News!
The latest in child welfare for November 1, 2023.
Welcome to November! Here’s your rundown of child protection and well-being news of interest.
Let’s start off with my home state of Georgia, where US Senator Jon Ossoff has been investigating Georgia’s child welfare and foster care system and holding hearings. There is plenty the federal government can do to bolster the efforts of states, including Georgia, to protect children and serve vulnerable families. Whether these hearings are a path to reform remains to be seen, but here are a few thoughts from the Senator’s recent Congressional hearings:
Child protection is complex, difficult work, requiring often less-experienced case managers to make intensely difficult judgments. Am I hurting the child by removing him from his mother or father? Am I endangering the child by leaving her in an unsafe household? One of the lessons I’ve learned from experts such as Eileen Munro is that making policy based on personal stories isn’t always the best approach. It gets public attention, but it doesn’t necessarily drive true reform and improvement. Real reform requires understanding and addressing systemic issues.
Data doesn’t demonstrate success or failure; rather, it raises questions that can only be answered in context. A good example is a headline from the Senate investigation revealing that 1790 children were reported missing from Georgia’s foster care system between 2018 and 2022. Let’s put those numbers in context:
On average, 358 children were reported missing during each of those years, and the foster care population during that time period ranged between 10,000 and 14,000. So that figure means that around 3% of children in state custody were reported missing, a number consistent with a recent study by the Office of the Inspector General of the US Department of Health and Human Services. That nationwide study determined that states experienced rates of missing foster children between 1% (Wyoming, Maine) and 7% (Ohio, New York, Nebraska, Maryland, Kansas, and Delaware).
The question is not whether Georgia reported a significant number of children “missing” from foster care. Unfortunately, children and especially teens run from foster care placements for a myriad of reasons, including a desire to be independent, a desire to return to family, and (in the worst cases) based on promises made by adults with bad intentions. We want those situations reported promptly and responded to appropriately. Rather, the questions should be: (1) Why are children and youth running away from care and what can the State do to prevent it? (2) Is the State doing its part to find those youth and protect them, as federal law requires? and (3) What is the State doing to address the needs of those runaway youth?
This week’s hearings revealed concerns of juvenile court judges that Georgia DFCS leadership advocated for holding youth in juvenile detention if the child welfare agency had no place for those youth. Doing so would be clearly outside the scope of judicial authority. As the hearing revealed, the children and youth in question “have complex behavioral and mental health needs, and some of them have criminal backgrounds, making them very difficult for the state to place in a foster home.” So beyond the headlines and responses lies a more significant issue: what is the State’s responsibility for, and what should be its response to, addressing the safety and placement stability of these youth? What should the court do when a parent or guardian refuses to pick up a child who is being discharged from juvenile detention? What agency has responsibility to provide safety, stability, and care for children whose behaviors — often the product of mental illness or autism issues — prevent them from being safely cared for in a foster home or nonsecure facility?
For each of the issues raised by this Senate investigation, there are ways the federal government can help. Some ideas: allowing Medicaid coverage for intensive therapeutic residential care; providing federal funding for kinship caregivers that doesn’t require the child to be placed in state custody; and creating specific programs that ensure a spectrum of services for dual-system youth and children whose behaviors put them at risk of being abandoned to juvenile justice or foster care.
In other news:
Here’s a really interesting study out of Europe regarding citizens’ trust in their national child protection systems.
And here’s your weekly reminder of the trauma currently being suffered by children held hostage in Gaza, as well as a reminder of the need to protect children caught up in war.
Kansas is trying a new approach for helping youth in foster care achieve permanent connections to supportive adults. The SOUL program provides an alternative to reunification, adoption, or guardianship in which the youth selects one or more trustworthy adults who promise to become their “SOUL” family through a legally-recognized process.
West Virginia has the nation’s highest rate of children in foster care, according to this article.
Kentucky can’t get service providers to care for children with complex behavioral issues.
Despite socialized medicine, Canada is also dealing with situations in which parents of children with severe needs are being abandoned to state custody and housed in hotels.
Also up north, Quebec is naming a children’s rights commissioner.
As part of its response to the needs of children with complex mental health and autism issues, Georgia DHS is launching intensive community action treatment teams in hopes of keeping these children from being abandoned to foster care.
Congrats to my friend Bobby Cagle on his return to Georgia, where he’ll be working with CareSource.
We’ve talked a lot in this space about the need for child welfare agencies to truly support their foster parents. As this article from Ireland shows, the foster care crisis isn’t just a US domestic issue.
Gonzaga’s law school is launching a program to train attorneys interested in child welfare and children’s rights.
Michigan is rebidding its Medicaid contracts.
Maine’s Child and Family Services Director Todd Landry comments on the work of his agency.
Latvia is overhauling its child protection system this coming year. I sure wish I could go to Latvia — hint, hint :).
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