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I was browsing the net today and came across this article
from 2002. Its funny because things haven't really changed, when
you read the article, you would think it was written yesterday.
Wanted:
Foster Parents
Because of lousy recruitment and retention efforts, foster care agencies
across the nation are facing a dearth of qualified parents. Some cities
and states are developing new incentives to keep get and keep foster
parents. Youth Today,
http://www.youthtoday.org
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Is This Any Way to Treat Foster Parents?
Blasted as neglectful partners, public agencies try money, housing,
jobs and TLC to woo caregivers – and keep them.
By Patrick Boyle
Buddy the Foster Care Bear works the crowd like a pro. His birthday cake
and balloons brighten the lobby of a Trenton, N.J., office building,
luring hurried workers as they pass through. The fuzzy mascot cavorts
with them and directs them to youth and family services staff to talk
about becoming foster parents. A number of people say they’d love to.
Big deal.
That is to say, now comes the hard part. Public foster care agencies
have little trouble melting people’s hearts and getting them to say
they’ll take needy kids. But those agencies operate in perpetual crisis,
say two new federal reports, largely because the agencies recruit the
wrong people and treat the right ones so badly that they quit.
Thanks largely to lousy recruitment and retention efforts, foster
parents flee the system even as the number of foster children climbs
(from 405,700 in 1990 to 588,000 today), say the reports issued in late
May by the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services (HHS).
Dressing a staffer like a bear won’t solve the problem, New Jersey
officials say, but such attention-grabbers are among dozens of
try-anything approaches being employed by public agencies, with the help
of nonprofits and foundations, to attract the right foster parents and
keep them.
New Jersey offers foster parents low-interest, no-down-payment
mortgages. In Chicago and Boston, Hull House and Casey Family Programs
turn foster parents into full-time employees with annual salaries. The
nonprofit Utah Foster Care Foundation uses ZIP code data and teams up
with community-based organizations to recruit foster parents in
neighborhoods that foster kids come from. Kentucky recently brought its
foster payments close to what it actually costs to care for a child.
Some observers say all this just dances around what the foster care
system really needs: massive infusions of money for more caseworkers as
well as for foster parents. Others say the solution is to put fewer kids
in foster care by helping to keep more troubled families together.
With states cutting budgets, people like Jennifer Agosti, who is helping
to launch a 10-site foster care initiative for the Seattle-based Casey
Family Program, take a practical approach. “There’s no contesting that
we need more money,” she says. “That doesn’t mean we can’t do a better
job with the money we’ve got now.”
Efforts to do a better job focus largely on the recruitment and
retention of foster families. While this may take a little more money –
New Jersey pumped in an extra $22 million for recruitment in 1999 – the
initiatives rely just as much on changing procedures and attitudes at
public child welfare agencies.
‘Frustrated and Exhausted’
Rare is the foster parent who doesn’t consider giving up. When HHS
interviewed 115 foster parents in five states for its recent reports
(“Recruiting Foster Parents” and “Retaining Foster Parents”), every one
of them “said they had … considered leaving the foster care system.”
Various reports have warned since the 1980s that the number of foster
homes is decreasing. There are no firm national figures, but there is
clearly an incessant drain that keeps agencies scrambling to fill the
void. When Karen Jorgenson, administrator of the National Foster Parent
Association, began recruiting and training foster parents for Nevada
several years ago, she was shocked to learn that 42 percent of the
parents had been foster parents for less than a year.
“Many leave because they are frustrated and exhausted,” the HHS
reported. “They are weary from navigating a foster care system that is
difficult and inoperable.”
The most basic problem is money. The average cost of raising a
9-year-old child, excluding medical care, was $8,260 per year in 2000,
according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The average annual
amount provided to foster parents to care for a 9-year-old child,
according to Casey Family Programs, is $4,932.
Private foster care agencies tend to pay more – which exacerbates the
problem for public agencies, because some of their better foster parents
switch to private agencies.
But money just tops a long list of reasons that foster parents quit
public agencies. Among other reasons cited by HHS, foster care agencies
and foundations that study foster care:
• Little agency support: Foster parents have trouble reaching staff to
help solve problems or deliver basic services. Training and supervision
are lax.
“The single most important thing you can do to retain foster parents is
to make them feel supported, be there for them 24-7,” says Jay Berlin,
executive director of Alternative Family Services, a nonprofit foster
and adoption services agency in San Francisco.
In Washington, where a civil jury in December found that the state’s
foster care system violated the constitutional rights of children,
witnesses testified that staff shortages had compelled the Department of
Social and Health Services to reduce home visits from once every 30 days
to once every 90 days.
• No respect: “There is still is this authority thing that many social
workers get hung up on. ‘We’re not in this together, I’m actually your
boss,’” says David Richart, director of the National Institute on
Children, Youth and Families based in Louisville, Ky. “That just drives
foster parents absolutely crazy.”
“The public agencies tend to define foster parents as service
recipients, as welfare recipients,” rather than service providers,
Berlin says. “They’re very seldom made to feel like a member of the
team.”
