When kids who grow up in foster care "become adults," they’re more likely than their peers with family support to be homeless, get in trouble with the law and suffer from substance abuse or mental health problems.

SOOTHING GROWING PAINS WITH MATCHING GRANTS
Behind the city's new steps to help foster children live on their own.
By Adam F. Hutton

http://www.citylimits.org/content/ar...med ia_type=4

When kids who grow up in foster care "become adults," they’re more
likely than their peers with family support to be homeless, get in
trouble with the law and suffer from substance abuse or mental health
problems. Most have a harder time finishing their education, and lack
basic life skills such as money management, health maintenance and
career building. In short, many don’t know how to take care of themselves.

And when they turn 21, they're largely on their own.

Because eight out of 10 foster youth can’t rely on anyone but themselves
after they “age out” of the system, according to the city’s
Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), and today there's a higher
percentage than before of foster kids who are adolescents, more
attention is being paid to what happens to them after 21.

Despite a plan addressing just that, released by ACS last summer, and a
brand new initiative to help these young adults financially, child
welfare experts say there's still a long way to go to address the needs
of the roughly 1,000 people without any family support who leave the
system every year.

“The aging-out process in New York City is a terrible crisis,” said
Jeremy Kohomban, president and CEO of Children’s Village, an agency that
provides a variety of services to New York’s most troubled foster
children. “Our jails and homeless shelters are full with kids who were
once in foster care.”

Mayor Bloomberg moved to address one aspect of this situation concretely
when he announced the creation of the Youth Financial Empowerment
program, aimed at giving foster children between the ages of 16 and 21 a
leg up on personal finance. Youth enrolled in the program, developed by
city agencies in conjunction with ACS, will receive 20 hours of personal
finance training and savings accounts that the city will match $2 for
every $1 saved.

The million-dollar program is being funded in part by the Center for
Economic Opportunity, which committed $300,000. ACS will administer the
Youth Financial Empowerment program and presently has $400,000 allocated
toward it. Additional funds will come from charities like the United Way
of New York and New Yorkers for Children.

Dominique Jones, ACS’s director for Youth Financial Empowerment, says
the program will help 450 foster kids plan for their financial goals,
and hopes to have 100 youth enrolled in the program by the end of the year.

“While we’ve made a lot of progress over the last decade keeping young
children from having to enter foster care, the older kids who grew up in
foster care and are now beginning lives as independent adults still face
serious challenges,” Bloomberg said at a press conference introducing
the initiative two weeks ago. “When they turn 21 and leave foster care,
they immediately have to navigate a complicated and competitive world on
their own, which can be very intimidating.”

Kohomban praised the new program, adding that Children’s Village also
runs a dollar-for-dollar matching savings program for youth aging out of
foster care.

ACS Commissioner John Mattingly said the new program would be “a
critical piece of ACS’s system-wide effort to address the issue of youth
aging out of foster care through its plan, Preparing Youth for
Adulthood" (PYA).

Indeed, some would say it's not just a critical piece of the $19 million
PYA plan – but so far, it's the only piece. City Councilman Bill de
Blasio, chairman of council's General Welfare Committee, said ACS is
coming up short in meeting its own stated goals of helping foster
children broadly transition into self-sufficient adulthood. At a recent
hearing on the progress of PYA, de Blasio said he was not impressed with
the effort so far.

“These foster youth do not have the safety net of parents whom they can
rely on for a few months or years to save up money to get a place of
their own, nor do they have the support a parent might offer in helping
pay for college, pay for health insurance or find a job,” de Blasio said
at a press conference before the June 21 hearing (which was before the
financial plan was announced). “It is ACS’s responsibility to help these
young people get ready to be out on their own and ACS is failing.”

At the hearing, ACS Deputy Commissioner for Family Permanency Services
Jeanette Ruiz defended her agency’s steps forward, but was forced to
acknowledge that PYA was a work in progress.

“While we've done a lot of practice innovations this past year that
we're building on, we still have a lot of work to do,” Ruiz said under
questioning from de Blasio.

