To the End of June : The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (9780547999531) by Beam Cris

Author:Beam, Cris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Privatization is a strange word, lacking clear definition in child welfare. Sometimes it’s used to signify Florida’s choice: swapping out the fee-for-service model for a flat, nonnegotiable sum. But this isn’t really the privatization part of Florida’s radical overhaul. The funding shift is called a waiver, and five other states—California, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, and Oregon—have accepted waivers too, though on a smaller scale, in select counties. Privatization, in its strictest definition, is when the government seeks competition from private bidders to perform government activities. And this has been happening in foster care since its inception.

In New York City, for instance. Foster care in New York was founded on the private religious institutions and charities that took in foundlings and orphans and destitute kids, and although ACS still oversees all the kids who come into care, it contracts out all of the actual housing provisions, foster parent recruitment, and so on, to private nonprofits. Eighty percent of all states do this—it’s nothing new. What is new, perhaps, is the growing trend toward outsourcing more of the big-picture thinking and action in child welfare. The state of Kansas, for example, now uses private agencies for all aspects of its child welfare, including investigations and child removals—trumping even Florida in terms of government involvement. And, as more states and counties experiment with the waiver system, and thus have flexible funds at their disposal, they may look even more to the private agencies for broader, or more creative, or more business-oriented services.

It’s hard to tell, exactly, how the dual and sometimes intersecting trends toward privatization and waivers will pan out, but they seem to signify the beginnings of systemic change. Casey Family Programs, a national organization that provides child welfare services in five states and conducts major nonpartisan research on foster care as a whole, advocates the waiver system. Casey’s goal is to reduce foster care by half by 2020, so to them, tying funding to children who have been removed is entirely counterintuitive. Waivers allow states and agencies to spend their money as they choose—on more front-end support, say. Florida, on the whole, seems to be doing well with its choices. The secretary of Florida’s Department of Children and Families, and one of the key waiver advocates, was appointed head of child welfare at the national level. And shortly thereafter, President Obama signed an act allowing more states to apply for waivers, lasting through 2016. Florida applied for another five-year waiver.

Even still, one county that adopted the waiver option has garnered deep reproach. Los Angeles County, which shifted to the waiver payment in July 2007 and cut the number of kids in foster care by 23 percent in nearly three years, was criticized in a scathing series of articles in the Los Angeles Times. The reporters claimed Child Services didn’t share vital information across agencies or follow policy and noted that deaths from abuse or neglect went from eighteen in 2008 to twenty-six in 2009, and they questioned whether the waiver system, and a renewed focus on family reunification, contributed to the increase.

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