[House Hearing, 106 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
PROMOTING ADOPTION AND OTHER PERMANENT PLACEMENTS
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON HUMAN RESOURCES
of the
COMMITTEE ON WAYS AND MEANS
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SIXTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
JULY 20, 1999
__________
Serial 106-39
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Ways and Means
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
65-697 CC WASHINGTON : 2000
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20402
COMMITTEE ON WAYS AND MEANS
BILL ARCHER, Texas, Chairman
PHILIP M. CRANE, Illinois CHARLES B. RANGEL, New York
BILL THOMAS, California FORTNEY PETE STARK, California
E. CLAY SHAW, Jr., Florida ROBERT T. MATSUI, California
NANCY L. JOHNSON, Connecticut WILLIAM J. COYNE, Pennsylvania
AMO HOUGHTON, New York SANDER M. LEVIN, Michigan
WALLY HERGER, California BENJAMIN L. CARDIN, Maryland
JIM McCRERY, Louisiana JIM McDERMOTT, Washington
DAVE CAMP, Michigan GERALD D. KLECZKA, Wisconsin
JIM RAMSTAD, Minnesota JOHN LEWIS, Georgia
JIM NUSSLE, Iowa RICHARD E. NEAL, Massachusetts
SAM JOHNSON, Texas MICHAEL R. McNULTY, New York
JENNIFER DUNN, Washington WILLIAM J. JEFFERSON, Louisiana
MAC COLLINS, Georgia JOHN S. TANNER, Tennessee
ROB PORTMAN, Ohio XAVIER BECERRA, California
PHILIP S. ENGLISH, Pennsylvania KAREN L. THURMAN, Florida
WES WATKINS, Oklahoma LLOYD DOGGETT, Texas
J.D. HAYWORTH, Arizona
JERRY WELLER, Illinois
KENNY HULSHOF, Missouri
SCOTT McINNIS, Colorado
RON LEWIS, Kentucky
MARK FOLEY, Florida
A.L. Singleton, Chief of Staff
Janice Mays, Minority Chief Counsel
------
Subcommittee on Human Resources
NANCY L. JOHNSON, Connecticut, Chairman
PHILIP S. ENGLISH, Pennsylvania BENJAMIN L. CARDIN, Maryland
WES WATKINS, Oklahoma FORTNEY PETE STARK, California
RON LEWIS, Kentucky ROBERT T. MATSUI, California
MARK FOLEY, Florida WILLIAM J. COYNE, Pennsylvania
SCOTT McINNIS, Colorado WILLIAM J. JEFFERSON, Louisiana
JIM McCRERY, Louisiana
DAVE CAMP, Michigan
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C O N T E N T S
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Page
Advisory of July 13, 1999, announcing the hearing................ 2
WITNESSES
Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, Karen Spar,
Specialist in Social Legislation, Domestic Social Policy
Division....................................................... 8
------
Bliley, Hon. Tom, a Representative in Congress from the State of
Virginia....................................................... 52
Children's Village, Nan Dale..................................... 39
International Center for Residential Education, Heidi Goldsmith.. 13
Lewis, Hon. Ron, a Representative in Congress from the State of
Kentucky....................................................... 5
McKenzie, Richard B., University of California, Irvine........... 20
North American Council on Adoptable Children, (NACAC), Joe Kroll. 35
Smyth, John, Maryville Academy................................... 48
SUBMISSION FOR THE RECORD
Smith, Hon. Christopher H., a Representative in Congress from the
State of New Jersey............................................ 59
PROMOTING ADOPTION AND OTHER PERMANENT PLACEMENTS
----------
TUESDAY, JULY 20, 1999
House of Representatives,
Committee on Ways and Means,
Subcommittee on Human Resources,
Washington, DC.
The Subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:10 a.m., in
room B-318 Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Nancy L. Johnson
(Chairman of the Subcommittee) presiding.
[The advisory announcing the hearing follows:]
ADVISORY
FROM THE
COMMITTEE
ON WAYS
AND
MEANS
SUBCOMMITTEE ON HUMAN RESOURCES
CONTACT: (202) 225-1025
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 13, 1999
No. HR-9
Johnson Announces Hearing on Promoting Adoption and Other Permanent
Placements
Congresswoman Nancy L. Johnson (R-CT), Chairman, Subcommittee on
Human Resources of the Committee on Ways and Means, today announced
that the Subcommittee will hold a hearing on adoption and other
permanent placements. The hearing will take place on Tuesday, July 20,
1999, in room B-318 Rayburn House Office Building, beginning at 10:00
a.m.
In view of the limited time available to hear witnesses, oral
testimony at this hearing will be from invited witnesses only.
Witnesses will include Members of Congress, an adoption specialist from
the Congressional Research Service, children's advocates, and program
administrators. However, any individual or organization not scheduled
for an oral appearance may submit a written statement for consideration
by the Committee and for inclusion in the printed record of the
hearing.
BACKGROUND:
In 1997, Congress passed major adoption reform legislation, the
Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (P.L. 105-89 ). Among other
innovations, the 1997 law provided States with more flexibility to
decide the particular circumstances under which reasonable efforts to
reunify families could be terminated, required States to file a
petition to terminate parental rights after the child had been in State
custody for 15 months (with certain exceptions), and provided cash
incentive payments for increasing the number of adoptions of children
in foster care. The Subcommittee has been conducting regular oversight
hearings of adoption and associated issues to track several issues
including whether the new Federal requirements are being aggressively
implemented by States and whether adoption rates are climbing. Several
Members of the House and Senate have introduced legislation to
encourage adoption.
In announcing the hearing, Chairman Johnson stated: ``There is
universal agreement that adoption is the preferred living arrangement
for children who cannot live with their biological parents, but, many
experts and administrators in the field of child protection are telling
us that some children need living arrangements other than adoption or
family-based foster care. We are looking forward to hearing both sides
of this debate and to examine the strengths and weaknesses of these
alternative living arrangements.''
FOCUS OF THE HEARING:
One focus of the hearing is to provide Members with an opportunity
to explain their proposed legislation and to provide an opportunity to
determine what action might be appropriate on the various bills. A
second issue the Subcommittee intends to explore is what long-term
living arrangements States are now making for children who are not in
family-based foster care and for whom adoption is not planned. We are
especially interested in hearing about group homes and residential
education arrangements. The goal of this part of the hearing will be to
learn about how these institutions operate, the types of children who
are in residence, how long children stay, and whether there is
information about their safety, permanency, and well-being.
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noted above.
Chairman Johnson. Good morning. We will bring the hearing
to order. My colleague and ranking member, Mr. Cardin, is
meeting with Mr. Brock, and so he will come as soon as that
meeting concludes.
In 1997, Congress passed the Adoption and Safe Families
Act, which originated in this subcommittee under the leadership
of Clay Shaw. This law reflected the preference for adoption
over foster care when maltreating families continued to provide
an unsafe environment for their children. Members agreed that
too often we pass legislation and nothing happens, or at least
not in the immediate and measurable future; and I am delighted
that under ASFA important changes have occurred in the
immediate and measurable future. The General Accounting Office
found that adoptions have increased between a whopping 52
percent and 101 percent in its study of Connecticut, Florida,
Illinois, Iowa and Texas.
So often the problems faced by too many children in our
society seem intractable, unsolvable, hopeless, but for
children in out-of-home placement who do not have loving
families, we have found not only a policy that works but a
signal that big change is possible.
But some problems have solutions with legislative origins.
One problem that Congress continues to face is that adoptions
have increased so much and so fast that the amount of money we
have in the law for incentive payments is inadequate. Those of
you who follow the work of our subcommittee know that both Ben
Cardin and I are committed to figuring out how to get this
additional money. States have done a superb job, and they
should and will get the incentive payments they earn.
Because some legislative remedies can improve the status of
children in out-of-home care, I am particularly pleased to hear
today the legislative proposals of our colleagues in Congress
that have been designed to reform child welfare so that the
lives of more of our Nation's children can be improved. I know
that many of the members testifying here today have a personal
involvement in adoption and are its best advocates.
I am grateful to each of you for not only taking the time
to share your legislative ideas with our subcommittee, but for
all your efforts over many years on behalf of vulnerable
children to find adoptive homes. But despite our preference for
adoption over foster care, clearly we recognize that not all
children are adoptable nor do all children want to be adopted.
We had some interesting testimony to that effect during the
independent living hearing, and as we will hear in this
testimony today, there are some indications that not all
adoptions result in permanent families for children.
Unfortunately, too many adoptions fall apart leaving the child
still in need of a permanent placement and an adoptive family.
So while public policy should continue to pursue adoption
as the preferred placement for children in need of permanent
homes, there needs to be a comprehensive array of services for
children for whom adoption is not an option, and far better
support services for adoptive parents adopting difficult
children.
Our second panel today will explore the array of services
and alternative placement options available to children in need
of permanent arrangements. We have asked the Congressional
Research Service to survey where children and out-of-home
placements are going and what is known about these placements.
I am aware that these placements are not without controversy.
So we have in this panel a wide range of opinion regarding the
benefits of residential education, intensive residential
treatment services and other options that can provide a
positive, healthy alternative to foster care and, in some
cases, even to adoption.
[The opening statement of Mr. Cardin follows:]
Statement of Hon. Benjamin Cardin, a Representative in Congress from
the State of Maryland
Madame Chairman, I would like to thank you for calling this
hearing on promoting adoption and examining other long-term
placements for children in foster care.
When children come into the foster care system, our first
goal should be to help them return to their families--unless of
course reunification poses a risk to their health or well-
being. If a child cannot be returned home, he or she should not
be expected to wait indefinitely in foster care. Concurrent
planning should be undertaken to find that child a loving,
adoptive home. Fortunately, we have made some positive strides
toward this goal in the last couple of years. In fact, it
appears adoptions of foster care children rose 40% nationwide
last year compared to 1995.
On the issue of long-term, group foster care, I recognize
that some children, especially those with severe psychiatric
conditions, may benefit from such arrangements. However, I am
concerned when long-term, institutionalized care is depicted as
an alternative to a full-fledged fight against the impact of
poverty on families. Furthermore, I worry about how and why
certain foster children might be deemed ``unadoptable'' and
therefore fit only for long-term foster care.
Some foster children may not return home or be adopted, and
we have an obligation to help them develop the skills needed
for self-sufficiency. The overwhelming House vote in favor of
the Foster Care Independence Act, a bipartisan product of this
Subcommittee's hard work, hopefully suggests we are soon to
meet that pressing need. However, when initial placement
decisions are made, we should guard against pigeon-holing
children as being suitable only for long-term foster care and
not adoption.
Finally, on the issue of promoting adoption, our focus
should be on those children who face the greatest barriers to
adoption--namely ``special needs'' children, such as older kids
or those with mental, physical or emotional problems. There is
no shortage of prospective adoptive parents for healthy babies,
with or without an expanded tax break. But there is a clear
shortage of adoptive families for ``special needs'' children,
who may demand more time and resources. An op-ed in the Boston
Globe on May 6th by Jeff Katz, who is the executive director of
Adoption Rhode Island, suggested that increasing the adoption
tax credit from $5,000 to $10,000 will do little or nothing to
help increase the adoption of ``special needs'' children. The
article points out that ``it costs virtually nothing to adopt a
child from foster care'' (there are no private agency fees). As
we continue our dialog on adoption, I hope we will remember
which children need the most help in finding a permanent,
loving family.
Thank you, Madame Chairman. I look forward to hearing from
our witnesses.
I am pleased to open this hearing and call forward the
first panel of my colleagues, Mr. Ron Lewis, and I guess, Ron,
you are the only one here right now. If the others come in, we
will interrupt the second panel to hear from them. It is a
pleasure to have you, Congressman Lewis.
STATEMENT OF HON. RON LEWIS, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM
THE STATE OF KENTUCKY
Mr. Lewis. Thank you. Thank you, Chairman Johnson, for
holding this important hearing and giving me the opportunity to
discuss with the Subcommittee my bill, the Fairness for Foster
Care Families Act, H.R. 1194.
During a Human Resources Subcommittee hearing in April we
heard some good news regarding adoption. Studies have shown
that the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 has helped more
children move from foster care into adoption.
Our goal, as a society, has always been to move children
from foster care into adoption or, when possible, to reunite
them with their parents. As we work towards this goal however,
many children will spend at least some time in the foster care
system. According to a CRS report, over 400,000 children spent
some time in foster care in 1995.
As the father of an adopted son, I support the legislative
proposals of our colleague Chairman Bliley, and I would like to
thank Chairman Johnson for her interest in adoption
legislation. In our ongoing efforts to promote child welfare,
however, we must also remember the important role of supportive
foster care families.
One concern I have is that under the current tax law, some
families are discouraged from providing foster care. The reason
is because tax laws regarding foster care payments are
confusing and unfair.
