Friday, May 16, 2014

California Foster Children Costly for Relatives

Pretty much every expert agrees that foster care is not a nice place for children. Understandably, one of the goals of foster care is to move children out of the system as quickly as possible. Many child-welfare experts agrees that it's in a foster child's best interest to be placed with family members because foster kids "experience more stability, fewer placement changes and more contact with biological parents and siblings."

So it's pretty alarming to discover that only California has a policy so that caring relatives who take in a foster child receive less money than if the foster youth was placed with a non-related family. You read that right! Instead of going into the history of how this came about, the bottom line is that a foster kid's relatives are financially punished while complete strangers are paid more, respectively, a lot more.

Here's an example:
"The state pays $820 a month to a nonrelative caretaker of a 15-year-old foster child—or what UC Davis determined to be the minimum cost of caring for a foster child with no special needs—but only $351 a month to a relative provider through CalWORKs."
I can hear some of you ROFLing so let's overlook the ridiculous $820 a month that a nonrelative caretaker receives much less the insane pittance of $351. Anyone who lives in California knows that this amount is beyond fantasy and nothing close to real costs in 2014.

This issue gets even crazier when you realize that there are laws in place mandating the identification, location, and notification of a foster youth's relatives with the hope that an adult relative will step forward and care for the child. In California, the average stay in foster care for a child is more than three years with an average cost of $190,000 or $5,000 per month!

These relatives who come forward to care for their kin saving the child from a sad life in foster care also save taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars. These family members do so not for the money but as Cecilia Escamilla-Greenwald, who took in two related foster children, said, "We step up because we want to help kids stay with their families."

With some much benefit being received by a foster youth and the cost savings to county foster care agencies, it makes no sense to penalize family members by giving them less financial aid than complete strangers receive. Or maybe it's just another example of governmental insanity.

Regards,

Richard Villasana
  Richard

Richard Villasana
Find Families In Mexico
760-690-3995


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