• Too many kids too fast: In Nevada, Jorgenson had to create “Karen’s
Rule”: No more than one foster child in a home at a time for the home’s
first year.
• Sexual abuse allegations: In every focus group conducted by HHS, the
reports say, “foster parents expressed concerns about being investigated
for false allegations of abuse and neglect.” At the NFPA, Jorgenson
says, “we get at least one [call] a week” about a foster parent who says
the children were taken from the home because of a false allegation.
Even after they’ve been cleared by police, the parents often drop out of
the system or find that agencies won’t place more children with them.
Various reports have warned since the 1980s that the number of foster
homes is decreasing.
• Adoption: Each year foster parents adopt about two-thirds of the
foster children who are placed for adoption, according to the U.S.
Administration for Children and Families within HHS. Most of those
adults then stop serving as foster parents.
• More troubled kids: Foster care operators and observers agree with the
HHS conclusion that “children entering the foster care system are older
and often have more mental, behavioral and emotional challenges than in
the past.”
The last item leads to one of the biggest recruitment and retention
problems: getting the right foster parents, i.e., those willing to take
school-aged children, teens and troubled youth.
Many new foster parents “have a romanticized idea of what it’s going to
be like,” Agosti says. They want babies and cute little kids. “They get
the first couple of placements, and they’re gone.” Or they don’t accept
the children that the agencies try to place.
The ironic result: At a time when public agencies don’t have enough
homes for all their foster children, many foster beds sit empty. Of the
41 foster care program managers surveyed by HHS, 36 said “they had
licensed foster care families who were not currently caring for
children.”
Child welfare workers and foster parents told HHS that “their agencies
are spending a lot of time and money licensing foster family homes which
may never receive a child because these families are unwilling to accept
adolescents, sibling groups or children with severe psychological or
medical needs.”
Explains Dallas Pierson, president of the Utah Foster Care Foundation:
“It’s not really a numbers game. It’s a matching game.”
The question is whether foster care agencies can learn how to play.
Focused Recruitment
Pierson knows well how easy it is recruit a lot of the wrong people.
Faced with rising foster care caseloads and declining beds, Utah decided
in 1998 to contract with a nonprofit for recruitment. The Utah Foster
Care Foundation was born for that purpose, with a state-funded budget of
$2.7 million.
The foundation increased the number of licensed foster homes from 944 in
1999 to 1,325 in 2000, Pierson says. But then, he says, “We realized
we’re getting a lot of people, but … they had licenses and empty beds,”
because many of them wouldn’t take the kids the state needed to place.
Last year the agency focused its recruitment more on families that would
take hard-to-place kids. “We’ve dropped back down to about 1,200 foster
families,” Pierson says, but placements are up.
More agencies are instituting that kind of “focused recruitment.”
That starts with being blunt about the children who need homes. It means
saying, “We’re not looking for homes for adorable 2-year-olds,” says
Casey’s Agosti. “We’re looking for homes for 11-year-old boys, for
fairly troubled teens.”
It also means trying harder to recruit foster parents with the same
ethnic backgrounds as most of the unplaced foster kids – usually
minorities.
And it means looking more for foster homes in the neighborhoods that the
foster children come from. Agency administrators say it’s better to keep
children in their neighborhoods (so they don’t lose their schools or
their friends, for instance), and adults seem to respond to the concept
that a community should take care of its own children.
The Utah Foster Care Foundation analyzes ZIP code data about the
children’s biological homes and neighborhoods, Pierson says, then
contacts churches, service providers and civic groups to help find
foster homes in those same communities. The local agencies put out word
in their newsletters and at their gatherings, and host open houses on
foster care.
Casey Family Programs plans to try the same thing in Boston, says Fran
Gutterman, director of Casey’s Enterprise Development program, which is
working with the state to boost recruitment and retention of foster
parents.
Key to the Massachusetts effort, as in Utah, is creating more
partnerships with community-based organizations to find foster parents.
“The smaller community agencies had access to the neighborhood
residents” that the Department of Social Services “did not have,” says
Mia Alvarado, a senior enterprise development specialist who oversees
Casey’s Boston initiative.
In some states, the outreach includes churches. In Tennessee, the Child
and Family Policy Center at the Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy
Studies is working with the state Department of Children’s Services to
develop a church-based foster and adoptive parent recruitment
initiative. It would include training church members to conduct foster
parent certification classes.
In a couple of places, getting and keeping foster parents has led to one
of the most radical shifts of all: turning foster parenting into a
full-time job.
Sibling Revelry
When Illinois was sued in the early 1990s over the separation of
siblings in foster care, it needed outside help. Hull House, the
legendary Chicago-based nonprofit founded by Jane Addams, developed a
model to literally hire people to care for brothers and sisters.
Called Neighbor to Neighbor, the program pays one foster parent per
household $16,000 a year, plus benefits and the monthly stipend for each
child (which, at $600, is higher than the regular state stipend), says
program Director Vanessa Lankford.
