"WHILE EVERYBODY SLEPT, CONGRESS DID SOMETHING EXTRAORDINARY FOR VULNERABLE CHILDREN

Godless Children of the Universe
2.12.2018

This really does sound like good news.

TUCKED QUIETLY INTO the most recent congressional measure to keep the government open was the most sweeping and ambitious piece of child welfare legislation passed in at least a decade. It’s an attempt to reshape the entrenched foster care system as a raging opioid epidemic swells the population of children in need.

The measure overcame the opposition of group homes, which pocket thousands of dollars per month for each child warehoused in their custody. The Family First Prevention Services Act upends the funding structure for the child welfare system by allowing states to use federal matching funds for programs addressing mental health, substance abuse, family counseling, and parent skills training — to keep at-risk children from entering the foster care system in the first place. It’s meant to help families stay together.

Most new programs are funded by specific amounts of money, which makes them vulnerable to cuts or expiration in the future, but the new law amends the Social Security Act to open up funding for families at risk of entering the foster care system. That means major funding will be available in states willing to take advantage of the new federal money.

The law is also designed to deter the use of group homes, which profit from the children they take in and shuffle through, by limiting federal funding for congregate care and reducing the number of kids going into the system at all. At a Senate HELP committee hearing on Thursday, William Bell, president of Casey Family Programs, noted that for every $7 spent on foster care, there is only $1 spent on intervention.

The law seeks to rebalance a particularly difficult dynamic at play in the foster care system. Imagine the situation from the perspective of a caseworker: You see a parent struggling with her housing situation, holding down several low-paying jobs, and perhaps you suspect some substance abuse issues. There are pamphlets you can hand out, organizations like food pantries or diaper banks you can recommend for some elementary services, but beyond that, what can you do?

The sole significant action available is to break the family up and put the child in foster care, stuffing them in a group home. If you don’t and something goes wrong, it’s on you. If you do put the child in a group home and something goes wrong, well, that’s the fault of the group home.

As the law was drafted in Congress, lawmakers heard testimony about how the lack of options for caseworkers is one of the great stressors associated with the job — one that has, not coincidentally, extraordinary turnover. It sets up a system where all incentives lead toward breaking up the family, even though studies show doing so produces far worse outcomes.

The new law balances that incentive by giving caseworkers some meaningful things they can actually do. Now they’ll be able to offer addiction treatment and counseling, parenting support services or moving the child in with close family. The latter option — allowing the child to live for a time with grandparents or aunts and uncles — has long been the most common sense approach, but has never been truly supported or encouraged by public policy. Now, with the Family First law, it is.

The law also takes some practical steps not to set up new disincentives. Much of government action on the ground level is driven by how it influences funding flows. In order for a state to recoup federal money for foster care services, for instance, there are income thresholds involved. (Not many rich children wind up in foster care, but it’s part of the law nonetheless.) The new law says that if a child’s relatives attempt to take the child in and for whatever reason it doesn’t work, the child is still eligible for federal support. If that weren’t made clear, caseworkers might be reluctant to let a grandparent try to take a child in, for fear that the time spent with a relative with a higher income would make them ineligible for federal help down the road. Those are the kinds of backward incentives that had long been a blight on the country’s foster care system, but are finally being addressed.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, Republican chairman of the Finance Committee, who co-sponsored the legislation with ranking Democrat Sen. Ron Wyden, said on the Senate floor on Thursday the legislation would “help keep more children safely with their families.”

In 2016, Hatch and Wyden tried to push nearly identical legislation but it failed to move through the Senate after a Baptist group home network in North Carolina pressured its Senate delegation to go against it. The Baptist Children’s Home of North Carolina, along with other providers across the country, voiced objections this time around too. Most of the resistance to foster care reform came from group home networks — the legislation would reduce the number of kids entering the system, therefore interfering with their revenue model of stowing away children. But there was also opposition from California and New York, where the child welfare community says the federal solution will undermine state-based solutions they embarked on years ago."

Source
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