The current policy with regard to the tax treatment of
foster care payments is the result of congressional action in
1986. Under this 1986 law, foster care families can exclude
from taxable income the foster care payments for the care of an
individual. The exclusion, however, is dependent on a
complicated analysis of three factors: the age of the foster
individual, the type of agency that placed the individual, and
the source of the payment. If the payments are not excludable,
the foster care provider is then required to keep extensive
records of every expense made on behalf of the foster
individual in their care in order to qualify for lower tax
payments.
As you can see by the chart in my statement, these tax
rules are extremely confusing. In fact, many accountants and
IRS officials have difficulty understanding the tax treatment
of foster care payments.
My bill, H.R. 1194, will simplify and correct inequities in
the tax treatment of foster care payments. This is accomplished
by allowing all foster care providers to exclude foster care
payments from taxable income, regardless of the age of the
individual in foster care and type of entity that placed the
individual.
By passing this legislation, Congress will also recognize
the increasing role of private agencies in foster care. As you
may know, many local communities and States are now contracting
with nongovernment, private agencies to help needy individuals
find safe homes. These agencies must be licensed and certified
by the State and are also accountable to the State.
In closing, I would like to thank my colleagues on the
Subcommittee who have cosponsored H.R. 1194. A strong
bipartisan support of this common-sense, profamily legislation
has helped my efforts in getting it included in the recently
committee passed tax cut bill.
Again, thank you, Chairman Johnson, for giving me the
opportunity to testify this morning.
[The prepared statement follows:]
Statement of Hon. Ron Lewis, a Representative in Congress from the
State of Kentucky
Thank you Chairman Johnson for holding this important
hearing and giving me the opportunity to discuss with the
Subcommittee my bill--the Fairness for Foster Care Families
Act-H.R. 1194.
During a Human Resources Subcommittee hearing in April, we
heard some good news regarding adoption. Studies have shown
that the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 has helped more
children move from foster care into adoption.
Our goal as a society has always been to move children from
foster care into adoption or, when possible, to reunite them
with their parents. As we work towards this goal, however, many
children will spend at least some time in the foster care
system. According to a Congressional Research Service report,
494,000 children were in foster care in 1995.
As the father of an adopted son, I support the legislative
proposals of our colleague Chairman Bliley and I would like to
thank Chairman Johnson for her interest in adoption
legislation. In our ongoing efforts to promote child welfare,
however, we must also remember the important role of supportive
foster care families.
One concern I have is that under the current tax law, some
families are discouraged from providing foster care. The reason
is because tax laws regarding foster care payments are
confusing and unfair.
The current policy with regard to the tax treatment of
foster care payments is the result of congressional action in
1986. Under this 1986 law, foster care families can exclude
from taxable income the foster care payments for the care of an
individual.
The exclusion, however, is dependent on a complicated
analysis of three factors: the age of the foster individual,
the type of entity that placed the individual, and the source
of the payment.
If the payments are not excludable, the foster care
provider is then required to keep extensive records of every
expense made on behalf of the foster individual in their care
in order to qualify for lower tax payments.
As you can see by the chart below, these tax rules are
extremely confusing. In fact, many accountants and IRS
officials have difficulty understanding the tax treatment of
foster care payments.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Age of
Placement Agency Payor Foster Care Payment
Individual Excludable?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
State or political State or <19 years Yes
subdivision. political
subdivision.
State or political State or 19 years Yes
subdivision. political
subdivision.
State or political 501(c)(3)...... <19 years Yes
subdivision.
State or political 501(c)(3)...... 19 years No
subdivision.
State or political Not 501(c)(3).. <19 years No
subdivision.
State or political Not 501(c)(3).. 19 years No
subdivision.
Licensed 501(c)(3)........... State or <19 years Yes
political
subdivision.
Licensed 501(c)(3)........... State or 19 years No
political
subdivision.
Licensed 501(c)(3)........... 501(c)(3)...... <19 years Yes
Licensed 501(c)(3)........... 501(c)(3)...... 19 years No
Licensed 501(c)(3)........... Not 501(c)(3).. <19 years No
Licensed 501(c)(3)........... Not 501(c)(3).. 19 years No
Not 501(c)(3)................ State or <19 years No
Political
subdivision.
Not 501(c)(3)................ State or 19 years No
Political
subdivision.
Not 501(c)(3)................ 501(c)(3)...... <19 years No
Not 501(c)(3)................ 501(c)(3)...... 19 years No
Not 501(c)(3)................ Not 501(c)(3).. <19 years No
Not 501(c)(3)................ Not 501(c)(3).. 19 years No
------------------------------------------------------------------------
My bill, H.R. 1194, will simplify and correct inequities in
the tax treatment of foster care payments. This is accomplished
by allowing all foster care providers to exclude foster care
payments from taxable income, regardless of the age of the
individual in foster care and type of entity that placed the
individual.
By passing this legislation, Congress will also recognize
the increasing role of private agencies in foster care. As you
may know, many local communities and states are now contracting
with non-government, private agencies. These agencies must be
licensed and certified by the state and are also accountable to
the state.
In closing, I would like to thank my colleagues on the
Subcommittee who have cosponsored H.R. 1194. The strong bi-
partisan support of this common-sense, pro-family legislation
has helped my efforts in getting this legislation included in
the recently passed tax-cut bill.
Again, thank you Chairman Johnson for giving me the
opportunity to testify this morning.
Chairman Johnson. Well, thank you very much for taking the
time to testify on this issue because, as we all know, it is
going to take a long time to get a tax bill through, and little
provisions are most at risk in the kind of eclectic process
ahead of us; and I hope all of you who are concerned about this
issue will help us by reminding those in the Senate how
important this kind of little change is to the fundamental
goals of providing safe and secure homes for children, and as
we move to conference, that these kinds of little reforms in
our tax code are really terribly important in people's lives.
It is one of the good, nice, solid positives in the tax
bill, and as we move forward, I certainly will work with you to
protect it.
Mr. Lewis. Thank you.
Chairman Johnson. Thanks. We will move on to the next panel
then, and as I say, if members arrive, we will interrupt the
panel to hear from them. So, if we could move to actually the
first and only panel, Karen Spar, Heidi Goldsmith, Richard
McKenzie, Joe Kroll, Nan Dale, and the Reverend John Smyth.
Karen Spar, Specialist in Social Legislation, Domestic
Policy Division of the Congressional Research Service, thank
you for being here today.
STATEMENT OF KAREN SPAR, SPECIALIST IN SOCIAL LEGISLATION,
DOMESTIC POLICY DIVISION, CONGRESSIONAL RESEARCH SERVICE,
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Ms. Spar. Good morning, Madam Chair and Members of the
Subcommittee. Thank you for inviting me to testify before you
this morning. I have been asked to present an overview of the
different ways in which children enter foster care, and the
different kinds of settings that children are placed into.
According to our latest data, more than half a million
children are in foster care under the custody of State child
welfare agencies. Most of these children are there because they
don't have families that can care for them safely. According to
the latest available data, 60 percent of the children who
entered foster care in 1994 were placed because they had been
victims of abuse or neglect and another 17 percent because of
the absence of their parents. Thus, about three-quarters of the
children who entered care in 1994 were placed because their
natural families were either unable, unwilling or unavailable
to care for them, whether for a short time or permanently.
For some children, the primary reason they enter care has
to do with them, the children themselves, rather than with the
actions or absence of their parents. Again, looking at 1994,
almost 10 percent of the children who entered foster care that
year entered because of delinquent behavior, and another 5
percent because they had committed a juvenile status offense,
such as running away or truancy. Another 5 percent were placed
because of a disability.
We often use the term ``foster care'' generically to
describe all situations where children are living apart from
their families under the supervision of child welfare agencies,
although foster care actually encompasses a range of settings
and placements. In general, child welfare professionals and
Federal policy favor placing children in the least restrictive,
most family-like setting available that can meet the child's
needs. However, because of the complex needs of some children,
and also because of the shortage of foster family homes and the
frequent instability of foster home placements, there has been
ongoing discussion for years about the role of group facilities
for foster children.
According to data for 1997, less than half the children who
were in foster care on September 30 of that year actually lived
in the home of a family to whom they were not related, although
that is the arrangement people think of most commonly as foster
care. Even within this category, there is variety. For example,
some children are in therapeutic or treatment foster care,
which resembles traditional foster care except that the foster
parents may have additional skills or training and function as
part of a broader team, such as a health care or mental health
care team that provides and arranges services for the child.
Another 32 percent of foster children in 1997 lived with
relatives, in a form of foster care known as ``kinship care.''
it is important to understand that, while the data indicate
that almost a third of the children we refer to as foster
children live with relatives, not all children who live with
relatives are foster children. In 1997, about 1.3 million
children lived away from their parents in households maintained
by their grandparents, but only a fraction of these children
had been formally placed with their grandparents and were under
the supervision of the child welfare system.
Finally, a certain number of children in foster care are
placed in group or institutional settings. In 1997, 9 percent
of foster children were living in group homes and another 7
percent were in institutions.
Whether children are placed in foster family homes or in
some type of group setting generally is a function of the
child's needs. For example, adolescents and older children who
have experienced multiple foster care placements may be
uncomfortable in close family settings and prefer a group home
with other children their age. Children with emotional,
behavioral, physical or medical needs may be more likely to be
placed in a group home or, potentially, an institution,
depending on the severity of their needs. However, it also
happens that some children are placed in group care, at least
on a short-term basis, because of the shortage of foster family
homes.
As with kinship care, group homes and residential
facilities are used by child welfare agencies as a placement
for foster children; again, however, not all children living in
group homes or residential facilities are foster children. For
example, the Justice Department reports that 106,000 juveniles
who had been charged with some kind of offense were living in
public or private facilities in October of 1997. It is possible
that some of the children included in the Justice Department
count may also be included in the HHS count of the total number
of children in foster care.
As other witnesses will testify, there are a variety of
kinds of public and private residential programs. We have no
comprehensive information or data on the specific types of
group facilities that serve foster children, or the larger
population of all children who are living in residential
facilities away from their families. Although research is
sketchy, it appears that the number of group facilities for
children and youth has increased in the last 20 or 30 years,
while the facilities themselves are smaller and more
specialized than institutions of the past. Some of the children
in these facilities are placed through the child welfare
system, but others are placed by juvenile justice or mental
health care agencies, or they may be referred by their schools
or placed voluntarily by their families. Children in the same
facility may be supported by Federal funds, State funds,
private funds or their parents' own resources or insurance
policies.
Although Federal foster care law requires children to be
placed in the least restrictive setting consistent with the
child's best interests and special needs, the law also
envisions that children in foster care may be placed in
settings other than private homes. Title IV-E of the Social
Security Act allows Federal funds to be used by States to help
care for children who are placed in foster family homes and in
child care institutions, within certain constraints. For
example, Federal funds cannot be used to support children in
public facilities that serve more than 25 children or to
maintain children in detention facilities.
Federal foster care law also contains provisions relating
to permanency planning for children which reflect the
philosophy that foster care should be temporary and as short-
term as possible. Especially since enactment of the Adoption
and Safe Families Act in 1997, Federal policy requires
expeditious decision-making regarding whether children will be
returned to their families or freed for adoption.
I have been talking about different placement settings as
variations of foster care, and regardless of the type of foster
care arrangement that a child is living in, permanency planning
requirements apply. These include periodic case reviews,
judicial reviews and the new deadline established in 1997 for
filing petitions to terminate parental rights. Nonetheless, for
some children who cannot return home and for whom adoption is
not considered feasible or appropriate, long-term foster care
is used by the States as a permanent arrangement. However,
there are currently no data to indicate the types of permanent
foster care arrangements that are generally used for these
children.
Madam Chair, that concludes my statement. I would be happy
to answer questions.
Chairman Johnson. OK. Thank you very much, Ms. Spar.
[The prepared statement follows:]
Statement of Karen Spar, Specialist in Social Legislation, Domestic
Social Policy Division, Congressional Research Service, Library of
Congress
Good morning, Madam Chairman and Members of the
Subcommittee. Thank you for inviting me to testify this
morning. I have been asked to present an overview of the
different ways in which children enter foster care, and the
different kinds of settings that foster children are placed
into. We tend to use the terms ``foster children'' and ``foster
care'' in a generic way, to encompass all children who are
living away from their parents under the supervision of child
welfare agencies. Typically, these terms evoke images of
children who have been abused or neglected and are living in
the homes of other families, while their own family may be
receiving some kind of services so they can return home, or
while they are waiting for a new family to adopt them. In
reality, children come into custody for various reasons,
usually but not always because they are victims of abuse or
neglect. And, children are placed in various kinds of settings,
not always the private homes of other families.
Pathways into Custody
According to our latest data, more than half a million
children are in foster care under the custody of state child
welfare agencies. Most of these children are there because they
don't have families that can care for them safely. According to
the most recent readily available data, 60% of the children who
entered foster care in 1994 were placed for protective service
reasons. These children had either been victims of abuse or
neglect at home, or were considered at imminent risk. Another
17% of the children who entered care that year came because of
the absence of their parents, as a result of such conditions as
illness, death, disability, or other problems. Thus, about
three-quarters of the children who entered care in 1994 were
placed because their natural families were either unable,
unwilling, or unavailable to care for them, whether for a short
time or permanently.
