As California faces a $12 billion budget deficit, here are some of the programs that were proposed for cuts:
- Crisis services for foster youth
- Services for the homeless
- Medi-Cal, the state’s health insurance program for the poor
But one group not only isn’t being cut, they’re in line for a great big increase. They’re getting a $31.5 million taxpayer bailout for private agencies that operate group homes and institutions and oversee some family foster homes. There are far better answers, including not taking so many children needlessly in the first place.
The money wouldn’t actually go to help young people. Instead, it is a taxpayer bailout for agencies that can’t afford insurance, because so many people now have the right to sue after being abused on their watch.
[Related: Prevention with protection — Making Family First work for every child]
The bailout was the agencies’ second choice. What they really wanted was virtual immunity from having ever to be held to account by young people beaten and raped while in their care. New York agencies sought, but failed to get, a bailout of up to $200 million. Illinois agencies have been seeking immunity.
All of this ignores the real lesson from the insurance crisis: Foster care is now known to be so harmful to children, and there is so much abuse in foster care, that agencies providing it are becoming uninsurable. As far back as 2013, the Los Angeles Times reported that Los Angeles County’s private agency system “has become more expensive and more dangerous than the government-run homes it has largely replaced.”
Courtesy of Richard Wexler
Richard Wexler
But instead of demanding remedies that could eliminate the last vestiges of accountability and deny children justice, this should be seen as an opportunity — a chance to finally make meaningful change in a system that so often destroys children in order to save them.
Private agencies are trying to scare lawmakers away from seizing the opportunity by fearmongering. If we can’t get insurance, they cry, we’ll go out of business — and then all those kids will be out on the street! No, they won’t.
In almost every state, foster care is overseen by a mixture of public and private agencies. If private agencies collapse, government can step in and run the facilities and oversee the foster homes — with the same foster parents and the same staff, if they choose to stick around. Will governments do a better job? Almost certainly not. But they wouldn’t do any worse, and abused foster children wouldn’t be denied their rights.
There’s also another solution: Stop taking away so many kids in the first place. Most cases in which children are torn from their parents are nothing like the horror stories. In 83 percent of cases, there is not even an allegation of physical or sexual abuse. In 62 percent there is not even an allegation of drug abuse. Far more common are allegations of neglect, which often is confused with poverty.
Get the children who don’t need to be in foster care back into their own homes, and there will be plenty of room in good, safe foster homes for the relatively few children who really need them. There will be almost no need for group homes and institutions — where the odds of abuse are highest.
The agencies will claim some children have such “complex behavioral needs” that they have to be institutionalized and no family can handle them. But it’s not true. As a recent report by the U.S. Senate Finance Committee pointed out, there is no evidence that so-called “residential treatment facilities” work, and “the risk of harm to children in RTFs is endemic to the operating model” — something illustrated by scandals in Arizona, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Utah, Oklahoma, Washington state, Arkansas, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York and on and on.
Indeed, there is nothing an institution does that can’t be done better and at less cost by providing intensive wraparound services to birth families or foster families.
So let’s seize the moment: Each time an agency closes, take a second look at each child.
- Was this child taken for reasons related to poverty? If so, can we fix those underlying problems so the child doesn’t have to stay in foster care at all?
- In the case of a child who supposedly has severe behavior problems, is this child’s behavior really all that difficult, or did the private agency just keep saying so to keep its per-diem payments rolling in?
- Could this child be returned safely to her or his own home if the family received intensive, home-based wraparound services?
Meanwhile, if you’re in California, think of what else you could do with $31.5 million.
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Richard Wexler is executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.
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