“In the past year, (ACS) has rebuilt the infrastructure of this office,
trained staff throughout the child welfare system, and launched a number
of ground-breaking initiatives,” Ruiz told the committee. “As we move
deeper into implementation, we will continue to integrate this work into
everything we do, especially our emphasis on placing youth with families
that can serve as a permanent resource to them.”

The goal of preparing foster youth for self-sufficient independence is
more pressing for ACS now than ever before, she said. “Our sense of
urgency is heightened by the fact that, while New York City's foster
care census has declined overall in recent years, adolescents have come
to comprise an even larger proportion of children in care,” Ruiz said.
“Today, 42 percent of children in foster care are over the age of 12.”

As foster kids go, Pauline Gordon is a lucky one, with a promising
school and home set-up. Gordon graduated from high school in Brooklyn
last year and just finished her freshman year as an undergraduate
nursing student at Lehman College in the Bronx. The city put Pauline and
her twin sister – who come from a family with a history of mental
illness – in foster care when they were 14 years old.

Gordon will age out of the system next year, but unlike so many of her
peers – including her sister – she’ll have the support she needs from
caring adults. Her foster mother will let her stay at home as long as
she’s in school. But she’s hoping to spread her wings and get out on her
own even sooner, taking classes on her own to sharpen her financial smarts.

She was excited about the announcement of the Youth Financial
Empowerment program, especially the matching savings program. She said
she’s planning on applying for the program and telling her friends at
her foster care agency about it.

“It’s a good opportunity,” Gordon said. “I’m going to apply for it
myself, but I was mostly thinking about it for my sister. She doesn’t
have a savings account and she doesn’t have a permanent home like I do,
so I’m not sure what she’s going to do when she ages out of the system.”

Fortunately for other foster children, who like Gordon will soon be out
on their own, New York’s nonprofits have been working to fill the gap in
developing successful programs to prepare them for adulthood. That's one
part of the PYA plan that seems to be moving steadily forward: the key
role that nonprofit service providers can play.

Two years ago, the Heckscher Foundation for Children, which provides
grants to nonprofit child welfare agencies, took an interest in the
aging-out crisis. Senior program officer Julia Bator said they spent
months working with service providers in the child welfare system to
develop a “wish list” of programs they felt were missing from the lives
of children aging out.

Both ACS and other nonprofits "are all set up to deal with the front
door of foster care – abused and neglected babies and young children,"
Bator said. "None of them were prepared to deal with the back door –
creating model citizens out of troubled youth."

Bator's foundation ended up working with The Door, a Soho-based
nonprofit that has been helping adolescents since the '70s, and FEGS
(Federation Employment and Guidance Service), one of the largest
nonprofit human service providers in the country, to create The Academy,
which provides “every kind of preparation for adulthood training course
you can think of” to 80 foster kids, she said. They hope to have a total
enrollment of 120 by the end of the year.

Kathleen McAnulty, assistant director of The Academy at FEGS in the
South Bronx, said the program is flexible to meet the needs of each
individual. “The needs of a 16 year old who has five more years to go
before they leave the system are much different than the needs of
someone who turns 21 next month,” McAnulty said.

“It’s important for us to teach these kids how to manage their money,
take care of themselves and prepare them for work environments – but
it’s just as important for us to give them hope for the future and to
let them know that we care about them,” she added. “We want them to feel
like they can come back to us in a year, after they’ve aged out, and
keep coming back as long as they need support.”

Bator said ACS isn’t meeting the goals it set for helping foster kids
aging out of the system outlined in Preparing Youth for Adulthood. But
understanding that those kids need help and recognizing that it is a
serious concern is a step in the right direction, Bator added.

“ACS isn’t hitting the mark now because their primary focus is on
younger kids,” Bator said. “But at least they know that kids aging out
aren’t getting the help they need and they’re shifting some of their
focus onto those who are getting ready to leave the system.”

- Adam F. Hutton





CURRENTLY CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES VIOLATES MORE CIVIL RIGHTS ON A
DAILY BASIS THEN ALL OTHER AGENCIES COMBINED INCLUDING THE NSA / CIA
WIRETAPPING PROGRAM....

CPS Does not protect children...
It is sickening how many children are subject to abuse, neglect and even
killed at the hands of Child Protective Services.

every parent should read this .pdf from
connecticut dcf watch...

http://www.connecticutdcfwatch.com/8x11.pdf

http://www.connecticutdcfwatch.com

Number of Cases per 100,000 children in the US
These numbers come from The National Center on
Child Abuse and Neglect in Washington. (NCCAN)
Recent numbers have increased significantly for CPS

*Perpetrators of Maltreatment*

Physical Abuse CPS 160, Parents 59
Sexual Abuse CPS 112, Parents 13
Neglect CPS 410, Parents 241
Medical Neglect CPS 14 Parents 12
Fatalities CPS 6.4, Parents 1.5

CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES, HAPPILY DESTROYING HUNDREDS OF INNOCENT
FAMILIES YEARLY NATIONWIDE AND COMING TO YOU'RE HOME SOON...


BE SURE TO FIND OUT WHERE YOUR CANDIDATES STANDS ON THE ISSUE OF
REFORMING OR ABOLISHING CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES ("MAKE YOUR CANDIDATES
TAKE A STAND ON THIS ISSUE.") THEN REMEMBER TO VOTE ACCORDINGLY IF THEY
ARE "FAMILY UNFRIENDLY" IN THE NEXT ELECTION...

On Mon, 06 Aug 2007 20:18:08 -0700, fx wrote:

SOOTHING GROWING PAINS WITH MATCHING GRANTS
Behind the city's new steps to help foster children live on their own.
By Adam F. Hutton

Simply an extension of what the state has had to do all along, because
the parent's either couldn't, or wouldn't, or chose not to.

The truth?

The holes in the Doyle study on foster care outcomes:
....................
Foster children fare worse than children CPS leaves in-home — turning
logic on it’s head

Over the past few years studies, like the one below, have come out
that prompts critics of CPS to claim that these found that children
placed in foster homes had worse outcomes later, and as adults, than
children workers chose to place in out-of-home-care (foster).

The premise is, of course, that foster care placement itself causes
the bad outcomes.
The concept that workers make picks that are incorrect for the child
and their family is the exact opposite of simple logic, and what the
actual study report makes clear.

In fact, the outcome study reports that indeed, if one wishes to see
it objectively, the children placed in foster are the more damaged
coming into the system, the ones with the least parental resources to
go home to, the ones where the workers and their supervisor’s
assessment is that the family will not or cannot provide any but the
worst outcomes themselves.

This would include the gamut of problems common to more troubled
families.

One or more parents might well be missing entirely.

Crime involvement with running and hiding, incarcerated, disabled with
drug or alcohol use, mental illness severe enough to endanger
children. Parents that party over parenting.

Worker’s make a judgment call to leave children in their own homes
with their parents based on a set number of factors in a formal
assessment process.
Those parents show they have the willingness to commit to conditions,
a safety plan. Get treatment and support they need. Gain information
for safer more effective parenting. Have a support system around them,
in any of a number of forms, including but not limited to, extended
family, friends, church, community based services for the support of
family infrastructure — transport, shopping, money for utilities, etc.

Sometimes it can be as simple as doing a cleanup fix-up on the home
and yard.
Cases may be opened because the seriousness of an injury to a child,
or because a heightened level of dangerous risk warrants it…but the
fix being relatively simple and quick to accomplish makes the family a
better risk for success, not failure.
Of course such children from such families are going to have a better
outcome.

I can’t help but wonder if the researcher counted those times when a
child was sent home, and was further injured, or killed. Now that is a
bad outcome, overall. The researcher MIT economics professor Joseph J.
Doyle stated he did remove the more serious cases from his subject
group.
In fact, to draw such conclusions as critics make, that children are
better off at home, ignores one of the most important of points in the
research methodology.

Children from the most serious case were NOT included in the study.
Home or foster…they were not counted for analysis. That would hardly
support some of the wild conclusions that even Doyle himself did not
make and clearly states one should not make.

in his report Doyle makes what to me is the extraordinarily painful
claim: “This paper uses the removal tendency of investigators as an
instrumental variable to identify causal effects of foster care
placement on a range of outcomes for school-age children and youth.”

One needs to be very cautious about using such labels as “causal,”
with some of the missing elements in method he is being addressed by
his peers about.

Richard Wexler introduced this study into the Cornell researchers list
server, @list.cornell.edu, where it was greeted with what could
generously be called “cautious” evaluation of method and the author’s
claims.

A few remarks from half a dozen or so respected researchers in their
own right:

“This study itself may be okay, but the interpretation of the results
seems problematic.”

“It seems like there are four possibilities. Two choices: (1) Keeping
a child in the family and (2)placing a child in foster care times two
outcome categories: (1) better outcome for child, and (2) worst
outcome for child (there are actually 3 since it is possible that the
child will be neither better or worse off). If eliminating extreme
cases means eliminating cases in which maltreatment is most severe, it
will bias the results in the direction of making placement look bad.”

“I would have to agree that my central concern with this study is not
with its method or design, but with the authors’ interpretation. …

… Yet, I find it curious that the author did not highlight in any
substantial way the basic main-effect findings indicating that
children placed outside the home had comparable outcomes to their
peers who remained in the home. There were no differences in
delinquency or employment/earnings and only a small difference in
childbearing. This is an important finding!”

“One must evaluate the basal functioning of the child prior to any
intervention before determining efficacy of outcome. There is wide
trajectory of outcome between the progression of a child with ADHD and
mild oppositionality in comparison to one who sits fires, kills
animals, and sexually perpetrates on peers or siblings. …

… the upshot of studies that are broad in scope and fail to tease out
correlation and causation fall into the hands of child welfare
decision-makers, who then adopt the next “overarching philosophy”
(initiativeitis). This results in extraordinary pressure on
caseworkers, who witness situations that are well beyond typical human
experience. ”

The full study is available in PDF he

http://www.mit.edu/~jjdoyle/doyle_fo...arch07_aer.pdf

Here’s some information on the study in an oft quoted, by anti-CPS
critics, piece in the Kansas City Star:

Children on verge of foster care tend to do better when left with own
families, study says
By JOHN SHULTZ
The Kansas City Star

http://www.kansascity.com/105/story/205399.html

Children on the brink of entering state custody are apt to fare far
better in the long run living in their own potentially troubled homes
than in foster care, a recent study suggests.

Those children who remained with their families were less likely to
experience juvenile delinquency and teen pregnancy and often had
better,
more consistent employment later in life than those who became foster
children, according to the study by MIT economics professor Joseph J.
Doyle. He studied some 15,000 Illinois children whose families had
been
reported to the state for abuse or neglect.

Doyle’s research is the latest report to underscore the thought that
foster care should be looked at as an option of last resort to protect
children.

Some child advocates are lauding it as groundbreaking — both for the
breadth of the population studied and for raising empirical evidence
that supports theories that foster care may do more harm than good for
children whose cases could have gone either way.

“It confirms what observation and experience tell us: That kids need
families,” said Gary Stangler, the former head of Missouri’s
Department
of Social Services and current executive director of The Jim Casey
Youth
Opportunities Initiative based in St. Louis. “In my work now,
especially
dealing with older youths getting ready for life, you can see the
impact
of not having a family prepare them for that.”

Representatives from Kansas and Missouri child protection agencies
said
the study wasn’t surprising. Both states, as well as others
nationwide,
have refocused efforts in recent years on keeping families together.
Still, critics contend that states remain too quick to pull children
from their homes.

This study never suggests that foster care is inherently damaging to
children. Doyle did not study cases of children whose homes were the
subject of allegations of drug use or severe physical or sexual abuse,
reasoning that removing those children was necessary.

But, Doyle wrote, “The results suggest that children on the margin of
placement tend to have better outcomes when they remain at home,
especially for older children.”