For some children, the primary reason they enter care has
to do with them, the children themselves, rather than directly
with their families. Again looking at the 1994 data, almost 10%
of the children who entered foster care that year were placed
because of delinquent behavior, and another 5% because they had
committed a juvenile status offense, such as running away or
truancy. Some of these children may have come directly to the
child welfare agency; others may have been referred by the
juvenile justice system. Another 5% of the children who entered
care in 1994 were placed because of a disability, and some of
these children may have been referred to the child welfare
system through a health care or mental health care agency.
Finally, for almost 1% of the children who entered care in
1994, their parents had voluntarily relinquished their rights
and placed them in the custody of the child welfare system.
It is important to note that the primary reason a child
enters foster care doesn't tell the complete story of that
child, especially during the entire period of time that the
child remains in care. Children may enter care primarily
because of the actions of their parents, but the children bring
with them their own unique circumstances, and a wide range of
problems and needs, both related and unrelated to the specific
reason for their placement in care. Being removed from home and
placed in foster care--in and of itself--is traumatic for
children, and the period of time they spend in care is usually
filled with uncertainty and change. Thus, the child welfare
system is faced with multiple challenges: first and foremost,
to protect children, but also to treat the underlying problems
within their families, while also meeting the complex, ongoing
and constantly changing needs of the children themselves.
Types of Placements
As I said earlier, we often use the term ``foster care''
generically, to describe all situations where children are
living apart from their families, although foster care actually
encompasses a wide range of settings and placements for
children. There is not absolute consensus within the child
welfare community about what constitute the best and most
appropriate placements for children. In general, child welfare
professionals--and federal policy--favor placing children in
the least restrictive, most family-like setting available that
can meet the child's needs. However, because of the complex
needs of some children, and also because of the shortage of
foster family homes and the frequent instability of foster home
placements, there has been ongoing discussion within the child
welfare community about the role of group facilities for foster
children.
According to data for 1997, less than half the children who
were in foster care on September 30 of that year actually lived
in the home of a family to whom they were not related.
Specifically, 46% of foster children on that date lived in non-
relative foster family homes, even though that is the
arrangement people think of most commonly as ``foster care.''
Even within the category of foster family care, there is
variety. For example, some children are in ``therapeutic'' or
``treatment'' foster care, which resembles traditional foster
care in that an individual family opens its home to a child or
children in need. But in a therapeutic or treatment home, the
foster parents may have additional skills or training and
function as part of a broader team, often a health care or
mental health care team, that provides and arranges services
for the child. Treatment foster care is sometimes an
alternative to regular foster care for a child with special
needs. For some children, treatment foster care is an
alternative to institutional care.
Also in 1997, another 32% of children who were in foster
care lived with their relatives, other than their parents. This
is a form of foster care known as ``kinship care,'' and has
been increasingly used as a placement of first resort during
the past decade, especially as the number of traditional foster
homes has not kept pace with the increasing number of children
in need of care. It is important to understand that, while the
data indicate that almost a third of the children we refer to
as ``foster children'' live with relatives, not all children
who live with relatives are foster children. In fact, in 1997,
about 1.3 million children lived away from their parents in
households maintained by their grandparents, but only a
fraction of these children had been formally placed with their
grandparents and were under the supervision of the child
welfare system. Nonetheless, in some cases, the lives and
circumstances of children in formal ``kinship care'' may be
very similar to children who are living with their relatives
informally, although the role of the government in the lives of
these children and families differs a great deal.
Finally, a certain number of foster children are placed in
group or institutional care. In 1997, 9% of foster children
were living in group homes and another 7% were living in
institutions. What do these terms actually mean? According to
regulations issued by the Department of Health and Human
Services (HHS), a ``group home'' is defined as a ``licensed or
approved home providing 24-hour care for children in a small
group setting that generally has from seven to 12 children.''
An ``institution'' is defined as ``a child care facility
operated by a public or private agency and providing 24-hour
care and/or treatment for children who require separation from
their own homes and group living experiences.'' HHS cites child
care institutions, residential treatment facilities, and
maternity homes as examples of institutions.
As I said earlier, the primary reason that a child is
removed from home and placed in care doesn't tell that child's
whole story. Regardless of the reason they enter care, whether
children are placed in foster family homes or in some type of
group setting generally is a function of the child's needs, not
the circumstances of the child's family. For example,
adolescents and older children who have experienced multiple
foster care placements may be uncomfortable in close family
settings and prefer a group home with other children their age.
Children with emotional, behavioral, physical, or medical needs
may be more likely to be placed in a group home, or potentially
an institution, depending on the complexity of their needs.
However, it also happens that some children are placed in group
care, at least on a short-term basis, because of the shortage
of foster family homes. Sometimes, children are placed in
emergency shelters until an appropriate family is found for
them.
As with kinship care, group homes and residential
facilities are used by child welfare agencies as a placement
for foster children; again, however, not all children living in
group homes or residential facilities are foster children. For
example, the Justice Department reports that 106,000 juveniles
who had been charged with some kind of offense were living in
public or private facilities on October 29, 1997. A small
percentage--about 6.5%--had been charged with status offenses
and it is possible that some among this group may have been
placed in the same facilities with foster children who had
committed similar offenses. Indeed, it is possible that some of
the children included in the Justice Department count may also
be included in the HHS count of the total number of children in
foster care. Similarly, some of the children in residential
treatment facilities may be foster children, while others are
not; and some of the children in residential education programs
may be foster children, while others are not.
As other witnesses will testify, there are a variety of
kinds of public and private residential programs, with
different goals, philosophies, target populations, and
services. We have no comprehensive information or data on the
specific types of group facilities that serve foster children,
or the larger population of all children who are living, at
least temporarily, in residential facilities away from their
families. Although research is sketchy, it appears that, in
general, the number of group facilities for children and youth
has increased in the last 20 or 30 years, while the facilities
themselves are smaller, serving fewer children, and more
specialized than institutions of the past. Some of the children
in these programs are placed through the child welfare system,
but others are placed by juvenile justice or mental health
agencies, or they may be referred by their schools or placed
voluntarily by their families. Children in the same facility
may be supported by federal funds, state funds, private funds,
or their parents' own resources or insurance policies.
Title IV-E and Group Foster Care
Although federal foster care law requires children to be
placed in the least restrictive setting consistent with the
child's best interest and special needs, the law clearly
envisions that children in foster care may be placed in
settings other than private homes. Title IV-E of the Social
Security Act allows federal funds to be used by states to help
care for children who are placed in licensed or approved foster
family homes, and in licensed or approved child care
institutions, within certain constraints. For example, federal
funds cannot be used to support children in public facilities
that serve more than 25 children (although there is no
comparable restriction on private facilities), and federal
funds cannot be used to maintain children in facilities that
are operated primarily for the detention of delinquent youth.
Currently, data are not readily available on the number of
federally eligible foster children who are cared for in group
settings, or on the federal expenditures made on behalf of
those children.
Federal foster care law also contains provisions relating
to permanency planning for children, which reflect the
philosophy that foster care should be temporary and as short-
term as possible. Especially since enactment of the Adoption
and Safe Families Act in 1997, federal policy requires
expeditious decision-making regarding whether children will be
returned to their families or freed for adoption. I have been
talking about different placement settings as variations of
foster care, and regardless of the type of foster care
arrangement that a child is living in, permanency planning
requirements apply. These include periodic case reviews,
judicial reviews, and the new deadline established in 1997 for
filing petitions to terminate parental rights. Nonetheless, for
some children who cannot return home and for whom adoption is
not considered feasible or appropriate, long-term foster care
is used by the states as a permanent arrangement. Long-term
foster care was the placement goal for 7% of the children who
were in foster care on September 30, 1997. However, there are
no data to indicate the type of permanent foster care
arrangement these children were living in.
Madame Chairman, that concludes my statement. I'd be happy
to answer any questions the Subcommittee may have.
Notes regarding data sources: Data cited in this testimony
should be considered estimates. Data on the total number of
children in foster care and on the living arrangements and
placement goals of children in foster care on September 30,
1997, are from the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and
Reporting System (AFCARS), administered by the Department of
Health and Human Services (HHS). National estimates are based
on incomplete reports; not all states have submitted data of
acceptable quality to HHS for inclusion in AFCARS. Data on the
primary reasons for placement for children entering foster care
in 1994 are from the Voluntary Cooperative Information System
(VCIS), operated by the American Public Human Services
Association, and also are based on incomplete reporting by the
states; not all states submitted information or responded to
every data element. Data on youth in juvenile justice
facilities in 1997 are from the Department of Justice, Census
of Juveniles in Residential Placement (CJRP).
Chairman Johnson. Heidi Goldsmith, the executive director
of the International Center for Residential Education.
STATEMENT OF HEIDI GOLDSMITH, FOUNDER AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR,
INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR RESIDENTIAL EDUCATION
Ms. Goldsmith. Madam Chair, members of the Subcommittee. My
name is Heidi Goldsmith. I am the founder and executive
director of the International Center for Residential Education,
a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting and assisting
the development of residential schools for disadvantaged
children and youth. For 6 years, we have helped communities
open new residential schools and formed a coalition among the
existing ones. Thank you for the opportunity to be here today.
I am strongly in favor of adoption, but as the chairman
says, not all young people are, realistically, adoptable; nor
do all at-risk children want or need adoption. We advocate for
additional long-term choices, residential education, in
particular. I contend it is No. 1, an effective option which we
need to expand; No. 2, it is a cost-effective option; and No.
3, legislation is needed to help expand this option for at-risk
children and youth.
Residential education is an umbrella term for out-of-home
settings where a person both lives and learns. It encompasses
boarding schools, prep schools, orphanages, children's
villages, and youth academies. These 24-hour educational,
future-focused settings become students' ``second homes.''
Students are fed, they are safe, they receive a quality
education and they can take advantage of such opportunities as
sports teams, community service, computer clubs, arts,
leadership programs, et cetera. They learn social skills such
as conflict resolution, have positive adult role models and
gain a positive sense of what their lives can be, that a more
positive life lies ahead of them.
The values and lessons learned are consistent 24 hours a
day, so that what they learn in the mornings in their
classrooms are the same things that are reinforced in the
afternoon in their dorms or cottages, and vice versa.
Despite their low income, troubled backgrounds, children in
these settings--in some of our member schools, 95 percent of
the graduates go on to 4-year colleges. Your leadership is
needed to make this success a more widely available option.
Residential education programs were prevalent in the United
States until the late 1960s. With the advent of
deinstitutionalization, most were closed or transformed into
residential treatment centers or juvenile delinquency
facilities. Most of the surviving 30 or so programs were funded
under private auspices. In the past 2 to 3 years, there has
been a dramatic resurgence of interest, especially in the form
of public-private partnerships, usually using the vehicle of
residential charter schools.
There are now residential charter schools in three States
and the District of Columbia. The Minnesota legislature last
year passed legislation creating three new residential schools.
Efforts are now under way in New York City, San Diego, Florida
and elsewhere. As with all charter schools, the funding for the
educational component comes from public education dollars which
follow a child to the school. The residential component is
funded by a combination of a variety of public sources, and
private dollars.
They are cost-effective, and at most schools can meet a
child's educational and living arrangements for the cost of
about $28,000. That is less than half the cost of a juvenile
delinquency facility, where many of these children will end up
without significant intervention; a third to a fifth of the
cost of residential treatment centers or intensive psychiatric
facilities, which tend to be short-term, intensive and focus on
the youth's pathology. Unfortunately, many children from
abusive living situations are inappropriately placed in these
settings because of the lack of less restrictive, less
expensive residential education alternatives.
While there are no empirical studies for residential
education as a whole, there are thousands of anecdotes. Over
and over again, students in schools I visit tell me they are
the only one of their friends who is not in jail or dead.
Sometimes the students vote with their feet. Schools in our
coalition have ``pilgrims'', students who arrive at the door to
the schools, kind of with the proverbial bandanna on a stick
over their shoulder and say, ``Please take me in.''
Who are best served in these settings? Youth who don't live
in safe homes, meaning homeless youth and those in abusive
homes; youth who have been bouncing around in the foster care
system from foster home to foster home; youth whose well-
meaning parents, struggling to make ends meet, beg the
residential schools to take them in, in order to keep them safe
and away from the drug culture; youth whose parents won't go
into residential drug treatment programs because they are
afraid to place their children in the foster care system. So
they continue their self-destructive habits and their habitual
abuse and neglect of their children.
Parents who live in nice, safe neighborhoods and have the
financial means often send their children, with pride, to
residential prep schools. Children from abusive or neglectful
homes rarely have that choice. Yet they need this choice the
most.
I personally was inspired to make this option available for
at-risk youth, having seen Israel's 65-year-old network of 70
children and youth villages. There they tell the children,
``What your family cannot provide for you, your community
will.'' We can and need to do that here.
Legislation is needed to appropriate funds to jump-start
new residential schools, as was done with charter schools; to
increase flexibility of the use of existing public funds; to
allow waivers of certain restrictive rules and regulations; and
to fund a study and evaluation of this reemerging field.
