A report released Tuesday by a 16-member national panel, which included a Utah appellate judge, spells out a number of significant policy recommendations regarding children in foster care.
The Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care spent the past year reviewing the plight of foster-care youths and developed proposals to drastically revamp federal financing of child welfare systems.
"Simply put, current federal funding mechanisms for child welfare encourage an overreliance on foster care at the expense of other services to keep families safely together and to move children swiftly and safely from foster care to permanent families," the report said.
Among the panel members was Judge William A. Thorne Jr., who sits on the Utah Court of Appeals.
The report notes there were 534,000 children in foster care in 2002, almost double the number of the early 1980s. Children stay in foster care longer than may be necessary and often do not receive appropriate services, it concluded.
The study also noted the overrepresentation of minorities in foster care — especially African-Americans, who enter foster care at the fastest rate and leave at the slowest.
Barbara Feaster, an abuse survivor who spent close to two years in foster care, said the study is an important milestone in recognizing the challenges faced by abused and neglected children.
Feaster, who went on to establish uFOSTERsuccess, an organization for people who have been in foster care, said the report highlights critical areas public policy crafters need to address. Those include improvements in the court system and ensuring services are provided once foster-care children "age out" of the system.
In Feaster's case, she said she relied on plans that luckily fell into place once she turned 18.
"I am lucky that Plan A worked out, because there was no Plan B — no safety net for me to fall back on," she said. "The alternative would have been homelessness."
Feaster did not come into the system until she was 16. But the national study found foster children, on average, have three different foster-care placements, and 20 percent of them wait five or more years for a permanent home.
Infants represent the fastest-growing segment of the foster-care population, with nearly 39,000 entering the system in fiscal year 2001.
The impact plays out in adulthood, with foster children who age out of the system more likely to experience homelessness, unemployment and other problems.
The report details a system that is struggling in a number of ways — from courts that lack adequate training in the child welfare arena to child welfare caseworkers who face a 20 percent turnover rate in public agencies (and 40 percent in the private sector).
In noting federal spending flaws, the report said $4.8 billion is shelled out to states as reimbursement for the cost of maintaining eligible children in foster care. In contrast, the amount of federal dollars spent on state child welfare systems to provide family preservation services is a "relatively small pot of money," accounting for only 5 percent of all federal spending on child welfare in 2000.
"Such a disparity in these two funding sources hampers states' abilities to invest in strategies that limit the time children need to spend in foster care," the report said. "The result is a discouraging and frustrating cycle: Foster-care rolls are swelled by children who might have been able to stay at home safely or leave placement sooner had states been able to use more federal dollars for prevention, treatment and post permanency services."
The report, aside from recommending $10 million to be spent on courts for additional training, said public policy officials should consider reducing federal reimbursement rates to states for children in foster care by up to 35 percent. While states would not lose additional federal dollars, the reduction would ultimately encourage the child welfare systems to throw more resources at family preservation services, according to the report.
E-mail: amyjoi@desnews.com