Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Foster Children - Foster Care Statistics Show the Deck Is Stacked Against Them




Many people have asked us over the past month how is it that foster children are not receiving the services they so desperately need. Two such services are family finding and relative placement.


Family finding is a social service's and governmental term for the activity of identifying, locating and notifying adult family members that one of their related children is in foster care. Federal and often state laws mandate thorough efforts be executed to locate family members of foster kids so they can move out of foster care and into "relative" placement, living with family as opposed to complete strangers.




Nearly 84,000 U.S. foster youth have Hispanic ancestry with the majority having some relatives still living in Mexico.



As we have commented in the past, many foster care agencies lack the resources or the training to effectively perform family finding in Mexico. Fortunately, due to our increased outreach to agencies around the country, more and more cases are being brought to us. The result is that more foster children are now reconnected with their families, and many are now out of the system and living with adult relatives in the U.S.

However, there are still tens of thousands of children who are languishing in a government institution (group home) in part because many agencies claim a lack of funding to support family finding in Mexico. This brings us back to the foster care statistics above.


The foster care system has a serious money problem. That problem is in how they allocate our tax dollars to support the system and not foster children.

Let's see how this funding mismanagement is working against getting foster kids out of the system and into permanent homes with their relatives. These two issues, family finding and relative placement, are inseparably linked together.




I've already said that some agencies use lack of funds as a reason not to perform family finding even though this is a federal requirement. When a foster child's relatives are located, the most likely outcome is that the child will be in relative placement.

There is a HUGE incentive for foster care agencies not to find relatives. Using the chart above, we see that when foster kids are placed in a group home, the agency now has $102,348 to spend on caring for each child. There are also 45 group homes involved with the necessary staff to run those facilities.


Here are the hard numbers:


Relative Placement
11,188 foster children living in homes with caring, loving relatives
Cost: $47.1 million/year


Group Home Placement
1,070 foster children living in government operated facilities 
Cost = $109 million/year


Or to really put this into context, if those 1,070 children in group home placement were instead in relative placement, there would be a savings of:


 


You may think that more money clearly means a better outcome for foster youth. You would be mistaken. Studies show that foster kids generally do better in all areas of their lives and their futures are far superior to those children in either foster care placement or a group home.


Now here's the real crime against foster children. Sex trafficking victims are most likely to be former foster youth with some children still being in the foster care system. The foster care statistics above show that an overwhelming amount of personnel and support are available for kids in group foster homes. Yet children who are physically and sexually abused and become victims of sex trafficking are for the most part those same children in either foster care placement, a non-family home, or in a group home.





We all want the best for those children who through no fault of their own, end up in foster care. We expect that the government will do its best to protect these children and get them out of foster care as fast as possible. The mission of foster care agencies is to have these children either returned to their parents or, in those cases where this is not safe or possible, to have the children in relative placement.


Unfortunately, based on studies such as the one above and many more, it is in the best interest of agencies not to locate family members for all foster youth. Failing to locate relatives, those foster children can now be fed into foster care placement or a group home, both which provide less safety for foster kids and a much greater probability of them aging out and living a life being homeless, undereducated or ending up in prison.


You can help more foster children by donating and supporting our efforts to find their family members.


There is a lot of money in foster care. It's just that not enough is going to finding family members and putting children in relative placement.

Do it for the children,

Richard Villasana
  Richard

Richard Villasana
Find Families In Mexico
760-690-3995

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