This option for kids needs to transcend partisan politics,
as was done with the charter schools.
Thank you for reframing this debate on the residential
education option. I urge you to consider creation of a national
policy and modest funding which encourages the development and
expansion of residential schools as an option in a continuum of
options for America's valuable youth.
Thank you.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you.
[The prepared statement follows:]
Statement of Heidi Goldsmith, Founder and Executive Director,
International Center for Residential Education
Madame Chairman, Members of the Subcommittee, staff, and
guests, My name is Heidi Goldsmith. I am the Founder and
Executive Director of the International Center for Residential
Education, a non-profit organization, based in Washington, DC,
dedicated to promoting and assisting the development of
residential schools for disadvantaged children and youth. For
six years the International Center for Residential Education
has been waging an uphill struggle to increase the number of
residential schools for at-risk, school-age children. It has
helped communities open new schools and formed a network of
existing ones, primarily in the United States. The
International Center and its supporters believe the residential
education option should be made available to more at-risk
children and youth, as one more option, in a continuum of
options, along with adoption and family preservation.
Thank you for this opportunity to be here today, to share
with you what we have learned about stable, effective options
for children and youth whose families cannot support them. We
are all in favor of adoption. But not all young people are,
realistically, adoptable.
My fellow panelists and I will discuss today a long-term
alternative to adoption and foster care--``residential
education.'' Residential education is an out-of-home setting
where a person both lives and learns. The term encompasses
boarding schools, `prep' schools, orphanages, children's
villages, and youth academies. In these environments, youth are
provided safe, 24-hour, nurturing, long-term, education-focused
settings in which to develop to their full potential. The
International Center for Residential Education, and its
association of residential schools, the Coalition for
Residential Education, focus on residential education programs
for economically disadvantaged children from zero-parent,
single-parent, or abusive homes. Today we will describe these
environments, profile the youth for whom they are most
effective, and encourage you to consider legislative action
encouraging the further development of these safe, healthy,
structured, educative environments. We have seen great results
in these settings, and greater promise awaits with your
assistance.
Residential schools for poor children from single-parent,
no-parent, or abusive homes worked well in the past for
thousands of disadvantaged children and teenagers. Recently,
there has been increased interest in opening new residential
schools for these children, whose homes cannot support them and
whose schools cannot effectively teach them.
A Brief History of Residential Education in the U.S.
Residential education programs have existed in the United
States for over 350 years. Traditional ``preparatory schools,''
geared toward children from well-to-do families, with the
primary goal being preparation for college, have flourished
since the 1700's. Large congregate care settings for
economically and socially disadvantaged youth changed, for the
most part in the late 1960's, with the advent of
``deinstitutionalization,'' from primarily custodial
``orphanages'' to primarily ``residential treatment,'',
``shelters,'' or ``correctional'' facilities. What remains is
about 30 residential programs located erratically across the
country, which focus on providing a safe, nurturing, surrogate
home, and a quality education. For example, Pennsylvania has 3
large programs. Maryland has none.
Despite the term `orphanage' and the associated image, the
vast majority of the students in the orphanages of the past
were not true ``orphans.'' The legal definition of being an
orphan was having no father. Today it often means having no
mother. The ``bottom line'' was, and should continue to be,
``Is the child's family able to provide him or her with basic
developmental needs?'' Can they get the basics: Food, clothing,
shelter, an appropriate education, a close and positive
relationship with an adult, physical and emotional safety? The
orphanages of the past were really residential schools--second
homes and good schools for disadvantaged children who wouldn't
otherwise have these basics. In these `second homes' they also
had a much better academic, vocational, and social skills
learning environment, readying them for productive lives, and
more equal access to success to mainstream society. In this
way, the `orphanages', the residential schools for
disadvantaged children, of the past, are much like the few
existing residential schools today. This, and not the movie
image of a 19th Century British warehouse for unwanted kids, is
the reality.
The Federal Government runs the large Job Corps program,
more of a ``second-chance'' residential education program for
low-income 16-24 year olds. The federal Bureau of Indian
Affairs runs a network of 49 residential schools for American
Indian children. There are two state-funded residential schools
for poor children whose parents are military veterans. Until 2
years ago, other residential schools for at-risk children were
funded under private auspices--private philanthropists, church
groups, or intensive fundraising, though some receive state
funding for specific children referred by state sources. The
Milton Hershey School and Girard College in Pennsylvania, and
the Piney Woods School in Mississippi, the nation's largest
historically Black boarding school for low-income teens, are
prime examples of these entirely privately funded schools. At
Girard College in Philadelphia and at Piney Woods, despite
their low-income, single parent backgrounds, 95% of the
graduates go on to attend four-year colleges.\1\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ Goldsmith, Heidi, Residential Education--An Option for
America's Youth: Policy and Practice, Milton Hershey School, November
1995.
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Equal Access and Choices
There is a perverse dichotomy today: It is considered
admirable for parents who have the financial means to send
their children to residential preparatory (``prep'') schools,
boarding schools. Yet most child welfare professionals, and
much of the general public, consider it a negative practice to
send a child to a residential school if they come from an
abusive or neglectful family, and/or who live in a neighborhood
with high crime, poverty, high school dropout rates, high teen
pregnancy rates, and few positive male role models. These
children need this choice every bit as much, if not more than,
the children from more privileged backgrounds. They rarely have
the option, the choice, to attend a residential school.
``Residential Education'' is a term imported from Israel,
which has an extensive network of children and youth villages.
``Residential care'' or ``residential treatment'' had been the
terms used in the US. ``Education'' is a normative term;
education is something everyone needs. It represents a more
positive view of students, and emphasizes strengths and the
future. `Care' or `treatment' is what you give to a patient--to
someone who is ill, and indicates a more problem-to-be-solved
approach. In the residential education programs we are
discussing today, the focus is on young people's future. It is
the job of everyone in the program, especially theirs, to
develop and utilize the youth's potential. In these programs,
they are safe, they are fed, they get a quality education, and
they can take advantage of a myriad of opportunities such as
sports teams, computer clubs, arts, leadership programs,
community service, mentoring, and on and on. They learn social
skills such as conflict resolution, and they gain a positive
sense of purpose.
The fact that these schools allow children to stay for a
longer period of time is crucial. The average length of stay in
the residential schools I work with is approximately 3.5 years.
Everywhere I go, whether it is a residential school in downtown
Philadelphia, an American Indian residential school, a rural
school, an Israeli youth village, or a residential school in
Namibia or Scotland, I ask how long it takes to really see a
change in a child. In each setting, I hear the same response,
``About two years.'' Somewhere around the two year mark, and it
may be 18 months for one child and 30 months for another, the
student suddenly understands that he or she doesn't have to be
a `victim'. He realizes there is a choice, that he can really
be a `somebody', and that it is up to him to make that choice.
A light goes on in his eyes, and his motivation for success
skyrockets. It is a thrilling and rewarding thing to see!
Some students at the few existing residential schools come
from low-income families who want the best for their children,
but they themselves are struggling. They beg the schools to
take in their children. With their children safe, studying, and
away from the temptations of drugs and gangs, they get a
respite, and can get the needed job training and/or drug
treatment they need. Their children get `on track'
academically, and gain productive social and life skills. With
the assistance of these residential schools, their families are
made stronger, even though they spend most of their time apart.
Some parents won't go into residential drug treatment
programs because they don't want their children in the foster
care system. And they are unwilling to relinquish them for
adoption. So they continue their self-destructive habits, and
their habitual abuse and neglect of their children. I have been
working recently with the Board of Education of New York City
on creating a new residential academy. One of their prime goals
is to create a residential setting for children from high-risk
home environments, without having to place these children into
the foster care system.
There is currently little empirical evidence that these
settings are effective. There are thousands and thousands of
anecdotes. Professor McKenzie, the next speaker and Chair of
the Board of the International Center for Residential
Education, is a ``live anecdote.'' One statement I hear from
students in many residential schools I have visited is that
they are the only one of the friends they grew up with who is
not in jail or dead. Sometimes the `clients'--the students,
even `vote with their feet'. Every school in our organization's
association for residential schools for at-risk young people,
the Coalition for Residential Education, has `Pilgrims'. These
are students who arrive at the entrance to the residential
schools on their own accord from hundreds of miles away, with a
modern version of the bandana on a stick over their shoulders,
and say, ``Please Take Me In!''
Cross-program evaluation is needed. In its 1994 report on
residential care, the U.S. General Accounting Office concluded:
``Residential care appears to be a viable option for some at-
risk youth. However, programs seldom conduct controlled or
comparison studies to determine how outcomes are linked to
their treatment efforts, and few programs have conducted
studies to show what happened to participants more than 12
months after they left the program No consensus exists on which
youth are best served by residential care rather than
community-based care or how residential care should be combined
with community-based care to best serve at-risk youths over
time.'' \2\
\2\ United States General Accounting Office, Residential Care: Some
High-Risk Youth Benefit, But More Study Needed, United States General
Accounting Office, Washington, DC, January 1994 (GAO/HEHS-94-56)
Residential schools are also cost-effective. Most schools
can meet a student's educational and living needs for
approximately $28,000 a year. That is less than half the cost
of most juvenile delinquency facilities, where many of these
kids are likely to end up without significant intervention.
$28,000 is a third to a fifth of the cost of residential
treatment centers or psychiatric treatment facilities, which
are short-term, intensive, and focus on the youth's pathology.
But that is where many children from abusive living situations
are placed, often because there are no less intensive, less
expensive residential options for them.
For Whom is this Option Best?
Clearly, these schools are not for all children. We contend
this is the most effective, and cost-effective option for
bringing some marginalized and at-risk young people into the
mainstream to become future tax-paying, productive, responsible
citizens. For whom, specifically, are these settings best?
Children who don't live in safe homes--homeless youth, those
in abusive homes.
Children who have been bouncing around in, or would fail in,
the foster care system.
Children whose parents want to, but cannot provide for their
basic needs. This usually means children living in single
parent, low income homes in violent neighborhoods.
Five years ago I spent a few months traveling around the
country, visiting existing residential education programs, to
write a study, Overview of American Residential Education
Programs for Youth. I found that the programs differ in size,
target age, funding auspices, location, and even specific
expected outcomes. I found they share more than they differ,
however. They all offer students five essential components of
life, otherwise unavailable to them: Safety (physical and
emotional), Education, Community, Structure, and Self-Esteem.
The Israeli Residential Education System
I personally was inspired to make this option available for
at-risk American youth, having seen Israel's extensive network
of 70 children and youth villages. There they tell neglected,
abused, and parentless children, half of them immigrants and
half from abusive homes, ``What your family cannot do for you,
your community will.'' We can, and need to, do this here!
Israel's residential education network was created
originally to house children fleeing the Holocaust. The
programs are based on a hybrid of a Kibbutz (communal village)
and traditional European boarding schools. Many of Israel's top
politicians, artists, military heroes, and business executives
are graduates of these schools. The programs have been adapted
over the past 65 years to meet the changing demographics and
needs of Israel's citizens. The current mix of students is
approximately half abused and neglected Israeli children born
in Israel and half new immigrants, primarily from Ethiopia and
the former Soviet Union.
The settings in Israel function as communities. The
programs are group-centered while valuing each community
member, committeed to helping students graduate, and
unstigmatized. Students and staff contribute what they can and
take what they need that is available. In the Israeli system
today, the various cultures from which students arrive are
celebrated, studied, and used to enrich the environment of the
majority rather than be replaced by it. As Dr. Chaim Peri,
Director of Yemin Orde Children's Village, explains, ``You must
get thoroughly into the children's past, culture, and language.
He doesn't come from a void!''
American Residential Education in the New Millenium
Since the International Center for Residential Education
was founded in 1993, we have seen a dramatic resurgence in
interest in this option for at-risk youth, particularly in the
form of public/private partnerships. Two years ago the nation's
first residential charter school opened in Massachusetts, the
Boston University Residential Charter School. There are now
four publicly/privately supported residential charter schools,
in three states and the District of Columbia. In April 1998,
the Minnesota legislature, at the urging of former Governor
Arne Carlson, passed legislation and appropriated money to
create three new boarding schools for at-risk children and
teenagers. Efforts under way to develop new residential schools
in New York City, San Diego, Florida, and elsewhere. In these
public/private partnerships, funds for the educational
components are funded with public education dollars. Funds for
the residential components are funded with a combination of
existing public dollars and private donations.
Private philanthropy is also excited about this option.
Five years ago the American Honda Corporation funded a new
residential school, Eagle Rock, in Estes Park, Colorado.
Individuals and church groups are exploring creating additional
ones, developing their own models.
Obstacles
The two biggest obstacles to the development of more
residential education programs are funding and attitudes. Many
at-risk children are not, for a variety of reasons, adoptable.
