenting, mental health, or drug treatment services. Obviously, there is always an element of guesswork in deciding if children can indeed remain safely at home. Many children have been injured or killed after a social worker decides they are safe at home with services.¹ Others end up being placed in foster care later because the abuse or neglect continues.

As described in the HHS issue brief, enrolling young children who are candidates for foster care in high-quality ECE provides an extra layer of protection against further abuse or neglect. There are several pathways that link ECE and child safety.

Participation in an ECE program with staff trained in detection of abuse and neglect ensures that more adults will be seeing the child and able to report on any warning signs of maltreatment.
Taking young children away from home for the day provides respite to the parent, gives them time to engage in services, and may reduce their stress, which contributes to child maltreatment.
Attending quality ECE all day improves child safety by reducing the amount of time the children spend with the parents.
Quality ECE programs that involve the parents can also improve child safety by teaching parents about child development, appropriate expectations, and good disciplinary practices. They may also connect parents with needed resources in the community and help them feel less isolated.

As documented in the HHS issue brief, multiple studies link ECE to reduced child maltreatment. The most striking findings were from Chicago’s Parent Child Centers: participants were half as likely as a similar population to be confirmed as a victim of maltreatment by age 18.

Promoting Emotional and Cognitive Development: Enrollment in high quality ECE would promote healthy brain development for children involved with child welfare. A large body of research demonstrates that ECE has positive effects on the early cognitive and socio-emotional development, school readiness and early academic success of children in the general population. And these effects are greater and long-lasting for children who are socioeconomically “at risk,” like most children involved in child welfare.

Many children involved with child welfare are victims of “chronic neglect,” which has been defined as “a parent or caregiver’s ongoing, serious pattern of deprivation of a child’s basic physical, developmental and/or emotional needs for healthy growth and development.” There is increasing evidence that chronic neglect has adverse impacts on children’s brain development, which may lead to lifetime cognitive, academic and emotional deficits.

High-quality ECE can be viewed as a “compensatory” service to make up for emotional and developmental neglect, as Doug Besharov, the first Director of the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, suggested back in 1988.

Unfortunately, there is already a national shortage of high quality ECE, and children involved with child welfare cannot simply be inserted into existing slots without displacing other children who may be equally at risk. The lack of high quality ECE is a problem that is far broader than the child welfare system.

The federal spending bill recently passed by Congress and signed by President Trump provides some new money for child care subsidies for low-income parents, but it is only $29 billion for a two-year-period. Child welfare advocates should ally with advocates of expanded ECE to support voter initiatives, such as those that have passed in various Colorado jurisdictions, to use public money to expand the number and quality of ECE slots. All at-risk children can benefit from quality ECE. And maltreated children need it perhaps most of all.

The Associated Press found 768 children who died of abuse or neglect over a six-year period while their families were being investigated or receiving services to prevent further maltreatment. According to the latest federal data compiled from 35 states, nearly 30% of the children who died had at least one prior contact with CPS in the previous three years. ↩

New book debunks prevailing child welfare myths

A new book by two leading child welfare researchers aims to elucidate the complex world of child welfare for the general public and policymakers. In After the Cradle Falls, Melissa Jonson-Reid and Brett Drake of Washington University provide a useful primer for the child welfare field. While they may be overly optimistic in assuming that a lay audience will pick up this book, it will certainly be useful for policymakers, journalists, students and advocates who want a general overview of child abuse and neglect, child welfare systems, and proposals for change.

Jonson-Reid and Drake make a particularly valuable contribution by highlighting myths and common misconceptions that are rife in the child welfare field. Among the common myths they debunk are the following:

“Neglect” is just another word for poverty, and parents become embroiled with Child Protective Services just because they are poor. Johnson-Reid and Blake explain that while poverty increases the risk of neglect, most parents who are poor do not neglect their children. Neglect is much more serious than a missed dental appointment or a messy house. Some neglect cases are extremely severe, even fatal. But even less severe cases can result in devastating lifetime consequences on brain development and the ability to form relationships.
Racial disproportionality in child welfare involvement is caused by racist decision-making by Child Protective Services (CPS). There is no dispute that African-American children are overrepresented in child welfare services and foster care compared to their share of the population. But Jonson-Reid and Drake conclude that “it is hard to find current empirical data that suggest that widespread bias within today’s CPS system is a significant driver of current disproportionality.” It would have helped if they had included the key research finding that actually debunked the myth about racism and disproportionality. As I have explained elsewhere, research has conclusively shown that higher Black representation in the child welfare system reflects higher rates of maltreatment in African-American families. This Black/White maltreatment gap may in turn reflect the relationship between race and poverty, as Jonson-Reid and Drake suggest.
State and local agencies have an incentive to take more kids into foster care. This trope was mentioned over and over again by supporters of the Family First and Prevention Services Act (FFPSA), which was signed into law on February 9, 2018. Jonson-Reid and Drake rightly give it short shrift. They explain that states are required to make “reasonable efforts” to keep children with their families and can be sanctioned by the federal government if they fail to document that they have made such efforts. The authors could have cited some other key evidence against this myth. For example, only about half of children in foster care are eligible for federal foster care support under Title IV-E of the Social Security Act and the federal government pays only part (50 to 83% depending on the state) of the cost. States and localities spent about $8 billion on foster care in FY 2014, 47% of their total child welfare spending, so it is hard to understand how they could have an incentive to place children in foster care. Moreover, states have access to other federal funds for services to intact families, such as TANF, Title IV-B, and the Social Services Block Grant.
Child welfare systems should prevent abuse and neglect. As the authors point out, child welfare systems (which they refer to as CPS, a term that I prefer to reserve for the investigation function only) have no truly preventative role. They are charged with responding to abuse and neglect after they have already occurred. This common misconception is particularly important in relation to the recent debate on FFPSA. Despite its name, the Act does not fund prevention; rather it funds treatment, or services to parents who have already maltreated their children. Obscuring the distinction between prevention and treatment prevents an honest and clear-headed debate about the appropriate allocation of resources between these purposes.
Child welfare is a broken system: Jonson-Reid and Drake argue that rather than being broken, the child welfare system has never been completed. They compare it to a fire department that will will send out a fire truck only 60% of the time, and often after the house has been consumed by flames. When a truck does respond, the firefighters may have minimal training in firefighting. A firefighter might show up without a truck and will have to wait until a truck with water is found. An injured person, instead of being taken into a hospital, may be placed in the home of someone who has no idea what treatment they need.
Child welfare can be fixed in a cost-neutral manner. Jonson-Reid and Drake point out that reform efforts (such as privatization or differential response) have often aimed to do more with less or the same amount of resources and have thus either done harm or failed to make a difference. They argue that any real improvement would raise costs but but could result in big long-run savings. They point out that we spend only $30 billion a year on child welfare when the long-term costs of child maltreatment have been estimated at $250 to $500 billion for each year’s cohort of victims.

The last myth is particularly poignant in view of the recent passage of FFPSA. It expands the use of federal Title IV-E funds to services to parents at risk of losing their children to foster care. But it finances some of this new spending by taking money from other key functions of child welfare. like congregate care placements (necessary both for therapeutic reasons and to make up for the foster parent shortage), and foster care payments to kin, who will now not be allowed these payments if the parent is receiving federally-funded services.

Jonson-Reid and Drake end with an extensive list of suggestions for changing programming, policy and law. These include primary (or universal) prevention such as poverty reduction and educating parents about positive parenting, systemic improvements to child welfare (such as completing the system), and improving and expanding treatment for children and families. The list is somewhat overwhelming, but gives policymakers and advocates many options for where to start addressing this massive and complex problem.

After the Cradle Falls is a realistic and informed discussion of child welfare. It will be a useful resource to those who are open minded enough to accept the conclusions of science and common sense even when they conflict with the facile platitudes of ideologues, which have all too often had a disproportionate influence on policy and practice.

Family First: A “Reform” that Isn’t

By now most readers will know that Congress passed the Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA) as part of the continuing resolution to fund the government until March 23. The passage of this major legislation as part of a continuing resolution marks the final victory of an ideological agenda that has taken over the child welfare advocacy community.

FFPSA was drafted in secret without feedback from stakeholders such as state and county child welfare administrators, many of whom expressed opposition to the bill or at least concern about its consequences. After several failed attempts to pass the bill over a two-year period, it was finally passed as part of a continuing resolution that was urgently needed to fund the entire government and avert a shutdown.

If we had a more pluralistic intellectual landscape in child welfare, FFPSA might have looked very different. Any bill calling itself “child welfare finance reform” should have started by addressing the most egregious flaw in child welfare financing–the linkage between Title IV-E eligibility and eligibility for the long-defunct AFDC program, which was terminated in 1996.

As a result of this linkage, fewer children are eligible for Title IV-E assistance every year, and states spend millions of dollars on the useless exercise of verifying eligibility for every child entering the system, as described by Sean Hughes in the Chronicle of Social Change. Yet, the advocacy community, in its single-minded quest to reduce the foster care rolls, gave up the fight to de-link foster care from AFDC.

Instead, the goal of “finance reform” became expanding the use of Title IV-E funds to included what the Act calls “prevention services.” These are not services to prevent abuse and neglect, but rather to prevent a child’s entry into foster care once that abuse or neglect has already occurred. FFPSA allows the use of these funds to fund parenting education, drug treatment and mental health services for parents.

Most of these “prevention” services logically belong to other systems, such as drug treatment and mental health, and are also funded by Medicaid. But prevailing ideology favors diverting foster care funds to other purposes, ostensibly to encourage prevention. In the most recent display of this ideology, the President and CEO of Casey Family Programs testified last week that “for every $7 the Federal government spends on foster care, only $1 is spent on prevention.”

No footnote was provided, but it appears that Bell was restating a common refrain that compares Title IV-E foster care expenditures with spending under Title IV-B, that is used mostly for in-home services. This comparison fails to take into account all the services provided by other programs, such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Social Services Block Grant, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, Medicaid, the Maternal Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program and the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. Most of these programs are insufficiently funded, but it makes sense to increase their funding rather than divert funds that were designed to help good Samaritans meet the needs of the children they have volunteered to care for temporarily.

