How Many of You Know the Source of Funding for Foster Children? POLL Question

[illinoisgranny]

I'm posting this thread because of another thread I started and a former CW validated my suspicions that agencies often don't care about the "best interest" of a child when they're more concerned about $$$$$.

For those of you who aren't aware of this let me fill you in. When a child is in a home where they have been abused/neglected, or there is a suspicion of either, CW's are supposed to help them remain intact by offering services to educate the birth family and keep at risk children in their homes.

Because of federal funding resulting from CAPTA, ASFA and other bills this doesn't happen nearly as much as it should. Every state collects HUGE amounts of dollars from Social Security Title IV funds (that's right, the taxes that come out of your check for your golden days) to spend on FOSTER children.

The funding streams for keeping intact families and for reunification are miniscule in comparison. Sad, but also true, is the fact that some families have been falsely reported, and agencies rush in to grab the children anyway so they can continue to chase the money stream. Don't believe me? Check out this site:

http://fightcps.com/

It's just one of many, by the way.

Cases often go long past the 15 of 22 month rule, too. Why??? The monthly $$$ stops. And when a child IS successfully adopted out of foster care these state and private agencies also get HUGE adoption bonuses (up to $6000 and sometimes more) especially when the child has special needs. Often those special needs are created (think RAD) by the very foster care system itself.

If a family member cares for a child without licensure, which can happen in some states (my state is one of them) private agencies don't get that funding. That is why these agencies sometimes place children with willing biological family members waiting to care for them into a traditional foster home!

The food chain for this money extends to judges who often get a piece of the pie in corrupt counties like mine. It sickening but true.

Now I'm not saying that foster parents are bad or that foster care is bad. But the funding stream that created this money grab and the broken system that has resulted is a horrible travesty of injustice.

[Hedgehog Mtn]

This is sad - truly sad for the families and for the children.

[Drummer's Wife]

Why isn't there more money spent on resources to help the families change for the better? If we are talking about the same amount of funding - why can't it be allocated differently to reach the original goal of reunification? I'm just curious about it, is all. Couldn't the agencies receive a similar bonus based on how many intact families they end up with, or would that promote returning more children to undesirable homes?

[kathteach]

I imagine it would be different in different states. Personally I know someone with an open CPS case and Family Preservation has provided many many services and material things for this family to keep them together.

[illinoisgranny]

Kathteach, there are some variables in every state, to be sure, but nationally most of the funding is spent on fostering and adoption. It's a sad fact. Some states have put more emphasis on keeping families intact and other countries also have a better program for allowing children to stay at home by improving the family situation, but overall this is not the case. I've researched this subject quite thoroughly. The ASFA law has caused the majority of changes in the foster system. It was intended to help get children out of long term foster placements into loving homes, but it turned into a hornets nest and a money grab.

[Polliwog]

The information about funding sources may (or may not for that matter, I don't know) be correct, but it doesn't mean that states (or counties) keep children in foster care for monetary reasons. There are so many variables. And research shows that placing children (who aren't able to live at home) with an appropriate biological relative or family friend is often better for a child than living with strangers. In my state, these relatives can receive the monthly board payment if they go through the licensing process that any other foster parent goes through.

I wouldn't use sites like the one you linked as a source of accurate information.

[marsupial-mom]

MSNBC reports:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37523526/

Thanks to sizable reductions in several other states, it's a coast-to-coast phenomenon — the latest federal data, from 2008, recorded 463,000 children in foster care nationally, down more than 11 percent from 523,000 in 2002.

Each jurisdiction is different, but by reducing stays in foster care, speeding up adoptions and — perhaps most crucially — expanding preventive support for troubled families so more children avoid being removed in the first place, the numbers are coming down.

[...]Overall, however, there's encouragement that New York City and a few other places — notably California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey and Ohio — have been able to sharply reduce the number of children in foster care.

"We're going to continue to see practices get better," said Anita Light, director of the National Association of Public Child Welfare Administrators. "In many cases, a child can remain at home and be safe with the proper amount of support."

The article says that many different factors play a role, but flexibility in funding - beinf allowed to spend money on preventive or supportive services instead of foster care - is one of the factors.

[queenjane]

I guess my issue is that for some (many?) parents, no amount of money or resources would make them be better parents. If you are a drug addict, yes getting into treatment is important...but in the end, staying clean is your responsibility. If you have a mental illness, you may or may NOT be able to effectively parent even with supports. If you have beaten or raped your children, there may not be enough therapy in the world to make you be a safe person to live with your kids again.