Residential education is, in the short term, an expensive
option for meeting the needs of at-risk youth, when compared to
basic foster care or simply leaving a young person to live at
home and drop out of school. Yet, compared to the costs of
residential treatment and juvenile lockup facilities, where
many young people from difficult circumstance might end up, it
is much less expensive, and certainly much more educative. The
myths about residential education, that the programs are
``institutional,'' ``last hope settings,'' or Oliver Twist-like
environments where youth are placed by social workers and
probation officers, are a further detriment. Many child welfare
professionals and teachers' unions oppose ``new'' modes of
caring for and teaching at-risk children. The prevailing theory
among critics of residential schools for these at-risk children
is ``The worst home is better than the best institution.'' I,
and those I represent, strongly disagree.
Another obstacle is the dearth of information about
residential schools. Until a year ago, the approximately 30
residential education programs had little contact with each
other. There was little sharing of ``best practices'' in
residential schools, cross-program evaluation, and no student
referral network. When a private philanthropist, a community,
or organization wants to start a new residential school, they
must start almost from scratch, traveling the country visiting
the existing schools to try to identify components to include
in their new school, designing and redesigning their new model,
scrounging for potential funding sources, and initially meeting
with mixed success in the schools they create. Large
foundations which support at-risk children haven't supported
study or development of residential education because, on the
face of it, residential education seemed to go against the
prevailing politically correct `darlings' of Family
Preservation and Community Support.
A year ago, we founded the Coalition for Residential
Education, a national association of existing and developing
residential schools, to network among practitioners and other
advocates, exchange ``best practices,'' collaboratively address
common dilemnas, and implement, in a concerted fashion, a
public education campaign about the value of residential
schools. This has begun to help both fledgeling and long-
existing residential schools.
A further obstacle is certain restrictive rules and
regulations which unnecessarily drive up the costs of these
schools, restrict student referrals, and in many instances
cause the school to be an `institution' rather than a
supportive, educative community.
Legislative Action Needed Now
Legislative action needed in the near future is legislation
which:
Increases flexibility in the use of existing
public funds--for example, funds earmarked for foster care,
which could follow the child, used to cover costs of the
residential components in a residential school
Appropriation of funds to jumpstart new
residential schools, as was done with charter schools
Allows waivers of certain restrictive rules and
regulations
Allocates funding for the study and evaluation of
this re-emerging field, option
In 1994, a year after the creation of the International
Center for Residential Education, the enthusiasm for this
additional preventative and developmental intervention for
children was dampened, in the short term, when then Speaker
Gingrich brought up the concept of `bringing back' orphanages.
This option for at-risk kids became suddenly publicized and
quickly politicized. There was a lot of publicity and public
debate. Both sides were earnest about their beliefs, but based
much of their opinion and their spin on old movie images.
Fortunately, times are changing. Over the past few years,
Americans across the political perspective are urging the
development of boarding schools for poor children from broken
families and violent neighborhoods. Both the Heritage
Foundation's magazine Policy Reviewand the Democratic
Leadership Council's magazine The New Democrat have published
articles I have written promoting this concept. This option for
kids needs to transcend partisan politics, as was done with
charter schools. It needs to be available as one more option,
one more choice for kids and those who care about them
Many people consider children from difficult backgrounds
``Throw Away Children.'' Human and financial resources are
expended--or rather, not expended--on them accordingly. Thank
you for today's careful and realistic consideration of this
option for kids. You are reframing the debate on this option
for at-risk youth. This time we are opening an informed,
serious, reasoned discussion, based on reality.
I believe adoption is the first preference for a child who
no longer has a parent. For children for whom adoption is not a
realistic option, the safe, 24-hour, education-oriented,
structured environment of a long-term residential school
prevents them from dropping out of school early, having
children too soon, and engaging in a range of self-destructive
behaviors. If we are to avoid `losing' so many of our young
people to drug abuse, crime, and hopeless futures, we cannot
afford to wait. I urge you to consider creation of a national
policy, and modest funding, which encourages the development
and expansion of residential education as a long-term option,
in a continuum of options, for America's valuable children.
[Attachments are being retained in the Committee files.]
Chairman Johnson. Mr. Richard McKenzie, the Walter B.
Gerken Professor of Enterprise and Society at the Graduate
School of Management, University of California, Irvine.
Welcome.
STATEMENT OF RICHARD B. McKENZIE, ECONOMICS AND MANAGEMENT
PROFESSOR, GRADUATE SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT, UNIVERSITY OF
CALIFORNIA, IRVINE
Mr. McKenzie. Again, I am Richard McKenzie, and I am here
because of an edited volume that I put together a couple of
years ago on Rethinking Orphanages for the 21st Century. My
written testimony reflects that volume and tries to suggest to
you the range of issues that need to be addressed to facilitate
bringing back children's homes. I recognize that some of those
issues have, in fact, been dealt with over the last year or so.
I am also here because I grew up in an orphanage in the
1950s, and that has in many ways motivated my recent work.
Five years ago this November Newt Gingrich made an off-the-
cuff comment about how children in the welfare system might be
better off in orphanages. It started a media fire storm, and
his proposal was rapidly dismissed as ``unbelievable and
absurd.'' Perhaps Mr. Gingrich was more right than he knew at
the time.
Over the past 5 years we have learned a lot, not the least
of which is how many millions of American kids are, in fact,
abused, and that abuse is substantiated. We know that there are
at least a half a million American kids in foster care at any
point in time. We also know that at least 100,000 kids that
were in the foster care system in November 1994 are still there
today. We know that 27 percent of the foster care kids will go
through at least three placements on their first cycle through
the system, and many of them will go through several cycles
through the system. We do not know how many placements many of
them will suffer. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many kids
will go through dozens of placements. There are also reports of
kids going through 40 and 50 placements before they graduate
from high school.
With that background in mind, is there not some
understanding of why people might look ``back to the future,''
back to homes for children?
We have also learned a good deal about how well alumni did
in the past. I undertook a survey of 1,600 alumni from nine
homes in the South and Midwest. All of these kids are now 45
years of age and older. All of them spent an average of 8 years
in their children's home. They went there at an average age of
7, at anywhere from 2 to 13 or 14 years of age.
What I found is startling, but yet it confirms my own
personal experience with the kids with when I grew up. The
alumni from these homes have outpaced their counterparts in the
general population on almost all accounts, not the least of
which are education, income and attitude toward life. The
alumni have a college graduation rate that is 39 percent higher
than the general population. They have a 20 percent higher rate
of Ph.D's than the general population. They have a median
income somewhere between 10 and 60 percent higher than the
general white population. They have a lower poverty rate. They
have a lower rate of public assistance, a lower rate of
criminal incarceration. You name it, they have done better. And
that should perhaps suggest to us that we should look ``back to
the future.''
Not only that, we also learned that these kids were not all
like Little Orphan Annie, pining to be adopted. Indeed, 86
percent of the alumni from these homes said that they never
contemplated adoption. Many of them were like me. When I knew
that a couple was coming on campus to survey the kids who were
10, 11, and 12 years old, the age group I was in, we didn't
stand out to be asked to be adopted. We would head for the
woods, and there is good reason for that: If your family has
failed you, you don't necessarily think that Daddy Warbucks is
going to be the one who picks you out. If you have a pretty
good place, why not stay with it?
Only 3 percent of the alumni were like Annie pining to be
adopted. Some of the kids were asked to be adopted, but they
didn't allow themselves to be adopted until they graduated from
high school. This is an unheralded story that needs to get out.
Now, children's homes that are coming back--I mean the
children you meet today are being hampered in getting the kind
of care that I and many of my alumni cohouts got. If you ask
the alumni what counted, they will all tell you the work ethic,
religious and moral nurturing, and a sense of responsibility.
Yet, we have laws on the books that restrict kids from mowing
the grass. There is a home in Chicago that won't send its kids
to the grocery stores because of liability problems.
There are all kinds of restrictions on how religious and
moral nurturing cannot be instituted; and, of course, there is
a liability problem, not only in these homes but in foster
care. Kids in California who are in foster care or in these
homes cannot get a driver's license because nobody will assume
liability.
I think adoption is wonderful; I think it is great for
those kids who meet the requirements. But you have got to
understand that not all the kids are adoptable. Not all parents
will allow their kids to be adopted. My father would have
terrorized any adoptive parent who took me. Also, not all
children want to be adopted.
And then there is the issue--sorry, time's up.
Chairman Johnson. You finish if you can, in a couple
minutes, go ahead.
Mr. McKenzie. I am sorry, I lost my train of thought.
Chairman Johnson. You were going on to a second issue.
Mr. McKenzie. I know.
Chairman Johnson. We will come back to you.
[The prepared statement follows:]
Statement of Richard B. McKenzie \1\, Economics and Management
Professor, Graduate School of Management, University of California,
Irvine
Part I. Extended Oral Testimony
I am Richard McKenzie, an economics and management
professor in the Graduate School of Management at the
University of California, Irvine. I am here because of my
research on the alumni of children's homes that operated in
this country decades ago.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ Richard McKenzie is a professor in the Graduate School of
Management at the University of California, Irvine. He is also editor
of Rethinking Orphanages for the 21st Century (Sage Publications, 1998)
and author of The Home: A Memoir of Growing up in an Orphanage (Basic
Books, 1996). E-mail: [email protected].
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nearly five years ago former Speaker of the House Newt
Gingrich set the tone for his contentious speakership when he
dared to suggest that some welfare children would be better off
in private orphanages. In making his off-the-cuff comments, he
ignited a media firestorm, mainly organized around claims of
critics that his proposal was ``unbelievable and absurd.'' In
early 1995, Speaker Gingrich quietly conceded the issue to his
critics. He did not know how right he was.
Over the past five years an untold number of American
children have endured third-world living conditions and the
sordid consequences of their parents' horrific life choices,
facts that have regularly been reported in the news. Five
million cases of serious child abuse have been substantiated.
More than a million children have cycled through the foster-
care system. A hundred thousand or more American kids who were
in foster care in late 1994 remain there today--and will be
there into the next millenium.
Over the past five years, tens of thousands of children
have been repeatedly taken from their abusive and neglectful
parents only to be abused again, sometimes with greater force,
by the nation's child welfare system that regularly separates
siblings, sending brothers and sisters separately through a
dozen or more foster-care placements. These children have
become seasoned troopers in what family court judges have come
to call the ``plastic bag brigade,'' children who repeatedly
show up in court for yet another placement with only a plastic
bag in which to carry their possessions. They will never
understand what other Americans mean by one of the most basic
of human advantages--``home,'' a permanent place to call their
own. Ill prepared for a productive life outside the foster-care
system, many will graduate to relive the lives of their
parents.
There should be no debate that many of the children trapped
in the country's child welfare system would be better served by
being adopted. We have an absurd child welfare system in this
country that makes adoption so costly and cumbersome that many
American couples this year will travel thousands of miles to
foreign lands to adopt children. At the same time, it is
senseless to believe that all children in need of a permanent
home will be adopted. Some children do not fit the needs of
parents in search of children to adopt, and contrary to
conventional thinking, many other children do not want to be
adopted. Moreover, there is a little-discussed upward trend in
``failed adoptions'' that many adoption advocates rarely
acknowledge. I am here to suggest that the country needs--no,
children need--permanent care options beyond adoption.
What do we do with children who either can't or don't want
to be adopted? What do we do with the children who have been
dumped by their biological parents, dumped by a series of
foster parents, and then dumped by their adoptive parents?
I would be the first to acknowledge that children's homes
were far from perfect care options. I should know. I grew up at
Barium Springs Children's Home in North Carolina in the 1950s.
At the same time, I'm here as a representative of the hundreds
of thousands of adult Americans who grew up the way I did, who
have done well in life--and who to this day feel fortunate for
the opportunity they had as children and who shudder at having
to endure what many American children go through today.
Over the past four years, we've learned much about
children's homes that we didn't know in late 1994. We now know
from the first large-scale survey of 1,600 alumni from nine
orphanages in the South and Midwest that dismissal of the
orphanage option nearly five years ago was far too quick,
related more to ingrained and outdated Dickensian images of
orphanage life a century or more ago than to the reality of the
experiences that the vast majority of the children had in their
homes.
The alumni in the survey (all of whom are now middle aged
and older) have done very well as a group, exceeding by a
substantial margin the educational and economic accomplishments
of their counterparts in the general population.\2\ For
example, the alumni have a 39 percent higher college graduation
rate than other Americans in their age group; far more income;
and substantially lower unemployment, poverty, and
incarceration rates. Moreover, the vast majority (upwards of 85
percent) look back favorably on their orphanage experience and
attribute much of their life's successes to what they learned
about life, morality, and work in their at their homes. Less
than 3 percent view their experience unfavorably.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\2\ The details of this study are reported in Richard B. McKenzie,
``Orphanage Alumni: How They Have Done and How They Evaluate Their
Experience,'' Child and Youth Care Forum, vol. 26 (no. 2; April 1997),
pp. 87-111. The results have been reprinted in Richard B. McKenzie,
editor, Rethinking Orphanages for the 21st Century (Thousand Oaks,
Calif.: Sage Publications, 1998), chapter 7.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
What is important for this committee to hear is that very
few (less than 3 percent) were like Little Orphan Annie who
pined for adoption. Most were like the kids I grew up with.
