Enough of These Stupid Foster Care Ideas Already!

It's way past time that we stand up and take responsibility for our actions. I can tell that we want to...politicians, columnists, and even your Average Joe are all whipping the names of children around to rally people behind one agenda or another. Not just children, dead children. Not just dead children, but children murdered in what were supposed to be protective placements, foster and adoptive homes.

Enough, enough, enough...while I'm a firm believer in free speech, I also believe that you should have to take responsibility for the words that spew from your mouth or fingers.

When a child dies in foster care, it has nothing to do with whether or not social workers are armed or have safety measures in place. Unless the caseworker (as in the Saige Terrell case in KY, and also in KY in 1987) is dead or risking death, there is no room for that discussion in the discussion of child protection.

I'm hearing all sorts of off-the-wall arguments to strengthen the protective system so that more children are screened. PS referrals should be initiated every time there is a domestic abuse complaint (it wouldn't have saved Ricky Holland). Let's open a type of safehouse where children can come in and be properly investigated by multiple persons to see if they've been abused in any way (it wouldn't help countless children in or out of foster care, where merely going to school could afford them that opportunity), let's put the Office of the Childrens' Ombudsman under the legislative branch and pull it out from under CPS' authority (I can see your heart is in the right place but you're not seeing the scope of the problem...).

The problem is more serious that these philosopher types would like to admit. How many stories have to be told of children who have died when they were either under CPS's watch in their own homes or in foster/adoptive placement before people say, "Isn't there something in place to stop that?"

Here's where I go and do what I told everyone else to quit doing...but there's a twist. I've had a front-row seat to the way CPS, the family court, and associated agencies in the juvenile process work for almost a decade. It isn't from a social worker's point of view. I think we all know what social workers want. More, more, more. More funding, more rights, more power. It isn't from a legal aspect (though I can speak at length on the legal issues surrounding CPS cases in juvenile court), it's from the aspect of a mother.

I have a good idea what I'm talking about here, and it's from a different viewpoint.

I can't speak for any individual mother except myself. I can't tell you if Marcus Fiesel's mother tried to get help or report any abuse before he was left to die, bound and in a closet, while his foster family went to a family reunion in Kentucky. I can tell you that even if she howled from the rooftops, it wouldn't have made a lick of difference.

Do you know why children die in foster or adoptive placements? I do. It has everything to do with how the system is being run.

One - The bottom line with many of these agencies is funding, not children.

This sounds highly controversial, doesn't it? Well, thanks to the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, it is a harsh reality.

Private agencies are now licensing and monitoring foster parents. In most cases, these are not-for-profit agencies, but these agencies aren't looking to budget in a deficit any more than you would run your home or business in a deficit.

There are financial incentives to take and keep children in placements. In fact, Kentucky is running into this issue face-first. In June, it blew up all over the state that social workers were being forced to move families into termination in order to keep the federal funding coming in. An Anonymous tip-line had been set up, and social workers and others could complain anonymously about what they were being forced to do.

The best incentives come from terminating a parent's rights to their children. It is easier to do than one might think, unfortunately.

Two - Agencies don't do their job correctly.

Paperwork isn't followed, cases aren't caught up, workers are overworked and underpaid. We hear it all the time, but with such an influx of children into foster care, compounded by the high social worker turnover rate, it's easy to see what a logistical nightmare this has become.

These mandatory reporters are letting cases of abuse slip through the cracks, even though they've seen the abuse with their own eyes. It's certainly not just with birth parents. Children are far more likely to be abused in foster care than in their own homes (where most children are taken for neglect, not abuse). If a social worker doesn't propserly report it in the time frame so that it can be investigated, typically they get nothing more than a slap on the wrist if it's found out.

Three - Many states lack an Office of the Children's Ombudsman, or if they do, it's usually under the same funding as CPS. The Office of the Children's Ombudsman is supposed to be there to monitor the actions of CPS in particular cases where there may be some type of problem. They report their findings to the court.

I know, in Michigan, the new appointed Ombudsman was imported from the CPS offices. How does that help? Self-policing leads to no guilty parties. CPS is no exception.

Four - Parents are typically the ones who are first to notice abuse of their children. If they try to report these abuses they are routinely ignored because they are the parents.

A picture is painted of parents who lose their children, and no matter how they try to fight it, the people involved in CPS cases insist that they fit this picture and therefore utterly discredit them because their motives might not be pure.

Well in many of these instances, there's nothing pure about anyone's motive so singling out the parents just silences the only party that might actually be able to make things right.

Five - Agencies need foster homes. With all the children coming into care, there just isn't anywhere to put them. People no longer typically open their doors to take in children, particularly temporarily. Some do to find a child or several to adopt, or because a family member has lost their child...but the foster parents they're recruiting now are a completely different type of foster parent. Like the agencies, they're in it for the money.

Is it enough to pay for the child? Any foster parent will tell you no, and so will I. However, getting paid any decent amount of tax-free income to raise a child that I wanted to help and/or adopt anyway is more than biological parents get before their children are removed.

I know of people who became foster parents just for the funding, because the economy is so bad, and I cringe inside at what kind of care the children must be getting if that's what the people caring for them got into foster parenting for.

With that combined with the utter lack of decent foster homes, children are going to be placed somewhere dangerous.

With no safety net in place in case something bad happens, and tons of incentive to not build that safety net, children are going to fall through the cracks and get hurt...or worse...die.

People are spouting off with tons of ideas, tons of ways we can help...but they don't seem to want to get their hands dirty. Just come up with an idea, throw some money at it, and maybe we can make it go away. Well that doesn't work when children are involved, and I'm saddened to say that even with all these cases garnering media attention nowadays, no one is coming up with any real, viable solutions that put children first. Until we can do that, we are all failing children.