LOSING ISAAC pt3

LOSING ISAAC

Overhaul may be only hope

Faster adoptions, smaller caseloads seen as solutions

January 30, 2007

JACK KRESNAK, RUBY L. BAILEY and TINA LAM

FREE PRESS

Despite previous attempts at reform, the death of 2-year-old Isaac Lethbridge in foster care exposes a stubbornly persistent pattern of failures in Michigan's child welfare system.

The overburdened system has seen the number of children in foster care rise steadily since the mid-1990s, even as the state's resources to handle them shrank. Isaac was the third young child to die under the state's watch in the last 18 months.

"This is a system at risk, there is no question," Department of Human Services Director Marianne Udow said.

Gov. Jennifer Granholm will address issues raised by Isaac's death next Tuesday during her State of the State address, spokeswoman Liz Boyd said Monday.

Boyd said changes in foster care already implemented by the state are "the first step to ensuring the protection of children."

"Do we need to do more? Certainly," Boyd said.

Marcia Robinson Lowry, executive director of Children's Rights, a New York-based advocacy group that sued the state over foster care in August, said Michigan needs to ensure greater accountability and lower caseloads for workers, move children into adoptive homes more quickly and license more relatives as foster parents so children can stay with their families and still get help.

"This system really needs a very, very thorough overhaul," Lowry said. "Keeping kids alive and safe from abuse and psychological trauma seems like it ought to be high on the list of things the state would pay for."

A few years ago, Michigan's system was considered a model because of its high-quality family-preservation programs. But funds for preventing maltreatment, including programs to teach parenting skills, have been cut, and that may send more kids into an already stressed-out system.

With a budget deficit projected at more than $800 million for the current fiscal year, the state is in no position to pour millions more into child welfare, though experts say it is possible to improve conditions for foster kids without adding costs.

"Running a child welfare system right will always cost you less than letting a runaway child welfare system run up the tab," said Jess McDonald, former director of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. During the past decade, McDonald took a system bursting with more than 50,000 foster children to one with fewer than 17,000.

How one state improved

The turnaround in Illinois came by setting high goals and devising strategies to reach each one, McDonald said.

A major one was getting all public and private agencies in the system accredited through the Council of Accreditation for Services to Children and Families of New York. Without accreditation, agencies are no longer eligible to manage foster children in Illinois.

Fewer than half of the 500 licensed child-placing agencies in Michigan are accredited.

"Your basic operation has to be functioning in a certain way," McDonald said, explaining why he likes the standards enforced by accreditation. "It's a good blueprint."

Among the widely accepted standards: visiting children every month and worker caseloads of 15 or fewer children. Michigan foster-care workers typically handle caseloads of 20 children or more.

In the mid-1990s, Illinois also began using performance-based contracting with private foster-care agencies, using a system of rewards and punishments to ensure that agencies work toward positive outcomes for children. It also changed the jobs of hundreds of state employees who monitor foster-care cases assigned to various private agencies because, McDonald said, they represented a redundant layer of supervision for foster children already under an agency's care. In Michigan, there are 121 such workers.

Hundreds of those employees in Illinois got new assignments. Many became foster-care case managers, helping to reduce workers' caseloads from 25 or more foster children to 14 or 15. Other employees were assigned to licensing, and still others provided closer monitoring of struggling private agencies as part of performance teams.

"Redeploying those staffers gave us the opportunity to improve accountability of private agencies," McDonald said.

As in Michigan, Illinois' caseworker turnover rates were high -- 50% a year or more. McDonald said Illinois' caseworker turnover rate dropped to less than 10% with the reforms.

"The first thing you have to do is stop the bleeding," McDonald said, by hiring and promoting people who are qualified and giving them time to do the job right.

"You want to protect the workforce but set expectations for quality," he said. "It's who you hire, how you train them and how you supervise them."

Illinois also changed licensing rules to rule out placing more than six children in a foster home, except in rare cases. In Michigan, it's not uncommon for foster homes to have as many as eight foster children.

Tough choices for Michigan

Stresses on Michigan's child welfare system intensified in the last 15 years as tax reforms led to downsizing the state workforce.

Udow said early retirements and staff reductions at DHS since the late 1990s resulted in the loss of 4,000 workers -- many of whom were the most-seasoned and best-trained staffers. Today, the department has fewer than 10,000 workers. Training funds also have been cut.

