Foster Care: Picking Up the Slack

By DON ROLLINS

In a stinging online critique from 2014, controversial then-director of Baltimore Department of Social Services, Molly McGrath Tierney finds America’s foster care system an overall bust. Even after citing positive outcomes from the Baltimore programs she helped design, McGrath Tierney adds a disturbing footnote: “We fixed it, and now I run a well-oiled machine that does an outstanding job at taking other people’s children.”

Other cities’ departments haven’t been as quick to call for a full course correction. New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services reports a steady 25-year drop in foster cases, yet requests for placements still exceed the number of approved placements. The emphasis there is to review criteria used to certify foster caregivers — especially in regard to persons of color, those who identify as LGBTQI, or have full-time jobs.

Meanwhile, some states have taken a middle course, moving to overhaul, but not reinvent how they provide foster services. Washington State’s template calls for a hybrid, strength-based and streamlined approach: increase training and compensation for foster caregivers; create more flexibility in how grants are utilized; lower case loads for frontline service providers; increase funding for adoption services, substance misuse treatment, foster caregiver respite and peer support programs.

Disparate as paradigms for out-of-home care have become, they all play out in an era in which both foster referrals and children waiting for adoption are decreasing. Federal and Tribal Statistics comparing the fiscal years 2019 and 2020 also show a decrease in instances of parental rights’ terminations, from 71,900 to 63,800 — figures in line with those from 2020-21. (Children’s Bureau at the US Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families.)

The numbers are on their face encouraging, but the scope of the challenge remains:

400,000 children and youth are currently in out-of-home placement;

The estimated average age of a child in care is 7;

Black/African American children make up 20% of the foster population;

20,000 youth age out of foster care each year;

Teens in rural and urban placements are 25% less likely to have access to a home computer;

Adults who grew up in foster settings are at increased risk for substance misuse, mental health conditions, unplanned pregnancies, self-harm, incarceration and un/under employment.

These data are necessary but not sufficient when taking the true measure of today’s foster care network, much less the best model to address the deep, recurring trauma behind those figures.

And while Biden administration’s American Families Plan is a boost to children and youth in safe environments, it includes no direct funding for those in harm’s way. Thus whether the current delivery systems are as flawed as McGrath Tierney suggests, or salvageable per the New York and Washington State models, foster care reform may be another domestic policy victim in complicated times.

Meanwhile a child enters or leaves the system every two minutes. All the more important, the pressure progressives can bring to bear at the state and local levels. All the more important, the need to pick up the slack.

Don Rollins is a Unitarian Universalist minister living in Hendersonville, N.C. Email donaldlrollins@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2022

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