In late May the Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care released its final report. The Commission "was charged to develop a practical set of policy recommendations to reform federal child welfare financing and strengthen court oversight of child welfare cases."
I must admit that I was and continue to be a bit skeptical about the Commission and its underlying premise. Who exactly charged the Commission with this mission? Who identified "child welfare financing" and "court oversight" as the critical issues facing child welfare and foster care?
The Commission was premised on the notion that "current federal funding mechanisms for child welfare encourage an over-reliance on foster care at the expense of other services to keep families safely together and to move children swiftly and safely from foster care to permanent families, whether their birth families or a new adoptive family or legal guardian."
The Commission also surmised that "longstanding structural issues in the judicial system limit the ability of the courts to fulfill their shared obligation to protect children from harm and move children safely and appropriately through the system to safe, permanent homes."
The Executive Summary concludes "reform in these two areas is a critical first step to solving many other problems that plague the child welfare system."
Well . . . what do you think? Is federal child welfare financing and court oversight the two lead issues in your town, county or state? Read on for the key components of the Commission's recommendations. And stay tuned because next week I will tackle the Commission's recommendations on courts and child representation.
The key components of the Commission’s financing recommendations are:
• Preserving federal foster care maintenance and adoption assistance as an entitlement and expanding it to all children, regardless of their birth families’ income and including Indian children and children in the U.S. territories;
• Providing federal guardianship assistance to all children who leave foster care to live with a permanent legal guardian when a court has explicitly determined that neither reunification nor adoption are feasible permanence options;
• Helping states build a range of services from prevention, to treatment, to postpermanence by (1) creating a flexible, indexed Safe Children, Strong Families Grant from what is currently included in Title IV-B and the administration and training components of Title IV-E; and (2) allowing states to “reinvest” federal and state foster care dollars into other child welfare services if they safely reduce their use of foster care;
• Encouraging innovation by expanding and simplifying the waiver process and providing incentives to states that (1) make and maintain improvements in their child welfare workforce and (2) increase all forms of safe permanence; and
• Strengthening the current Child and Family Services Review process to increase states’ accountability for improving outcomes for children.
The Commission’s court recommendations call for:
• Adoption of court performance measures by every dependency court to ensure that they can track and analyze their caseloads, increase accountability for improved outcomes for children, and inform decisions about the allocation of court resources;
• Incentives and requirements for effective collaboration between courts and child welfare agencies on behalf of children in foster care;
• A strong voice for children and parents in court and effective representation by better trained attorneys and volunteer advocates;
• Leadership from Chief Justices and other state court leaders in organizing their court systems to better serve children, provide training for judges, and promote more effective standards for dependency courts, judges, and attorneys.
From the Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care Executive Summary
As a long time child welfare administrator, I'd suggest that the most critical issue facing child welfare is the workforce responsible for delivering the services. Since studies show that a professionally educated, well-trained and supervised workforce in adequate numbers is critical to improving outcomes in child welfare, the lack of emphasis in the Pew Commission's report was disappointing.
ReplyDeleteThere seems to be widespread agreement that the federal financing strategy (IV-E) is broken...but little concensus as to how to fix it in such a way as to result in improvements as opposed to a reduction in overall funding. Any change in the financing strategy ought to preserve the IV-E child welfare training program that has been so successful training professionals - a GAO report found that these professionals experienced greater job satisfaction and greater longevity in child welfare jobs.
While court oversight is also important, without a professional workforce to do the work, no amount of court orders will result in good outcomes for the families and children we serve.
better trained attorneys
ReplyDeleteIf ever there was a more problematic phrase...
I believe the place for training such professionals isn't specific to any particular area of law. I believe that while the role of the court can change the court itself should be as any other, a place where litigation can best occur.
For too long, for reasons that are no longer present (like it being a dumping ground for judges to cut there teeth or be condemed too), juvenile courts have been able to abandon there function as courts precisely by such stunts as 'training' 'attorneys' who are hired, let's be honest, to do a poor job of advocacy for there 'clients.'
Only relatively recently though has the regular attorney been able to escape such a hell and the corrupt able to find such a comfortable vice in front of it's benches.
It is my hope that state liability litigation that aspires to punish governments that create such realms of injustice will make at least a dent, but there is a role for the community to be told the truth, not merely recruited by militaristically slick 'casa' etc. arms of child buyers.
There is a role for former attorneys to publish there confessions and for judges who have found god or for some other reason want to come clean about the utter corruption they have cultivated and hopefully technology will assist in audiences being found and control being wrested from the fake parents who can hire real talent steal children from real ones who can not.
Hopefully brain scans of 'adopters' who felt 'abused' as children will let them go beyond 'adopting' as a means to cope with there pain and instead actually recover, and realize that there parents where victims too, just like those they would of adopted had such a tool not helped them get real help.
Finally, it is still amazing to me that adoption still occurs at all. A recent episode of Law and Order showed just how deep the zeal of the deluders will go, in portraying a real mom as a monster for searching for a child and finding another of her own from test tube madness.
Rather than seeing MacDonalds as a place where management given a phone call will gladdly require there employees to submit to strip searches, we should be giving any child who has th eright to see the nurse on there own the right to put there DNA in a database to determine who might be there real parents.
Severing children from there real parents is an act of Hubris that need no longer be tolerated by the people. There is no need for adoption. At one point the claim that the real parents where shot in the back of the head, or couldn't goto court, may have been necessary to be able to feed children found on the street etc. But we are a nation and largely world of great wealth, and we no longer need to decide decades ahead of time such things for our children or anyone.
Adoption and those who further it are the essence of the clinically violent. Real attorneys if given a chance, if hired, would of ended it long ago.
It needs to be taken off the table then 'overuse' of 'foster' (read other than) parents will end the same day.
Let the facts of a case matter from day to day.
McDonalds was metioned above as it has been regarded as a 'saftey' zone for runaways etc. Real safetey is in truth- it's the only thing that's permanent.
ReplyDeleteI like this part:
ReplyDeletePew defines the problem:
Simply put, current federal funding mechanisms for child welfare encourage an over-reliance on foster care at the expense of other services to keep families safely together and to move children swiftly and safely from foster care to permanent families, whether their birth families or a new adoptive family or legal guardian. (Fostering the Future: Safety, Permanence and Well-Being, p. 9)
The Commission offers this solution:
2. Because every child needs to be protected from abuse and neglect, the Commission recommends that the federal government join states in paying for foster care for every child who needs this protection. (p. 16)
If my logic is correct, providing more money to pay for more children to be in foster care will discourage over-reliance on foster care.
Where is Orwell when you need him?
As greater minds than mine would say - oy vay!
ReplyDeleteThey have tapped some standard reform arguments/premises that have had no traction over the years and a variety of arguments that support entrenched interests. Implementing many of their recommendations would certainly make the public child welfare industry more profitable with no certainty of improving outcomes. Generally, more, more, more is not a very radical approach to reform.
Given all of the history and given the political and economic environment regarding funding and given anyone with a rational view of reality it seems that everything that is old is new again.
Providing cash benefits to the principals at a multibillion dollar savings and just accepting a certain natural rate of failure as a more realistic alternative (at least it would save money and perhaps there would be no greater number of tragic outcomes...) I really think this report is communicatig a coded paradoxical message. In fact, the report is so profoundly out of touch with reality (funding, political will, and capability of the existing interests, industries and systems to undertake and successfully implement change under any circumstances, etc) that it is in fact a call to just do away with the whole enterprise.
Just a few thoughts.