Meanwhile, new laws that shorten the process of terminating parental rights sent more children into the system. There are 18,600 kids in foster care today, compared with about 16,000 in the mid-1990s. And Child Protective Services is substantiating more complaints of abuse and neglect, from around 12,000 in 1995 to more than 17,500 in 2006.

Child advocates attribute the increase to greater public awareness and willingness to report suspected abuse, coupled with heightened economic pressure that leads to more maltreatment of children.

With a worsening state revenue outlook, tough choices are ahead for the governor, Legislature and Department of Human Services.

Melvin Haga, executive director of the Michigan County Social Services Association, which makes suggestions to the state on behalf of county DHS boards, said Michigan can't cut its way out of its predicament.

"If you expect people to do 100% of the work, you should give them 100% of the resources," Haga said. "If we're staffed at 81% -- and I think that's pretty close -- then there's 19% of the work that you can't expect them to do."

Udow said DHS has limited options and faces "horrible" choices.

Ruth Mutchler, a UAW Local 6000 area representative for DHS child welfare workers, said the state can create different programs, but "the bottom line is, if you don't staff the program, you're not going to see the results you need."

Arguments for an overhaul

Tapping into federal foster-care money is one way to bolster funding, which has lagged in Michigan because fewer children are being placed with licensed foster parents -- a requirement to receive federal funding. Lowry of Children's Rights said licensing more relatives who can care for children will expand the services that can be provided.

But even federal foster-care reimbursements to counties have fallen by about half in the decade since Congress froze family income-eligibility standards at 1996 levels. Before those changes were made, about 75% of Michigan kids in foster care were eligible for certain federal funding based on their families' income, Udow said. Now, it's less than 60%.

In Wayne County, which handles about one-third of all of the children in foster care in the state, reimbursement drop-offs have resulted in the county paying an extra $40 million a year for foster kids.

Some experts argue that a more integrated foster-care system would help contain costs and produce better results for children.

Six years ago, for example, Wayne County created a managed-care approach for juvenile delinquents that helped lower juvenile crime rates and cost less because it provided intensive services while keeping children in their homes instead of in more expensive institutional care.

Dan Chaney, director of juvenile services for the Wayne County Department of Children and Family Services, said a similar approach would improve foster care. Now, he said, too much effort is spent trying to qualify foster children for funding for care instead of taking a more comprehensive approach toward solving a family's problems. In such a system, agencies would be required to adequately care for foster children or lose funding.

Now, the foster-care system "is too categorical," Chaney said. "They have these little niches they try to fit these kids into, unlike our system of care where we give a child to a provider and they have unconditional and complete responsibility."

Preventing problems

Nearly every child advocate and expert said Michigan's system needs more accountability, something difficult or impossible to achieve at current staffing levels without reducing the number of children in the system.

"The DHS has plenty of rules and regulations in place, they just don't follow them consistently," said Judge Judy Hartsfield, presiding judge of Wayne County Family Court. "I find that the checks and balances often don't work until you push past maybe the first level of supervision, and sometimes the second level of supervision."

Some states have cut the number of children in foster care by intensifying services such as family-preservation programs to keep families intact. Illinois had 51,000 kids in foster or institutional care in 1991. Last year, the number was 16,600 -- 2,000 fewer than Michigan, which has 2.5 million fewer residents.

"We realized that taking a lot of kids from their parents didn't make the kids any safer," said Benjamin Wolf of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, which sued the state in 1988. "We just need to make more sophisticated, more thoughtful decisions."

Udow said the state is working to keep kids out of foster care through its Family to Family program that brings struggling parents together with extended families, DHS workers, teachers and others to find ways to help them through crises.

Child Protective Services uses a similar program, Families First, to try to keep families intact.

More than 3 in 4 children entering foster care in Michigan do so because of parental neglect, not abuse.

Each child in foster care costs the state an average of $18,500 a year. Experts say redirecting funding into family-preservation and prevention programs can reduce foster-care costs and is a better use of limited resources.

"If we in the state of Michigan, and even nationally, put more emphasis on spending dollars up front, we would keep families intact," said Bill Newhouse, executive director of Children's Charter, a Michigan nonprofit that provides technical assistance and training for social service workers. "I'm not necessarily advocating just throwing more money into the system. But prevention is something I believe would work."

Contact JACK KRESNAK at 313-223-4544 or jkresnak@freepress.com.