The study follows another recent report that showed conflicting
benchmarks on the state of foster care.

A May report by the Pew Charitable Trusts said that while the nation’s
foster care rolls are shrinking — about 513,000 in 2005 compared with
560,000 in 1998 — the number and percentage of children who age out of
the system is rising. In 1998, it was about 17,000, a little more than
3
percent. Seven years later, more than 24,000 foster children, or 5
percent, outgrew state care without being adopted.

Doyle’s study keyed on Illinois because its abuse and neglect database
ties into other social service records, allowing him to track children
after they left state custody. The study looked at primarily older
kids
in the system from 1990 through about 2000.

“I was surprised that the results were as large as they were,” Doyle
said.

Doyle said the study is somewhat distinctive for suggesting that
disadvantages later in life may be caused by foster care. By
comparison,
older studies — including ones that found 20 percent of young prison
inmates and more than a quarter of homeless persons spent some time in
foster care — correlated negative life outcomes to foster care without
being able to present it as a cause.

“There’s been a movement more recently toward family preservation, and
my work would tend to support that,” Doyle said. “I hope this
encourages
a dialogue. But the academic in me would still like more work to
replicate my results.”

Richard Wexler, head of the Virginia-based National Coalition for
Child
Protection Reform, reads the study as a condemnation of any state that
too quickly removes children from their homes.

“It tells us how toxic intervention like foster care is,” said Wexler.
“It found that, on average, children did better when left in their own
homes. It does indicate where the presumption should be, and that
means
reversing the presumption that most child welfare agencies operate
under.”

Spokeswomen for state social services in Kansas and Missouri countered
that in recent years, both states have strongly emphasized maintaining
families over removing children.

Abbie Hodgson, with Kansas’ Social and Rehabilitation Services,
pointed
to the steep increase in cases handled by the state’s Family
Preservation Services. In 1997, the state served 1,800 such families,
she said. Last year, it was about 2,800. Over that time, the number of
children in foster care decreased.

“We’re well aware of the trauma that can be done to a child by
removing
them from their home and their parents, and that’s always done as a
last
resort and to preserve the safety of the child,” she said.

Missouri has seen a similar, though less pronounced, increase in
families being accepted into intensive in-home family preservation
programs over the past few years, said Department of Social Services
spokeswoman Sara Anderson. Missouri also had a similar reduction in
the
foster care rolls.

Neither Hodgson nor Anderson expect the MIT study to have much
immediate impact on how the states manage their systems.

Pauline Abernathy, with the Pew Commission’s Kids are Waiting
campaign,
said the study underscores the importance of state child welfare
services beyond foster care.

Lori Ross, head of the Midwest Foster Care and Adoption Association,
said in her experience, the recent shift to focus on family
preservation
has taken a number of the marginal foster care cases more prevalent a
decade ago out of the system. She called the study’s results
unsurprising, and also cautioned that such reports shouldn’t be used
to
never remove children.

“That would be very unfortunate for children if people did not use
good
judgment,” Ross said. “That study is not saying that foster care is
not
important for kids to be safe. That study is saying you need to do
your
darnedest to prevent them from getting into foster care in the first
place.”
…………..

The hallmark of research, of course, is the question, can it be
replicated. Other researchers have already brought into question some
of the methodology they have seen in this study.

So finally what it IS saying is very general and not specifically and
only addressing how child protection makes these decisions …

… “…do your darnedest to prevent them from getting into foster care in
the first place.”

Are we, parents, families not the one’s with the first obligation to
do that?

Aren’t we in “first place?”

CPS doesn’t hunt families. Allegations of abuse and neglect are
reported to them, and only then can CPS decide to investigate or not.
And what to do afterward, with that overseen by the family court
system. And their actions follow law. Both state and federal.

Changing CPS around in hopes of better casework outcomes and better
case practice methods is always an important and worthy goal.

But CPS does not have the mandate to “the first place,” that exceeds
our own responsibility to it, and so to our children.
The debate continues.

Kane