When we heard that a nice couple would be roaming the campus
with thoughts of adopting one of us, we headed for the woods.
Why? When your family has failed you, you don't necessarily
assume that the adoptive parents will be like Daddy Warbucks.
In all due respect to the policy combatants in late 1994,
the issue today is no longer whether children's homes will
return; they never went completely away. Moreover, new
children's homes, whether in the form of residential charter
schools or SOS Villages USA, are emerging. The California
Lutheran Church is one of a number of private groups across the
country working to establish homes. This past spring Minnesota
agreed to set up a dozen ``residential academies.'' The
movement is quiet and slow but unstoppable, because the need is
so great.
Moreover, children's homes offer many disadvantaged
children distinct advantages over foster care, not the least of
which are structure, stability, and a sense of permanence, if
not a place they can call ``home.'' However, children's homes
also permit siblings to stay together, and they afford children
a chance develop moral and religious values, a sense of
responsibility and work ethic, as well as much needed education
and job-related skills, factors that are sorely missing in the
foster care system.
However, as described in detail in my new edited volume,
Rethinking Orphanages for the 21st Century, there is much left
to be done in the way of policy reforms at the state and
federal government levels to speed up the reemergence of
private children's homes. First and foremost, we must correct
popular misconceptions relating to children's homes. People
must realize that if the orphanages of the past were all hell
holes, their alumni would not continue to gather yearly in the
hundreds and thousands across this country for homecomings--
forty and fifty years after their homes closed. (For a
discussion of the recommended policy reforms developed two
years ago by a group of child welfare practitioners and
scholars, see Part II of this testimony.)
We need to work hard to deregulate in a variety of ways
much residential childcare in order that modern children's
homes can become more cost effective and more common. We need
to once again free up the creative energies of American
philanthropists. The Hershey children's home in Pennsylvania,
which is expanding from 1,100 to 1,500 children and has an
endowment that rivals the Getty Museum, stands as the late
Milton Hershey's working monument to what good deeds, not
political rhetoric, can do for and through the lives of
children.
If anyone wants to see what private deeds through
children's homes can do, go to Hershey and be amazed. Take a
side trip to the SOS Village in Florida or Illinois and to the
Connie Maxwell Children's Home in South Carolina, and listen to
yourself wishing that more disadvantaged kids could have the
same opportunity to make a break from their sordid
circumstances and chart a brighter future in a place that they
can call home.
Again, my point is simple: Adoption is wonderful for those
children who have that opportunity, but adoption is not a
panacea. Children's homes are a care option whose time has come
again.
Part II. Rethinking Orphanages for the 21st Century: A Search for
Reform of the Nation's Child-Welfare System \3\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\3\ This section is drawn from Richard B. McKenzie, editor,
Rethinking Orphanages for the 21st Century (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage
Publications, 1998), chap. 16.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Few question the proposition that children need a good
start in life. However, far too many American children fail to
get the ``good starts'' that they need. The percentage of
children who are growing up without the supervision and
guidance of one or both parents for much of the time while they
are out of school is widely acknowledged. The statistics on
child abuse and neglect are horrific.\4\ More than a million
cases of significant child abuse and neglect are substantiated
every year. Five children in the country die each day from
abuse and neglect. Upwards of 22,000 babies are abandoned
annually in the hospitals in which they were born. The
incidence of child abuse and neglect of all forms more than
doubled between 1980 and 1993.\5\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\4\ For details on the extent of the nation's problems of abuse and
neglect, see Sedlak and Broadhurst (1996).
\5\ For a summary of statistics on child abuse and neglect, see
Fagan and Hanks (1997).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Adoptions have eased the troubles of many children, as
have various forms of substitute public care, not the least of
which has been foster-parent care.\6\ However, only 6 percent
of the babies abandoned each year in hospital nurseries are
adopted. The foster-care system is now approaching a crisis
state, given the speed with which the count of children in care
is expanding while the number of available foster parents is
contracting; the increase in the time children are staying in
the system; the decline in the percentage of foster-care
children who are adopted out of the system; and the growth in
the number of different foster-care placements many children
must endure.\7\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\6\ For a review of the problems potential adoptive parents face in
their efforts to adopt children, see Craig (1995).
\7\ For a review of one state's child-welfare system, see Matlick
(1997).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The foster-care system had well over 600,000 children in
care in 1992, up by more than 50 percent since 1986. At the
same time, tens of thousands of children across the country are
waiting to be placed in the foster-care system. The percentage
of children in foster care who had been in the system for two
to three years increased by almost half in just seven years,
from under 11 percent in 1983 to nearly 16 percent in 1990. The
percentage of children in foster care for three to five years
rose from under 12 percent in 1983 to almost 17 percent in
1990. All the while, the percentage of children adopted out of
foster care declined by a third, from 12 percent in 1983 to
under 8 percent in 1990.\8\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\8\ For more details on the problems in the foster-care system,
see Bevan (1996).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Foster care was intended to be temporary care. However, one
out of every ten children--over 60,000 of all current foster-
care children--can expect foster care to be, in effect,
permanent care, given that they will spend more than seven
years in the system. For all too many children, foster care
will also be unstable care, especially since siblings are often
sent to different foster homes. Moreover, twenty-three percent
of foster-care children will have two placements, an additional
20 percent will experience three to five placements, and 7
percent will have more than seven placements, which means that
more than one quarter of the children who go into the foster-
care system can expect to be shifted among more than three
foster parents \9\ (and many can expect to go through dozens of
placements \10\).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\9\ As reported in A Challenge to the Nation: Safe and Permanent
Homes for Children (1997).
\10\ No one knows how many children go through placements that
reach into the ``dozens.'' However, Donald Veuleur, an officer in the
Olive Crest home for children in Orange County, California, and Robert
Stansel, president of Barium Springs Home for Children in Iredell
County, North Carolina, attest to all-too-frequently working with
children who may have been through three and four dozen foster
placements.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
No doubt, many foster children have done well because
their foster parents gave a lot of themselves for very little
payment. However, signs of strain with the foster-care system
abound. Currently, children in foster care constitute less than
.003 percent of the nation's population. However, 17 percent of
state prisoners are former foster-care children, 40 percent of
foster children leave the system to go on the nation's welfare
roles, and 39 percent of the homeless youth in Los Angeles
County are former foster-care children.\11\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\11\ As reported in A Challenge to the Nation: Safe and Permanent
Homes for Children (1997, p. 3).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Judges and childcare workers across the country openly
decry the fact that many abused and neglected children will be
sent home from the foster-care system only to be abused again
and returned to the system for another round of foster
placements. Heads of group homes, which provide temporary care
for troubled children, readily admit that many of their charges
should never be sent home, but all too often, abusive homes or
additional foster-care placements are the only options
available.\12\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\12\ For an example of how judges assess their options, see Estella
Moriarty's contribution in McKenzie (1998; chapter 3).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
To say that the nation's childcare system needs new
options for care is an understatement of major proportion. One
of the ``new'' options for a growing number of children will
likely be an ``old'' one--the private ``orphanage'' (or
children's home) option. This short paper reviews the policy
obstacles that impede the return of private children's homes
and offers suggested policy reforms devised at a symposium of
researchers and practitioners.\13\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\13\ The list of the attendees at the symposium is included in the
appendix to this chapter.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Children's Home Option
In late 1994 and early 1995, policy makers and commentators
furiously debated the issues of whether private orphanages (or
long-term residential and educational care centers for
disadvantaged children) should be brought back as a care
option.\14\ Contrary to the way that debate ended--abruptly,
without any apparent resolution of the central issue--the issue
today is no longer whether private orphanages (or some modern
variant of them) will return. Private orphanages never went
completely away, as might be believed. Not all children's homes
folded or changed their missions to care for severely troubled
youth. The Milton Hershey School in Pennsylvania, the Connie
Maxwell Home for Children in South Carolina, the Masonic Home
for Children in North Carolina, and the Palmer House in
Mississippi are four examples of children's homes that have
continued to provide long-term care for disadvantaged children
for much, if not all, of this century.\15\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\14\ For a review of the orphanage debate of 1994-1995, see Ross
London's contribution to McKenzie (1998; chapter 6).
\15\ For reviews of beneficial residential children's programs in
Israel, Africa, and Europe, see Beker and Magnuson (1996). For a review
of the potential benefits of residential programs in the United States,
see Goldsmith (1995).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
New private orphanages (or children's homes) are springing
up. SOS Children's Villages-USA, Inc., which has children's
homes in 125 countries, has established a childcare beachhead
in the United States, with a new model for children's homes
that has been tested and proven effective in Florida and
Illinois and that will likely be duplicated throughout the
country.\16\ Moreover, other religious and civic groups have
concluded that the disadvantaged children who are now being
tossed from one foster placement to another, and between foster
placements and their own dysfunctional families, need the sense
of security that comes from having a permanent home. The
Lutheran Church of California has a project they have dubbed
``20/20/20,'' for twenty children's homes in twenty cities in
twenty years. Children's homes that two and three decades ago
became short-term treatment centers are reconsidering their
mission, with an eye toward reintroducing long-term residential
care for children who would otherwise not be able to return
home or who would likely continue to move from one foster
placement to the next.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\16\ For more information on SOS Villages-International, see the
organization's home page: www.sos.or.at/sos. There are currently 361
SOS children's villages worldwide caring for nearly 30,000 children
supported by over six million ``friends'' of the organization. All of
the world's major religions are represented in the villages, and each
child is brought up in his or her own religion.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Clearly, the nation's growing problems with family
stability, child abuse and neglect, welfare reform, and foster-
care ensure that some modern form of private orphanage care
will continue to return. The relevant question now is at what
pace private orphanages (or whatever they are called) will
spread, and that issue is critically related to the cost of
care, which is high and going up.\17\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\17\ For an analysis of the cost of care at two childcare
institutions, see Del Bradshaw, Donald Wyent, and Richard McKenzie's
contribution to McKenzie (1998; chapter 15). Briefly, these authors
found that the annual cost of care at one home for severely troubled
children was over $64,000 per child in 1995. The annual cost of care in
a home for disadvantaged children was more than $32,000 per child. The
annual cost of care per child at both institutions in 1950 (when they
cared for disadvantaged children) was less than $7,500 per child in
1995 dollars.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Children's Need for a ``Good Start''
To say that children need a ``good start'' is instructive
but not sufficient. One childcare expert, whose authority is
grounded in his professional work and his background as an
orphanage alumnus, suggests that a good start for a child
almost always encompasses four attributes: Connectedness,
Continuity, Dignity, and Opportunity (Seita, Mitchell, and
Tobin, 1996):
1. By connectedness he means that ``children need to feel
that someone is there for them, and that they are a part of
someone else's life'' (Mitchell, and Tobin, 1996; p. 93).
2. ``Continuity is a sense of continuous belonging with
another person or persons. The young person needs to feel a
part of a greater whole and has an important position to play
within it'' (Mitchell, and Tobin, 1996; p. 96).
3. ``To have dignity is to feel worthy. All children are
worthy of respect, caring, love, thought and courtesy.''
(Mitchell, and Tobin, 1996; p. 98).
4. Children need an opportunity to grow and develop, which
means that ``young people must be able to explore and express
their capabilities without undue external barriers. Children
must have access to quality education, recreation and leisure,
all at an appropriate developmental level.'' (Mitchell, and
Tobin, 1996; p. 100).
The list is short and subject to quibbles. Seita would be
the first to acknowledge that his list of four attributes is
not necessarily all-inclusive of children's needs. For example,
children need to feel safe (which Seita would include under
dignity), and they need some form of spiritual and/or moral
nurturing (which he would include under continuity). The point
is that what children needs are fairly basic and relatively
easy to identify and categorize. The tough task is ensuring
that children get the basics.
Most children will get the good start they need from their
biological families. Others will get a good start from adoptive
families, and still others will benefit from some form of
short-term and long-term foster care as the children's families
reconstitute themselves. Work on improving the care children
receive from their biological, adoptive, and foster families
must continue for an obvious reason: These forms of care will
always be the dominant means by which children get their starts
in life. However, for a growing number of children, the various
forms of family-based care available to them have been
inadequate, if not destructive. Many disadvantaged children
will never be adopted. That does not mean that adoption should
not be encouraged and more widely used, with the legal and cost
impediments to adoption reduced, as has been recommended.\18\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\18\ See Bevan (1996, chap. 5).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The unadulterated fact remains that many children should
never be returned to their abusive and neglectful biological
parents, and far too many children will spend years of their
childhoods in what can only be called ``permanent temporary
care,'' year by year going from one temporary foster-care
placement to another. Could not these children find better
childhood experiences in care centers that offer long-term,
permanent substitute care that might not match the ideal of
family life but would be significantly better than their next
best alternative?