My friend is adopting three kids, and in their bmom's case, i think more supports WOULD have helped her parent her children...her main issue was that she was a young teen who kept having babies. However, she herself was in a foster home WITH one of her kids, and she ran away from that home (without the baby)...so even though there were some supports in place, she chose not to utilize them.

I guess ultimately i feel that throwing more money at a problem isnt going to fix societal ills. There are situations where bparents have had all the supports in the world, given multiple chances, and they still are not safe people for their kids.

[JoyfamMama]

This is a very interesting, and sensitive, subject, I think. We have not had a child placed with us yet, but we have had large amounts of contact with our agency. It is a large county, and I sometimes worry that that will slow things down a lot. However, from the very beginning of our training, we were told over and over that they are not an adoption agency, and that they are REQUIRED to have a NINETY-FIVE % reunification rate, or the top people in charge (including the woman who handled all of our paperwork and background checks) would go to Jail! We were also hammered that if we ever get an adoption, we will be very blessed, but NOT to count on it.

It breaks my heart to think that these kinds of things are still going on in places. We think we have come so far from the FC system of the 60's and 70's...but have we really?

[Polliwog]

I know that my soon-to-be-adopted daughter's birthmother had a ton of supports in place and she still wasn't able to parent her baby. I wish that would have been possible but there were too many challenges for her to overcome.

[Polliwog]

Originally Posted by JoyfamMama

However, from the very beginning of our training, we were told over and over that they are not an adoption agency, and that they are REQUIRED to have a NINETY-FIVE % reunification rate, or the top people in charge (including the woman who handled all of our paperwork and background checks) would go to Jail!

That has to be a bunch of BS. Has to be. Even if they were "required" to have a 95% reunification rate (which seems impossible to achieve,) how could there be a criminal penalty for not meeting that standard?

[pumpkingirl71]

I find all of this very hard to believe. Every state is different. But my daughter's birth family was given sooooooo many services and she suffered so much due to the states attempts to keep her with her birth family. Then she stayed in foster care for a year and a half because the goal was reunification. I wasn't until the birthmother violated her probation and went to jail that they changed her goal. The state had very valid grounds to remove my daughter at birth and did not.

[MissinNYC]

That's utter nonsense. Many experience foster parents have had the experience of watching children grow up being tossed from home to home, while their parents are given chance after chance. If anything, parents have too many rights, while their children suffer and lose their childhoods while waiting. Yes, the financial incentives for the whole thing are icky- the incentive for foster parnets, the incentive for adoption agencies, etc. But I don't believe that kids are not getting RU'd for financial reasons, in my area. I have met so many judges and been in numerous courtrooms and all the judges have followed the law, to the letter.

[illinoisgranny]

Thanks for your responses, everyone. If any of you are interested in more information the Pew Commission has lots of information on foster care.

http://pewfostercare.org/

[liz-hippymom]

Originally Posted by MissinNYC

That's utter nonsense. Many experience foster parents have had the experience of watching children grow up being tossed from home to home, while their parents are given chance after chance. If anything, parents have too many rights, while their children suffer and lose their childhoods while waiting. Yes, the financial incentives for the whole thing are icky- the incentive for foster parnets, the incentive for adoption agencies, etc. But I don't believe that kids are not getting RU'd for financial reasons, in my area. I have met so many judges and been in numerous courtrooms and all the judges have followed the law, to the letter.

i know also that this is total BS. in my area it takes A LOT to get a kid pulled into care...CPS is not waiting to snatch up kids. i have seen the opposite time and time again. children being let in horrible situations, or being put back into horrible situations. and here in Texas if you have a pulse you can get a kid for a kinship placement. there is almost no requirements. caseworkers THROW these kids into relative placements that are ill equipped to take care of the children ALL the time.

[queenjane]

Originally Posted by JoyfamMama

This is a very interesting, and sensitive, subject, I think. We have not had a child placed with us yet, but we have had large amounts of contact with our agency. It is a large county, and I sometimes worry that that will slow things down a lot. However, from the very beginning of our training, we were told over and over that they are not an adoption agency, and that they are REQUIRED to have a NINETY-FIVE % reunification rate, or the top people in charge (including the woman who handled all of our paperwork and background checks) would go to Jail! We were also hammered that if we ever get an adoption, we will be very blessed, but NOT to count on it.

It breaks my heart to think that these kinds of things are still going on in places. We think we have come so far from the FC system of the 60's and 70's...but have we really?

That is ridiculous. Either you totally misunderstood what she was saying, or they are LYING to you, either way before proceeding with this agency i'd get clarification. I wouldnt want to work with an agency that used scare tactics to prove their point.

