Authors Kevin Ryan & Tina Kelley
care at ages 19 to 21 without a family to call their own. If we could win one battle in the war to prevent youth homelessness, this is the one I would choose.
Most children—78 percent in 2010—exit foster care to a safe, permanent family: their birth parent, a relative serving as a legal guardian, or through adoption. (Another 8 percent leave to live with relatives who are not their legal guardians, who sometimes, but not always, provide a permanent home.) But 11 percent of the children leaving foster care age out of the system with no place to go. That’s nearly 26,000 teenagers, up sharply from a little more than 20,000 a decade earlier. Some states have a much more serious problem than others—in Virginia, for example, more than a quarter who exit from foster care do so without a family in place.
Turning 18 doesn’t suddenly give young people new skills or power. For many alumni of foster care, the most essential tasks—completing school, finding work, saving, and knowing how to shop, cook, and pay the rent—remain elusive puzzles. A 2005 study by the University of Chicago’s Chapin Hall showed that former foster youth in Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin were twice as likely as other youth to be unable to afford rent and utilities, and sometimes even food. Fewer than half of the 23- and 24-year-olds in the study who had aged out of foster care in 2004 held a job six years later, and most who did were not earning a living wage. Nearly 40 percent been homeless at one point since leaving foster care.
According to one study, young people who age out of foster care cost $5 billion in welfare and Medicaid expenses, the costs of incarceration, and lost wages and tax revenues each year. That price, on a human as well as fiscal scale, is far too high.But encouraging innovation is underway. Focusing on the foster children who have been waiting for homes the longest, Wendy’s Wonderful Kids, a program of the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, awards grants to adoption agencies to recruit adoptive families aggressively, resulting in almost 3,000 adoptions.
In New Jersey in 2007, the child welfare system I led devoted its most experienced staff members to finding permanent homes for as 12 years were finally connected with families.
In St. Louis, a program called Extreme Recruitment uses retired detectives and child-welfare workers to locate dozens of standard procedures.
Under the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act of 2008, federal matching aid is available to states that provide assistance to relatives who become legal guardians of foster children. Research shows the importance of placing children with relatives whenever safe and possible. A far-reaching 2006 study by the Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania revealed that Philadelphia children typically found more stability when placed with relatives. Under the Fostering Connections law, many of these relatives can become permanent guardians without forfeiting state assistance.
States can also receive federal matching money for letting young people stay in foster care until age 21, as long as they are in school, working, or engaged in other constructive activities.
Yet in 2012, just slightly more than half of the states had successfully applied for federal matching dollars to expand guardianship care, and only 11 had received federal approval for matching aid to extend foster care to age 21, even though young people who could stay in foster care longer were three times more likely to complete at least one year of college and 38 percent less likely to become pregnant, compared to those who left care at 18.
Given limited government resources and the growing stock of abandoned, bank-owned properties across the United States, federal policymakers should encourage banks, perhaps with tax incentives, to contribute foreclosed properties to nonprofit organizations without liability. The White House could then target to nonprofit groups a number of existing federal Section 8 housing vouchers from the Department of Housing and Urban Development for use by youth aging out of foster care. The program would promote the growth and redevelopment of struggling communities, while allowing youth to prepare for independent living in a safe and stable setting.
We can’t forget that whenever it is safe for children to stay home, they should. Children very often do better living with their own families with the proper support systems in place than they do with strangers in foster care. Of the cases that child welfare workers investigate, most do not involve abuse and neglect. Many arise because of the cascading consequences of poverty—the need for groceries, utility aid, shelter, or child care. Billions more dollars have been spent on the machinery of foster care than on safely preventing admissions to foster care. Programs that supply wraparound services such as Memphis’s Youth Villages Intercept remain more the exception than the rule, even though they have helped young people with behavioral or emotional problems stay in their homes, by providing family therapy and parenting skills, at a lower cost than foster care. A growing movement in fewer than 20 states has created a “differential response” system, to address families’ social needs when child abuse and neglect are not suspected. Differential response embraces the idea that a traditional investigation of the family to determine whether child abuse or neglect has occurred is not appropriate in all cases.
Consider the homes without electricity or heat in the wintertime; the single parent with two jobs and no child care; the family with a sick parent and a truant child. Few would argue that children there need to be pulled from their families, which may just need heating assistance, subsidized child care, or Meals-on-Wheels to stay together safely. Any of these services costs significantly less, in dollars and heartache, than removing children to foster care. In many cases, differential response can assure children’s stability in their own homes, promote family functioning, and prevent child abuse and the need for foster care. Studies show that these children are less likely to be the subject of subsequent maltreatment allegations, and families are more likely to be preserved safely.
For young people who “graduate” from foster care without a party or a diploma, a thin network of youth shelters and transitional living programs may be available to help them establish safe and stable lives on their own. Federal funding for transitional living programs covers only about 4,000 youth a year, just 15 percent of those who age out of foster care, and most programs have long waiting lists. Charities such as Covenant House, relying substantially on private donations, strive to fill the gap, but the need is enormous.
the Americas devoted to serving homeless and trafficked children and youth. Covenant House reaches more than 56,000 vulnerable young people annually in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala. The charity's international human rights work to prevent the murder and exploitation of street youth has been Palme Peace Prize, the United States Department of State Hero Citation and the Guatemala Hands of Peace Award.
For more information, please visit:
www.covenanthouse.org
Owner/Editor - Chris Chmielewski