This view that a foster home is always better than a congregate (non-family) placement is another part of the prevailing ideology in child welfare. Congregate placements also happen to be more expensive, making restrictions on congregate care a perfect offset to FFPSA’s increased costs. It’s very convenient when ideological correctness coincides with saving money! Unfortunately, restrictions on congregate care may be harmful to children when there is a foster home shortage and so many of today’s foster homes are inadequate, as I described in my last column.

The lack of robust conversation and debate in the child welfare advocacy community has resulted in a “reform” that will create more problems than it solves. Our most vulnerable children deserved a better outcome.

The Family First Act: A Bad Bill that Won’t Go Away

continuing rsolution

Some bad ideas just won’t go away. The Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA) is rearing its ugly head yet again. The act, which failed to pass the Senate in 2016, has been incorporated into the continuing appropriations bill passed by the House of Representatives on February 6.

Chapter I of the Act, billed as “Investing in Prevention and Family Services,” would allow Title IV-E funds to be used to fund services meant to keep children out of foster care, including mental health and substance abuse treatment, parent training and counseling, and kinship navigator programs.

The general idea of allowing Title IV-E funds to be used for services to prevent foster care placement makes sense. (I prefer to call these family preservation services rather than “preventive services” because true preventive services would seek to prevent maltreatment before it occurred, rather than preventing removal from the home after maltreatment has already occurred.) But the bill limits the list of services funded to mental health, substance abuse treatment, and parent education and training. It does not include services like domestic violence prevention, peer mentoring or support groups, crisis intervention, housing assistance, and many others that could be crucial to keeping families together.

Chapter II of FFPSA is billed as “Ensuring the Necessity of a Placement that is Not in a Foster Family Home.” This chapter would forbid federal reimbursement for a placement other than a foster family home (often called “congregate care”) beyond two weeks without an “age-appropriate, evidence-based, validated functional assessment” using a tool approved by the Secretary of Health and Human Services to determine that the child’s needs cannot be met “with family members or through placement in a foster family home.” Such placements must also be approved by a court within 60 days. The bill also establishes stringent requirements that must be met by agencies seeking to qualify for reimbursement, including on-site nurses, for example.

This approach is problematic for two reasons.

First, we don’t have enough foster homes. States around the country are reporting foster home shortages. Reports of children being housed in offices and hotels have come from California, Texas, Oregon, Kansas, and Georgia, Tennessee, and Washington DC. With group homes closed, this problem will only worsen.

The attempt to close congregate care facilities 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.

Nevertheless, the authors of the Family First Act made sure to specify that: “A shortage or lack of foster family homes shall not be an acceptable reason for determining that the needs of the child cannot be met in a foster family home.” One wonders where these children should go but perhaps the sponsors don’t care. It is the states and counties that will find a place for the children, even if the federal government does not pay a share.

Second, we don’t have enough good-quality foster homes. Anyone who works with foster children and parents knows that a minority of foster parents do a spectacular job, treating their charges like their own children. But many of the other homes barely improve upon the abusive or neglectful homes the children were removed from.

I’m talking about foster parents that never visit the child’s school or transport them to activities, insist that the social worker to take them to the doctor and therapist, refuse to meet the child’s birth family, and siphon off part of the foster care payment for their own purposes. These children need extra love, support, and enrichment, not the bare bones of room and board and nothing else.

The widespread simplistic belief that a foster family home is always better than a non-family setting has been promoted widely with heavy support from ideologically driven funders and advocates including the Annie E. Casey Foundation and Casey Family Programs. These groups employ slogans like Every Kid Needs a Family, ignoring the fact that most children entering foster care do have a family that they want to return to, and would not necessarily prefer being placed in a family of strangers rather than an educational or group setting where they can receive the enrichment they need while awaiting reunification.

Research supports the idea that quality is more important than the type of setting, and that high-quality group care can have even better outcomes than high-quality foster home care. Moreover large sibling groups can often be kept together only by placement in a non-family setting.

It is hard to understand that anyone believe that a loveless, bare-bones foster home is better than an idyllic environment like the Crossnore School in North Carolina, where foster children (including sibling groups) benefit from dedicated cottage parents, an onsite school, and multiple forms of mental health treatment, including equine-assisted therapy. But the bare-bones foster home has one advantage over Crossnore. It is much cheaper.

Clearly, legislators want the savings from eliminating non-family options to offset the increased costs imposed by the expansion of Title IV-E to include preventive services. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the restriction on non-family placements would offset almost 70% of the costs of extending IV-E reimbursement to family preservation services, over a ten-year period.

It is not surprising that government officials in the three states with the largest foster care populations–California, New York, and Texas, have all expressed concern about or opposition to the Family First Act. Other states have expressed their opposition as well .

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. Last year, 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.

Lets hope that the same wise and courageous Senators make sure this dangerous legislation is not allowed to slip into law in the urgent effort to pass a continuing resolution. Lets not save money on our most vulnerable kids. Spending money on better placements now will surely reap savings down the road in crime, unemployment, and welfare receipt.