Its fine for an agency to say your number one goal is reunification, or that you must follow the case plan, that you shouldnt count on adopting a child in your care etc etc. Thats Fostering 101. But i'll go out on a limb here and say there isnt ONE COUNTY with a decent sized population in the US (didnt look at your profile, are you in the US?) that has a 95 percent RU rate. If it was that high, then there is a problem because that means they are pulling kids into care who should have received services while still in the birth home. Are you in some kind of specialized program, like a "mommy and me" type program that screens birthfamilies specifically for those that have an almost certain probability of going home? Otherwise, that statement is nonsense.

Plus....everyone would go to jail??? Seriously?? And no one in the class called them on that?? There are other people beside the trainers at initial foster parent training that have a hand in whether a child goes home (like, oh i dont know, a judge?? )

Are you sure she didnt mean that they must have as an INITIAL caseplan, RU for 95 percent of cases? THats totally different than having a 95 percent RU *rate*...MOST cases have reunification as the INITIAL goal. Thats why you usually cant even think "adoption" until the county files for termination (which often doesnt happen until the child has been in care for at least a year although in both of my cases it was much earlier, one TPR'd after four months in care, the other's TPR trial started just a few months after he was placed with me though technically in FC for nearly a year.) And of course even if they file for TPR, there are no guarantees really until the adoption finalizes.

I would really love to see if you could get some kind of clarification from your trainer.

ETA: i see you are in Ohio, which i know does not send 95 percent of its kids home (have you ever seen the AdoptOHIO photolisting??) Is your agency an extremely small private agency that the county sends ONLY cases they KNOW will be RU'd or something??

[pixiekisses]

I know how it works here. It's a different system, luckily.

[heatherdeg]

Originally Posted by queenjane

That is ridiculous. Either you totally misunderstood what she was saying, or they are LYING to you, either way before proceeding with this agency i'd get clarification. I wouldnt want to work with an agency that used scare tactics to prove their point.

<snip>

Plus....everyone would go to jail??? Seriously?? And no one in the class called them on that?? There are other people beside the trainers at initial foster parent training that have a hand in whether a child goes home (like, oh i dont know, a judge?? )

That's insanity. They can't even punish states for not following the 15/22 rule for TPR. There's no POSSIBLE way someone could ever go to jail for missing a goal statistic.

And if you didn't misunderstand and they actually said that, it's not an agency I would be dealing with. Any group that lays that level of misinformation on you in an attempt to manipulate is not a group I'd be dealing with. Ever. I can only imagine what they'd try to tell you when you actually had a child in your home.

[MissinNYC]

Originally Posted by heatherdeg

That's insanity. They can't even punish states for not following the 15/22 rule for TPR. There's no POSSIBLE way someone could ever go to jail for missing a goal statistic.

And if you didn't misunderstand and they actually said that, it's not an agency I would be dealing with. Any group that lays that level of misinformation on you in an attempt to manipulate is not a group I'd be dealing with. Ever. I can only imagine what they'd try to tell you when you actually had a child in your home.

Yes, yes, yes. Any agency which said this is either flatly lying to your face or woefully confused- in neither case would you want to work with them, IMO. This stat you quoted is impossible on many different levels.

And yes, we have come pretty far as a nation in how we do foster care. It's still an incredibly broken and horrible system, IMO, but it's so much better and permanency is so much more often the goal. I am sorry you've had this experience with your agency but I would really urge you to get to the bottom of this statement. I know my agency works hard at RU (as they all should) and returns about 45% of kids, max. There is NO statute which could or ever would penalize workers for failing to achieve a goal, and such quotas are specifically illegal.

[bella99]

I work in NY as a case worker for a private non-profit agency providing therapeutic foster care.

The counties in NY have their reunification rate very closely monitored by the state, and funding has been cut for having too high a percentage of children remaining in care rather than being returned or adopted (not too high a percentage of children in care period, but children remaining in care long term with no resolution) . There's also more resources available here for preventive services than for placement, which costs the state more. We've had hard discussions with county administrators asking why certain children were still in care because of this, even though there was no evidence that the parents could provide a safe environment for the children and the county's admitted that.

We also don't receive any kind of bonuses when the children in our program are adopted by their foster parents, we just end up down a placement (although we are not an adoption agency). In the last two months, we've had 7 of our children adopted by their foster families (our census usually hovers around 30-35 so that's a large number percentage wise). Most, if not all, of the kids in our program qualify for special rate handicapped subsidy's post-adoption.

Of course, I think that most times that a child remains in care longer than the 15 months with no sign of a resolution is more a sign of the failure of the system rather than the state wanting to hold onto any funding that child brings in.

But I know that not all states are the same.