The Hull House program (now serving 214 children in 59 homes) has been
copied in several places, including Boston. There, the Casey initiative
that Gutterman oversees pays five full-time caregivers $20,000 a year,
along with the stipend and benefits. Aside from caring for youths, the
parents regularly attend meetings with staff about treatment and other
issues. “They’re in the office almost on a weekly basis,” Alvarado says.
They also serve as mentors to the biological parents, helping pave the
way for returning the children home.
Casey pays the salaries, Gutterman says, but it is unclear how long that
will last.
Even as that concept spreads, however, it will apply to only a select
few foster homes. To keep more foster parents on board, states are
trying other incentives, like raising monthly stipends, relying more on
kinship care, creating liaisons in their agencies for foster parents to
contact for help, providing more respite care, hiring Spanish-speaking
staff, and organizing charity drives for essentials such as school
supplies and kids’ clothes.
Yet no public agency appears to have pulled off a cohesive overhaul.
Asked to name a state that seems to have demonstrated how to fix foster
care recruitment and retention, foster care experts often chuckle, then
name a few states that have tackled one aspect of the problem.
That’s why Casey Family Programs’ Collaborative on Recruiting and
Retaining Foster Families is geared toward “making dramatic, rapid
changes to an entire system, as opposed to these little steps,” said
program director Agosti. Co-sponsored by Casey and the David and Lucile
Packard Foundation, the program will aim for dramatic changes at 10
public child welfare agencies (which have not been chosen).
“We need to do something big,” Agosti says.
Some observers say the only big thing that will work is big money.
Alabama’s Department of Human Resources says money is the main reason
it’s been able hire more caseworkers over the past several years – and
that happened only after the state settled a lawsuit over the treatment
of foster children.
“The system is so grossly under-resourced that it is amazing,” Berlin
says. “The single most important thing you can do to make foster care
better is to lower caseloads. And that costs money.”
Patrick Boyle can be reached at
pboyle@youthtoday.org.
Oh Won’t You Stay?
Some recent public agency efforts to retain foster parents:
Higher stipends: When foster care advocates pointed out to state
legislators that Kentucky hadn’t increased its stipends to foster
families for a decade (1988-98), the legislature acted. It passed a law
that brings the state’s per diem payments close to the U.S. Department
of Agriculture’s estimate of the monthly cost of raising a child in that
region of the country. A similar effort is under way in New Hampshire.
New Jersey’s $22 million recruitment and retention initiative launched
in 1999 included $8 million to raise stipends to foster parents, says
Donna Younkin, assistant director of the state Division of Youth and
Family Services. “We moved our board rates up an average of 30 percent,”
to between $400 and $500 per month. “They hadn’t been moved up in
years.”
Kinship care: States have been trying to recruit more family
members to serve as foster parents since the 1980s, but some observers
(such as Jennifer Agosti at Casey Family Programs) believe more should
be done. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation reported (in “The
Future of Children,” Spring 1998) that 31 percent of children in
out-of-home care were living with relatives in the early 1990s. In 2000,
26 percent of foster children were living with relatives, according to
the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Mentors and liaisons: In Massachusetts, the Kid’s Net program
provides various supports to foster parents, including a liaison to the
state bureaucracy, mentors and training.
Foster parents: Several states now use foster parents in
recruitment ads and at recruitment events, and as trainers and mentors
for new foster parents.
Multilingual: Some agencies, like the Utah Foster Care
Foundation, are printing more of their materials in Spanish and hiring
Spanish-speaking recruitment staff. But Jay Berlin, executive director
of Alternative Family Services in San Francisco, says, “I haven’t seen
any jurisdiction make a reasonable effort to recruit and retain” foster
parents by putting all of its materials in Spanish and hiring
significant numbers of bilingual workers.
Respite care: Foster parents can never get enough of it, some
observers say. Santa Clara County, Calif., provides eight hours of
respite care a month. Over in Riverside County, the Children and
Families Commission just awarded $114,000 to the Friendship Community
Youth Center for a new respite care program.
Sex abuse allegations: Even when police clear foster parents of sex
abuse allegations, they often remain ineligible for years because the
foster care agency also has to clear them. Kentucky’s Cabinet for
Families and Children recently began an effort to try to speed up that
process.
Other support: The New Community Corp. in New Jersey offers
foster parents low-interest, no-down-payment mortgages for townhouses.
Resources
Kathy Barbell, Director
National Center for Resource Family Support
Fran Gutterman, Director
Enterprise Development
Casey Family Programs
1808 I St. NW, 5th Fl.
Washington, DC 20006
(202) 467-4441
www.casey.org/cnc
Karen Jorgenson, Administrator
National Foster Parent Association
7512 Stanich Ave., #6
Gig Harbor, WA 98335
www.nfpainc.org
Dallas Pierson, President
Utah Foster Care Foundation
136 East S. Temple, Ste. 960
Salt Lake City, UT 84111
(801) 994-5205
www.utahfostercare.org
“Recruiting Foster Parents”
“Retaining Foster Parents”
Office of the Inspector General
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
(202) 619-1343
http://oig.hhs.gov
http://www.youthtoday.org/youthtoday/ |