Reconsideration of Past Assessments Of Orphanages
Past assessments of institutional care for children have
been far too harsh. Admittedly, many childcare experts have
concluded, after reviewing a number of studies relating to the
efficacy of institutional care, that private orphanages
``damaged'' the children in their care.\19\ While many
orphanages may not have provided their charges with good
experiences, a critical review of the childcare literature
relating to orphanages suggests that the studies themselves are
defective in a number of regards, leaving open the question of
whether the broad sweep of private orphanages that covered the
country during the first half of this century were as ``bad''
as has been suggested.\20\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\19\ For a summary of the criticisms, see Ford and Kroll (1995).
\20\ For a brief history of the orphanage movement in this country,
see Marvin Olasky's contribution to McKenzie (1998; chapter 5). Also
see Seita, Mitchell, and Tobin (1996). For histories of individual
homes that appeared to have served a substantial majority of their
children well, see Cmiel (1995), Goldstein (1996), and Zmora (1994).
For a review of the scholarly childcare literature as it relates to
orphanage care, see John McCall's contribution to McKenzie (1998;
chapter 8) and Children's Bureau, Orphanage Background Materials
(1995).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
While all homes for disadvantaged children probably harmed
some of the children in their care (as do some families), there
is strong evidence that homes for disadvantaged children helped
a substantial majority of their charges. The general conclusion
drawn from the first and only large-scale survey of orphanage
alumni (involving 1,600 respondents from nine orphanages in the
South and Midwest) stands in sharp contrast to conventional
wisdom and expert conclusion on orphanage life: As a group, the
alumni have outpaced their counterparts in the general
population by significant margins on practically all measures,
not the least of which are education, income, and attitude
toward life.\21\ The survey respondents seem to be saying that
they got from their orphanage experience the required
``connectedness, continuity, dignity, and opportunity'' that
constituted a ``good start'' and served them well later in
life.\22\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\21\ See Richard McKenzie's contribution to McKenzie (1998; chapter
7).
\22\ The overwhelming majority of the respondents indicated that
they maintain favorable assessments of their orphanage experience (see
chapter 7 of McKenzie (1998)).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The record of many homes of the past should be reassessed
with an eye toward considering their ``batting averages''
relative to the ``batting averages'' of alternative systems of
substitute care, most notably foster parent care. These
assessments of the programs of past and current children homes
should be remade with the goal of identifying ``best
practices,'' and avoiding many of the mistakes that were made
in the past.
The case for temporary institutional care of seriously
troubled children has been made and is widely accepted. The
case for permanent care of disadvantaged children who have not
yet become seriously troubled has not been widely accepted and
needs to be remade with greater force. That case needs to be
made with reference to the problems and deficiencies in the
current substitute-care systems. However, what is needed is not
a contraction in the number of children who receive substitute
care, but an expansion in the array of care options in order
that children can be placed in environments that best serve
their particular needs.
It must be acknowledged that many children will never
prosper in an institutional setting. At the same time,
experience has shown that many children can do well in such a
setting, and they can surely do better in such a setting that
they might do in a sequence of temporary placements. Private
homes for children can provide a form of long-term, permanent
care, from which a sense a security can develop, but homes can
provide much more, not the least of which is improved
educational opportunity, a sense of work ethic, religious and
moral nurturing, and camaraderie and sense of community--
attributes that the alumni of homes have as important in their
childhoods and that are clearly evident at homes like the
Milton Hershey School in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and SOS
Children's Villages that, as noted, are scattered across more
than 100 countries worldwide.\23\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\23\ See McKenzie, ``Orphanage Alumni'' and Heidi Goldsmith,
Residential Education: An Option for America's Youth (Hershey, Penn.:
Milton Hershey School, November 1995). For more information on SOS
Children's Villages International, use the following web site:
www.netwing.at/sos/.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Policy Impediments to Permanent Institutional Care
Greater use of the private orphanage (or permanent
children's home) option is now, however, inhibited by a variety
of state and federal laws and regulations that encourage judges
and child-welfare workers to keep children with their
biological but abusive and neglectful parents and to shun the
use of long-term, institutional care. Many of these laws and
regulations also have the effect of driving up the cost of
long-term childcare in institutional settings, which means that
fewer children than otherwise will receive the type of
permanent care they need.
Under current federal law (namely the Adoption Assistance
and Child Welfare Act of 1980), states must prove that they
have made ``reasonable efforts'' to prevent the removal of
children from their biological parents and to return children
to their biological parents, a seemingly innocuous requirement.
The policy intent of that federal law was understandable, to
reverse the sharp rise in foster placements that occurred in
the 1970s (which did, in fact occur for a time \24\, and few
would question making ``reasonable efforts'' to keep families
together. However, the problem is that the term ``reasonable
efforts'' has been unreasonably interpreted by practitioners in
the child-welfare system to mean that virtually every possible
effort must be made to rehabilitate the parents and to reunite
the children with their parents when the children have been
removed.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\24\ Foster-care placements fell from a half million in the late
1970s to 300,000 by the mid-1980s. However, as noted, placements were
back above 600,000 by the early 1990s. See Pelton (1989), Tatara
(n.d.), and U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect (1993).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The termination of parental rights is often delayed for
years as the parents make little or no effort to change their
abusive and neglectful ways. Abusive and neglectful parents can
also slow down the termination process by, at times, making
only marginal improvements in their behavior or by claiming
that they have not been provided with ample state resources
(through, for example, drug rehabilitation programs) to correct
their behavior.
The accumulation of delays can mean that children are
forced to remain with their parents long after parental abuse
and neglect has been substantiated, as extensive efforts
continue to rehabilitate the parents and to stop the abuse. It
has also meant that children have been repeatedly returned to
abusive and neglectful parents to be abused and neglected again
and that, all the while, the children have been forced to
endure repeated cycles of multiple foster-care placements.\25\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\25\ See Conna Craig's contribution in McKenzie (1998; chapter 2).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The termination of parental rights of biological parents
has become progressively more difficult and time consuming,
even among abusive parents who have committed repeated felonies
against one or more of their children. Often, children who have
not been abused (sexually, emotionally, or physically) cannot
be removed from their abusing parent(s) even though one or more
of their siblings has been abused.\26\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\26\ For discussions of the problems children must face because of
family rehabilitation and reunification efforts, see Moriarty (chapter
3), Gelles (chapter 4), and Gelles (1996).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
No one questions the importance of good family nurturing to
children, and clearly state and federal law should not obstruct
the continuance of family life when it supports the welfare of
children in the families. However, as state efforts to
rehabilitate and reunite otherwise abusive and neglectful
parents have been extended and parental rights have not been
denied, children have aged through repeated cycles of foster-
care placements and have become progressively more troubled.
The children's growing troubles should be expected with the
buildup of insecurity as they are passed from one set of foster
parents to another in the so-called ``foster-care drift.''
Understandably, the children have become less adoptable, often
requiring, eventually, psychological care in institutional
settings.
Indeed, researchers have found that the substitution of the
foster-care system for the institutional/orphanage-care system
in the 1950s and 1960s has (after adjusting for a number of
other forces at work) lowered the adoption rate of
disadvantaged children.\27\ Unfortunately, growing evidence
indicates that the family rehabilitation and reunification
programs have been ineffective, all the while children have not
gotten the care they need or, worse, have literally been
abused, albeit inadvertently, by the child-welfare system that
was designed to help them.\28\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\27\ See William Chappell and William Shughart's contribution in
McKenzie (1998; chapter 9).
\28\ See Gelles' contribution in McKenzie (1998; chapter 4) and
Gelles (1996).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The child-welfare system may have been predisposed to
interpret ``reasonable efforts'' very generously because many
experts and practitioners are convinced that any form of family
care is to be preferred even over the best form of
institutional care, but also because the scope of care provided
by state agencies can be expanded with a generous
interpretation of what constitutes ``reasonable efforts.''
Regrettably, within the child aid system, there are built-in
budget biases in favor of placing children in foster care and
not moving them out to institutional care.\29\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\29\ For a political assessment of the growth of the child-welfare
system, see the contributions in McKenzie (1998) by Karol and Donald
Boudreaux (chapter 10) and Dwight Lee (chapter 11). The Bordeaux's
write, ``Such a program creates clear incentives to place children in
foster-care families. Add to the open-endedness of these funds the fact
that under the AFDC program `administrative costs' of social services
agencies were shared on a 50/50 basis with the federal government, and
the bureaucratic tendency to grow like kudzu receives further
encouragement. That is, social service agencies were receiving
unlimited funds from federal coffers for AFDC payments, which, as of
1961 included some foster-children, and agencies were splitting
administrative costs with the federal government. The greater the
number of children placed with foster-care families, the larger the
child-welfare agency budget.'' They quote the Encyclopedia of Social
Work (1987, p. 642), which also concludes that ``[s]tates that were
heavily dependent on [AFDC foster-care] funds had no incentives to move
children out of foster care because funding was lost each time a child
was discharged from placement'' (Encyclopedia of Social Work, 18th ed.,
Vol. 1 [Silver Spring, Md: National Association of Social Workers,
1987], p. 642).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
However, the system has another, perhaps stronger economic
incentive to make far more than ``reasonable efforts'' to
rehabilitate parents and to reunify children with families that
may or may not have been rehabilitated: The cost of
institutional care, which might have to be covered out of state
budgets, is very high--easily exceeding $30,000 per year per
child--and the cost has grown substantially over recent
decades.\30\ At one home for disadvantaged children, the annual
cost of care per child in 1995 was more than four times the
real (inflation-adjusted) cost of care per child in the early
1950s.\31\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\30\ See Bradshaw, Wyent, and McKenzie (chapter 15).
\31\ See Bradshaw, Wyent, and McKenzie (chapter 15).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The growth in the cost of institutional care over the last
five decades has been the result of many factors, not the least
of which have been the rise in the real wages of institutional
caregivers and the intentional reduction the institutions have
made in their children-to-staff ratios in order that additional
higher quality and more personal childcare services could be
provided. However, the cost increases have also been partially
self-inflicted by states, given the growth in the detailed
regulations that institutions must meet.
Institutions must now adhere to volumes of regulations and
accreditation requirements that in printed form weigh several
pounds. For example, in many states institutional children's
homes must meet construction requirements that exceed the
specifications in building codes for single-family homes, and
then they are told how many square feet of living space and
toilets they must have for each child in care. The institutions
are also told how many children they can have in each bedroom
and how many staff people with various credentials they must
hire for each child in care. In addition, they are required to
pay house parents when they are asleep.\32\ Then, the
institutions are limited in the work they can require their
children to do. They are further limited in the work they can
ask of children in their care because of the liability they may
incur in case of accidents.\33\ The financial problems of
institutions have been compounded by the fact that, when the
institutions accept public funding, they are told how long they
can care for and treat children, and they are restricted in the
extent of the required religious component of their programs,
restrictions that, no doubt, have undercut the willingness of
various denominations and civic groups to financially support
institutional care.\34\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\32\ See Michael DeBow's contribution in McKenzie (1998; chapter
13).
\33\ See Margaret MacFarlane Wright's contribution to McKenzie
(1998; chapter 12).
\34\ See Ross London's contribution to McKenzie (1998; chapter 6).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Path to Policy Reforms
Ways must be found to ensure that private charitable,
religious, and civic groups can develop creative and improved
alternative institutional care opportunities that meet the
local needs of identified populations of children. To develop
those care options, two changes in conditions appear self-
evident:
First, private homes, and their supporting
religious, civic, and charitable organizations, must be given
greater freedom to devise methods of care that are more cost
effective.
Second, more children must be allowed to enter
permanent institutional care before they have been repeatedly
abused, have experienced prolonged stays in the foster-care
system, and have become troubled by the lack of permanency in
their lives.\35\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\35\ For a set of policy recommendations designed specifically to
curb child abuse, see Fagan and Hanks (1997).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Members of Congress and their staff have recognized the
need for substantial reform in the country's basic child
welfare laws, and there is some reason to hope that laudable
policy changes will be forthcoming, given the passage of The
Adoption Promotion Act of 1997 (H.R. 867) by the House of
Representatives in the spring of 1997, which is understandably
intended to encourage adoption. At this writing (summer 1997),
this legislation is awaiting Senate action.\36\ But broader
changes are badly needed, given that adoption will not be
suitable for all disadvantaged children in need of a permanent
place to call home.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\36\ Under H.R. 867, as amended by a bipartisan proposal accepted
by voice vote, the current child welfare system would be reformed in
numerous ways that are endorsed in this paper: certain aggravated
circumstances involving children would be identified in which States
can bypass or discontinue efforts to reunite abused or neglected
children with their family; financial incentives would be provided to
the States to move more children out of foster care and into adoptive
families; and, for children under the age of 10 who have spent a
substantial portion of their lives in foster care, States would be
required to move expeditiously toward freeing these children for
adoption; the timetable for the hearing that determines the child's
future placement would be shortened from 18 months to 1 year; and
States would be required to provide foster parents and relatives notice
of all hearings and reviews. Additional minor and technical amendments
are also included in the bill.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
To afford homes for children greater flexibility in their
programs, five very general policy recommendations need to be
considered:
Lessen the Regulatory Burden on Childcare
Institutions. There must be a broad liberalization of state
licensure statutes and regulations applicable to residential
educational institutions, the goals of which are to lower the
costs of care facing current and would-be operators of such
facilities and to promote innovation and entrepreneurial
efforts.\37\ We suggest that states license particular
providers of residential childcare--including churches and
other civic and philanthropic organizations--and leave the
management details of residential facilities staffing and
programming to the licensed provider. In general, the states
should be assigned responsibility for setting the standards of
care, especially when public funding is involved, while the
facilities should be in the business of determining how best in
terms of quality and cost the standards can be met. Thus, we
suggest the following:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\37\ For an analysis of the extent and impact of institutional
childcare regulations in six states, (see DeBow chapter 13).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. That states adopt a statute that provides for a less
regulated status of ``registered'' childcare institution as an
alternative to the traditional, more regulated ``licensed''
status (versions of which have been adopted in Florida and
Mississippi).
