Pubdate: Sun, 23 Jul 2006
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2006 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Ian Urbina
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/youth.htm (Youth)

TRYING TO KEEP CHILD CARE IN THE FAMILY

PHILADELPHIA -- Kali Ward is just glad she can finally go to slumber parties.

Now that she is out of foster care, the sociable 17-year-old no 
longer has to get a criminal background check on her friends' parents 
if she wants to sleep over.

"People make plans same day," said Kali, a cordless phone in one 
hand, an afternoon waffle in the other. "Background checks take weeks."

Under the legal guardianship of their grandmother, Kali and two of 
her siblings left such worries behind last year with help from a city 
program that focuses on moving children from foster care into 
permanent homes with grandparents or other relatives.

States struggling to fill a void left by parents lost to drug 
addiction, AIDS and incarceration are increasingly using such 
programs to deal with the rising costs of foster care. Thirty-eight 
states have such programs, more than half of them initiated in the 
last five years.

Now, Congress is considering legislation to finance the programs, 
correcting what some advocates call a perverse system that provides 
much more support for children in foster care than it does to get 
them out of the child welfare system.

"Many of the half million children in foster care are spending years 
and years stuck without a permanent home, and these programs are an 
excellent exit strategy for them from the child welfare system," said 
Carol Emig, executive director of the Pew Commission on Children in 
Foster Care, a nonpartisan panel of experts convened to study 
problems with the child welfare system.

States like the programs because they are cheaper than foster homes, 
which require more oversight. Child welfare advocates like them, too, 
because they are more permanent.

Critics say the programs are a new form of welfare and potentially 
more costly than advocates claim.

Studies show that foster children average more than two years -- 
double the time that federal law advises -- without a permanent home, 
often drifting from family to family.

In Washington, which initiated a similar program last month, Patricia 
McCoy, 62, talks about being able to send her 10- and 12-year old 
grandsons to Boy Scout camp for the first time.

"These are the kind of things that make a big difference in boys' 
lives," said Ms. McCoy, who began caring for three grandchildren 
after their father went to jail and the courts ruled that their 
mother's depression left her incapable of caring for them.

Ms. McCoy and the children had survived on her $700 monthly 
retirement check and about $300 in welfare. With an extra $1,900 she 
started receiving this month from the city's guardianship program, 
she has replaced her squeaky brakes and fixed her freezer.

Foster care costs up to $80,000 per child per year, according to the 
Council of the District of Columbia.

In some ways, the programs are not new. In the late 1980's and the 
1990's, state officials began experimenting with so-called kinship 
care programs, which tried to draw relatives into the system. But 
costs were high, numbers expanded and children still lingered without 
a permanent home.

"States have definitely reached a certain comfort level now in that 
they realize subsidized guardianship is one more tool that should be 
available," said Rob Geen, director of the Child Welfare Research 
Institute at the Urban Institute.

More than 2.5 million children are being raised by grandparents or 
other relatives. The number has risen more than 86 percent since 
1990, up from 1.3 million, according to census data analyzed by the 
Children's Defense Fund. States have been watching the trend closely.

"Grandparents and other relatives have always played a vital role in 
childrearing," said Rutledge Q. Hutson, a lawyer at the Center for 
Law and Social Policy, a nonprofit public policy research 
organization in Washington. "But we've never before seen so many 
grandparents single-handedly raising children, and the nation's 
foster care system is simply not able to handle so many of them."

Donna M. Butts, executive director of Generations United, a nonprofit 
group that advocates on behalf of multigenerational households, added 
that children often linger in foster care because there is too little 
support for grandparents and other relatives who want to provide homes.

"Federal child welfare law states that children should be moved out 
of foster care within 15 months in one of three ways: reunification 
with their families, adoption or placement with a legal guardian," 
Ms. Butts said. "But in 2004, the average length of time spent in 
foster care was 30 months."

Although federal assistance is available to families providing 
temporary foster care and is available to many families adopting a 
child from the foster care system, federal support is not available 
to relatives who become legal guardians.

In Washington, for example, foster parents receive nearly $800 per 
month per child, whereas the only public resource available to a 
caregiver outside the foster care system is welfare, at roughly $239 
a month, according to a report from the District Council.

Critics say states should not pay relatives to do what is their 
responsibility anyway.

"Members of the advocacy community view these programs as a way to 
get more government payments into a high-risk population," said 
Heather Mac Donald, a researcher at the Manhattan Institute, a 
nonprofit policy research organization in New York.

Critics also say that grandparents who raised children with problems 
should not be trusted with another generation.

"I've heard from social workers of cases where the drug addict mother 
is living downstairs from her mother who is getting a payment that is 
several times what she could get on welfare," Ms. Mac Donald said. 
"In a case like that, there is really little incentive for the drug 
addict to get her act together because she still has access to the children."

Mark E. Courtney, director of Chapin Hall Center for Children at the 
University of Chicago, said he supported subsidized guardianship but 
worried that the programs allowed states to abdicate their 
responsibility to help troubled parents.

"States may view it as a lot easier and cheaper to give up on the 
parents and pay a family member to take the children off its hands 
than it is to provide the services needed by a mother to deal with an 
abusive relationship or a substance abuse problem," Dr. Courtney said.

Numbers are hard to come by, but some states claim significant 
savings under the new programs. Illinois started a program in 1997 
that has been studied closely and has moved more than 9,000 children 
from foster care into permanent homes. The state has saved about 
$6,000 per year per child, according to a 2003 study conducted by the 
School of Social Work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

But Mr. Geen, of the Urban Institute, said that other states, where 
administrative costs for foster care are lower, would probably save 
less, if they did at all.

For Carol J. Hayes, a 64-year-old grandmother living in Milwaukee, 
money is not the issue.

"Especially when the social workers came twice a month, the kids were 
always asking whether they were going to be taken away," said Ms. 
Hayes, who became a foster parent to her three grandchildren after 
her daughter became a crack addict over a decade ago. Last year, when 
Wisconsin initiated a subsidized guardianship program, Ms. Hayes 
signed up immediately.

"I don't receive any more money than I did as their foster parent," 
she said, "but the children know now that this is their home, for good."

The programs are crucial in poor cities like Washington, where about 
19 percent of children live in households headed by grandparents, the 
third highest percentage behind Baltimore and New Orleans, according 
to 2000 census data.

In 2001, Washington created a subsidized guardianship program that 
focused on children in foster care. This year, the city took a step 
further, setting aside $6.5 million in local money for the next two 
years to create a more pre-emptive program that focuses on children 
in need who have not entered foster care.

Grandparents and certain other relatives can qualify only if they 
meet particular income requirements, and once the court recognizes 
them as legal guardians after determining that the parents are truly 
unavailable.
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MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman