On May 15, the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support held a hearing on the “Challenges Facing the Child Welfare System.” The hearing focused on obstacles states face in protecting and establishing permanent homes for children in foster care programs.
Chair Jim McDermott (D-WA) said, “The door into our nation’s child welfare system is usually opened when a parent fails to uphold their most solemn responsibility ensuring their child’s safety and well-being. Once inside the system, a child becomes the responsibility of the state. As their de facto parent, we cannot afford to fail these children again.” Rep. McDermott added, “We need a system that focuses on preventing abuse, not just responding to it. We need qualified and experienced caseworkers who are not forced to oversee twice as many children as recommended. And we need a federal funding structure that adequately supports children and families in crisis. These goals will not be fulfilled with the passage of any single bill. They demand a long-term commitment to care and vigilant oversight, followed up with appropriate action. These problems in the child welfare system did not arise overnight, nor will they be addressed in that time frame.”
Ranking Member Jerry Weller (R-IL) said, “Despite [the] complexity and need for reform, some argue the key challenges facing child welfare systems all have to do with underfunding. But that ignores the fact that taxpayers spend more than $23 billion per year for child protection and foster care and adoption programs, according to the Child Welfare League of America.” Rep. Weller continued, “So instead of asking whether we are spending enough, we should consider whether we are spending taxpayer funds as well as we can…Several of the witnesses before us today think we also could do better when it comes to targeting efforts to better prevent abuse and neglect from occurring in the first place. That would result in fewer children needing foster care freeing more resources to ensure the safety, permanency, and well-being of those who do. Both goals are critical better prevention, and better oversight.”
“Studies show that young people who age out of care at 18 or older without family almost 25,000 kids do every year in America will likely become homeless, incarcerated, or on welfare rolls within a few short years,” said Anne Holton, first lady of Virginia and a former Richmond Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court judge. She continued, “They are less educated and less able to support themselves than their peers. And they have no family safety net to support them when inevitably they need it.” Ms. Holton added, “I have learned traveling across Virginia…that we can and must do better in providing supports for young people aging out of foster care. One consistent theme was the inadequacy of the support we give to 18-plus year olds in or formerly in foster care…I heard of…young people who had lost their Medicaid when they got part-time jobs while they completed their schooling. Others talked of the need for more help with employment, transportation, and independent living skills. We know from sociological studies that young people in intact families do not magically become fully independent at age 18 in fact, the average age at which a young person typically moves out of the family home in the United States is 26 eight years beyond when we effectively declare our foster kids able to care for themselves.”
Cornelia Ashby, director of Education, Workforce and Income Security at the Government Accountability Office, said, “For fiscal year 2006, Congress appropriated about $8 billion to support the ability of state child welfare systems to provide services that protect children from abuse and neglect, promote their physical and mental well-being, find them permanent homes, and enable families to successfully care for their children. State and local governments contributed more than $12 billion for these purposes…Despite this substantial investment, federal evaluations of state child welfare programs showed that states continue to struggle to meet federal outcome goals established by the Department of Health and Human Services to ensure the safety, well-being, and permanency of children in foster care.” Ms. Ashby added, “[S]tates reported that inadequate levels of mental health and substance abuse services, the high average number of child welfare cases per worker, and the difficulty of finding homes for children with special needs were the most important challenges to resolve in order to improve outcomes for children under states’ care…One reason maintaining an adequate level of services is difficult…is that the funding for family support services has not kept up with the need, which in turn may result in children entering foster care and staying there longer. [Another reason is that] some states did not have caseload standards to ensure that caseworkers had enough time to adequately serve each child and family, and caseworkers in some areas of most states often carried more than double the caseload standard established by the Child Welfare League of America.”
William Bell, president and chief executive officer of Casey Family Programs, stated, “If nothing changes in the 15 year period from 2005 to the year 2020: 14 million children will be victims of abuse and neglect; 22,500 children will die of abuse and neglect, the majority before they reach their fifth birthday; 9 million more children will be placed in foster care; more than 300,000 children will age out of foster care, most of them without adequate supports to successfully transition to adulthood; of these transitioning youth, while 70 percent have a desire to attend college, sadly only 3 percent will be expected to achieve a four-year college degree; [and] approximately 75,000 will experience homelessness and nearly 54,000 will become involved in the criminal justice system.” Mr. Bell indicated that there are seven areas on which policymakers must focus attention in order to improve state child welfare systems: reducing the caseload size of caseworkers; developing competent executive and mid-level leadership; ensuring that individual workers receive “proper training and education to make confident, experienced decisions on the front lines”; providing the political will to change the system; partnering with “local communities, law enforcement, education, health, community-based organizations, philanthropic organizations, and others”; obtaining quality data to effectively track progress; and setting better expectations with the public and policy leaders.
Mary Nelson, administrator of the Division of Child and Family Services at the Iowa Department of Human Services, said, “The child welfare system cannot do its work in isolation because we cannot address the complex needs of children and families, and achieve improved outcomes for children and families alone. Cross-system collaboration is critical both in terms of addressing the multiple needs of at-risk families in order to prevent abuse and neglect, and in terms of addressing the complex needs of the children and families that come to the attention of the child welfare system. Child protection is often the final safety net for many of the children and families that were not ‘caught’ in time by other systems, such as mental health, housing, public health, or education. By working together, child welfare and other systems can strengthen families and prevent the need for child welfare system involvement.” Ms. Nelson added that “for those children and families that do come to the attention of the child welfare system, cross-system collaboration is necessary to address the multiple challenges these families face, as well as the trauma of family violence…Addressing these issues [substance abuse assessment and treatment, child care, respite care, transportation, domestic violence services, home-based services, housing, and post-reunification services] is often integral to reunification and the ability of a family to care properly for its children.”
Ed Cotton, an independent consultant from Tallahassee, Florida, said, “The child welfare systems designed to protect children from child abuse and neglect, and to ensure that they attain a safe, permanent living situation are not accomplishing that task at an acceptable rate.” Mr. Cotton added that “[t]oo often reforms occur only as the result of a lawsuit. Since the lawsuits generally request changes that everyone would agree are essential to a well-functioning system, state child welfare agencies should be making these changes before going through costly and time-consuming lawsuits.” Mr. Cotton focused his testimony on improving child abuse hotlines/intake systems, investigations, in-home services, and out-of-home care and services, and recommended that states address accountability; create a national standard for caseworker caseloads; establish and enforce minimum standards for the quality of child welfare/protection work; pay private agencies that provide services to children in state custody based upon successful performance; and increase in-home services so that children never have to be removed from their homes.