2. That states take steps to eliminate the statutes and
regulations which currently discourage the use of volunteers
and resident labor, to the extent allowed by applicable federal
law.
3. That state regulatory bodies recognize the role of the
law in contributing to the high cost of starting up and
operating residential facilities for children and engage in on-
going discussions with the providers of these facilities to
find additional ways by which statutes and regulations can be
relaxed or eliminated and thus reduce the start-up costs of new
care facilities and the cost of continuing care.
Expand Work Opportunities in Childcare
Institutions. Many state laws allow parents to assign their
children a broad range of work responsibilities around the home
and in family farms and businesses. Childcare institutions
should be afforded the same rights to assign work
responsibilities to the children in their care.
Convert Public Child-Welfare Funds to Block
Grants. A portion, if not all, of federal child-welfare funds
that are now going into foster care should be distributed to
states as block grants, allowing states maximum flexibility in
the placement of disadvantaged children in existing permanent
institutional settings (for example, SOS Children's Villages-
USA), and in the development, monitoring, and evaluation of new
options for the permanent institutional placement of children.
To reduce the time children spend in foster care and to
increase the chances children will have to receive a measure of
permanency in their lives, a number of policy recommendations
need to be considered:
Elevate the Importance of ``Permanence'' in the
Development of Child-Welfare Policies. Preserving families and
reunifying children with their biological parents are worthy
welfare goal, but they are hardly the only guiding goals that
should direct child welfare policies, giving the number of
children who continue to be harmed by their parents. North
Carolina legislators have taken the lead in having child safety
take precedence over family preservation and reunification in
directing that state's child welfare policies.\38\ However,
policy makers must realize that children can be ``safe'' as
they are bounced among multiple foster-care placements. Policy
makers take an additional step, making the establishment of a
permanent residence for the child a higher public policy
priority. This means that the time allotted for permanency
planning for children in some jurisdictions, which, as noted,
can stretch to a number of years or until the child grows to
adulthood, must be shortened. We must seek to impose some
enforced time limit on the process of family rehabilitation and
reunification, before parental rights are ultimately
terminated. Clearly, we must make subjecting the child to the
fewest possible substitute-care placements a top priority.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\38\ As reported by Batten (1997, p. 1C).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Narrow the Range of Cases in Which ``Reasonable
Efforts'' Must be Made to Reunify Children with Their Abusive
and Neglectful Families. The Adoption Act of 1997 (H.R. 867)
proposes the type of change in federal child welfare law that
is needed. Under that bill, states would not be required to
make reasonable efforts to reunify a family in ``aggravated
circumstances'' as defined in State law and in which a court
has confirmed that a child has been subjected to such
aggravated circumstances. Examples of aggravated circumstances
are cases of abandonment, torture, chronic abuse or sexual
abuse. Reasonable efforts would also not be required when
parents' rights to a sibling have been involuntarily terminated
or when parents have murdered or committed manslaughter of
another child. In determining the reasonable efforts to be
made, the child's health and safety must be the paramount
concern.
Assign the Initial Investigation of Cases of
Substantial Abuse and Neglect to the Police and the Criminal
Justice System. Charges of child abuse and neglect, even in
severe cases, are handled in many states by social workers.
Shifting the assignment of investigative duties to the police
and criminal justice system would eliminate the inherent
conflict of interest between the child-welfare system that now
frequently investigates and, at the same time, apportions
resources for children who are found to be victims of abuse or
neglect. (The police and the criminal justice system are also
more likely to follow proper criminal investigative procedures
and requirements, such as notifying suspects of their rights at
appropriate stages of an investigation. In all too many
instances, procedural errors alone cause substantial delays in
the termination of parental rights.)
Establish a Rebuttable Presumption of Unfitness in
the Child-Welfare Law. This means, for example, we must make
the intentional infliction of serious injury or the killing of
a child or spouse presumptive grounds for the termination of
parental rights for all surviving children.
Shorten the Timetable for the Initial Hearings on
the Termination of Parental Rights. Instead of delays that can
go on for years, the timetable for initial hearings for
children removed from their homes should be shortened to 12
months (as recommended by H.R. 867). Such hearings would be
strengthened by requiring that the expected permanency
outcomes--including whether and when the child would be
returned home, placed for adoption, or placed in a home for
children--be a part of the child's written plan.
Speed Up the Notification of Judicial Authorities
of Cases of Parental Rights Termination. Delays in the
termination of parental rights occur simply because judges have
not been notified until after all avenues of parental
rehabilitation have been exhausted. We must begin to notify
judicial authorities at earlier stages of potential cases
involving the termination of parental rights--particularly when
a parent commits a felony against his or her child.
Establish Guidelines for the Permanent Placement
of Children. We must establish enforceable timelines for the
permanent placement of children after the termination of
parental rights. These guidelines should include guidance for
the pursuit of adoption and institutional placement
options.\39\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\39\ As recommended by H.R. 867, states would have to document
steps taken to find and finalize an adoptive or other permanent home
for the child including placement in the custody of another fit and
willing relative or home for children. Of course, biological and foster
parents and relatives providing childcare would be notified of reviews
and permanency hearings regarding child placement and would be given
the opportunity to be heard at these proceedings.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Place Responsibility for Rehabilitation on
Parents. Where parental rehabilitation is an issue in
termination of parental rights cases, we must place the
responsibility for rehabilitation entirely on the parent. We
must eliminate the objection to termination of parental rights
based on services not having been provided to the parent by the
government or some other service provider (for example, drug
treatment programs for addicted parents). Such objections now
delay many cases of parental rights terminations.
Make the Central Issue in Cases of Termination of
Parental Rights What Is Best for the Children. Parental rights
are, no doubt, important. However, in trying to protect the
rights of parents, the care of the parents' children can
suffer. In far too many cases, the rule of ``what are the
rights of the parents'' takes precedence over ``what is best
for the children.''
Require Concurrent Case Planning for Both
Reunification and Termination of Parental Rights. All too
often, attempts to terminate parental rights are initiated only
after repeated efforts to rehabilitate parents have failed,
resulting in prolonged stays for the children in the foster-
care system. If termination proceedings are initiated at the
same time that efforts to rehabilitate are begun, and if
reunification of a child with his or her parents is not
possible, the termination of parental rights can proceed
expeditiously.
Evaluate Parents' Fitness to Be Parents at the
Start of Child Abuse and Neglect Cases. The most fervently
contested parental rights termination cases are usually those
of neglect (rather than abuse). All too often, the termination
of parental rights is delayed because psychological and
substance abuse evaluations of parents are not made until
rehabilitation efforts have failed. These cases could be
processed more quickly and soundly by initiating parental
evaluations at the start of the investigations.
Use Public Funds to Encourage Childcare
Innovations. In restructuring current federal law
(specifically, Title IV), Congress should allow states maximum
flexibility in the use of those funds among various care
options, including institutional care. The purpose will be to
encourage new care options by more groups.
Concluding Comments
The child-welfare system in the United States is helping
hundreds of thousands of children. However, there are obvious
problems within the system, not the least of which is the lack
of permanent care being received by many children. Private
children's homes have never been a dominant form of care for
children in need, nor will they ever be a dominant form in the
future. Nevertheless, many of today's disadvantaged children
could benefit from the type of permanent care that children's
homes have demonstrated they can provide. The evidence is
mounting that children's homes have worked well in the past,
are working well now, and can work even better in the future.
Institutional care has always been and will continue to be
an imperfect substitute for loving biological, adoptive, or
other substitute parents. However, it can be an improvement in
the care provided to many hard-to-place children over what they
would otherwise receive. When loving and responsible parental
care is not possible, children need, at the very least, the
basic amenities of life. They also need permanency and
security. The recommendations tendered here are intended to
provide disadvantaged children with more opportunities to find
that permanence and security in their lives.
References
Adoption Promotion Act of 1997, H.R. 867, 105th Cong., 1st
Sess. (April 28, 1997) 105-77 (as found on the web: http://
thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c105:h.r.867).
Batten, Taylor. 1997. ``Child Safety Tops Family in Senate
Vote,'' Charlotte Observer (July 30).
Beker, Jerome and Douglas Magnuson. 1996. Residential
Education as an Option for At-Risk Youth (New York: Haworth
Press).
Bevan, Carole Statuto. 1996. Foster Care: Too Much, Too
Little, Too Early, Too Late (Washington, D.C.: National Council
for Adoption, 1996).
A Challenge to the Nation: Safe and Permanent Homes for
Children. 1997. A report to President William Clinton on
adoption reform (Alexandria, VA: SOS Children's Villages-USA,
Inc., February 6), p. 3.
Children's Bureau. 1995. Orphanage Background Materials
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services, May, duplicated).
Cmiel, Kenneth. 1995. A Home of a Different Kind: One
Chicago Orphanage and the Tangle of Child Welfare (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press)
Craig, Conna. 1995. ``What I Need Is a Mom,'' Policy
Review, Summer, pp. 41-49.
Encyclopedia of Social Work. 1987. 18th ed., Vol. 1 (Silver
Spring, Md: National Association of Social Workers).
Fagan, Patrick and Dorothy B. Hanks. 1997. ``The Child
Abuse Crisis: The Disintegration of Marriage, Family, and the
American Community,'' Backgrounder (Washington, D.C.: Heritage
Foundation, May 15).
Ford, Mary and Joe Kroll. 1995. There Is a Better Way:
Family-Based Alternatives to Institutional Care (Washington,
D.C.: North American Council on Adoptable Children, Research
Brief no. 3, March 1995).
Gelles, Richard. 1996. The Book of David: How Preserving
Children Can Cost Children's Lives (New York: Basic Books,
1996).
Goldsmith, Heidi. 1995. Residential Education: An Option
for America's Youth (Hershey, Pa.: Milton Hershey School).
Goldstein, Howard. 1996. The Home on Gorham Street and the
Voices of Its Children (Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama
Press).
Matlick, Justin. 1997. Fifteen Years of Failure: An
Assessment of California's Child Welfare System (San Francisco:
Pacific Research Institute, March).
McKenzie, Richard B. Rethinking Orphanages for the 21st
Century (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1998).
Pelton, See L. 1989. For Reasons of Poverty: A Critical
Analysis of the Public Child Welfare System in the United
States. (New York: Praeger)
Sedlak, Andrea J. and Diane D. Broadhurst. 1996. The Third
National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect: Final
Report (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services, National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect,
September).
Seita, John, Martin Mitchell, and Christi Tobin. 1996. In
Whose Best Interest: One Child's Odyssey, A Nation's
Responsibility (Elizabethtown, Penn.: Continental Press).
TataraT. n.d. Characteristics of Children in Substitute and
Adoptive Care (Washington, D.C.: Voluntary Cooperative
Information System, American Public Welfare Association).
U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect. 1993. Child
Abuse and Neglect: First Steps in Response to a National
Emergency: 1990 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services).
Zmora, Nurith. 1994. Orphanages Reconsidered: Child Care
Institutions in Progressive Era Baltimore (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press)
References
Adoption Promotion Act of 1997, H.R. 867, 105th Cong., 1st
Sess. (April 28, 1997) 105-77 (as found on the web: http://
thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c105:h.r.867).
Batten, Taylor. 1997. ``Child Safety Tops Family in Senate
Vote,'' Charlotte Observer (July 30).
Beker, Jerome and Douglas Magnuson. 1996. Residential
Education as an Option for At-Risk Youth (New York: Haworth
Press).
Bevan, Carole Statuto. 1996. Foster Care: Too Much, Too
Little, Too Early, Too Late (Washington, D.C.: National Council
for Adoption, 1996).
A Challenge to the Nation: Safe and Permanent Homes for
Children. 1997. A report to President William Clinton on
adoption reform (Alexandria, VA: SOS Children's Villages-USA,
Inc., February 6), p. 3.
Children's Bureau. 1995. Orphanage Background Materials
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services, May, duplicated).
Cmiel, Kenneth. 1995. A Home of a Different Kind: One
Chicago Orphanage and the Tangle of Child Welfare (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press)
Craig, Conna. 1995. ``What I Need Is a Mom,'' Policy
Review, Summer, pp. 41-49.
Encyclopedia of Social Work. 1987. 18th ed., Vol. 1 (Silver
Spring, Md: National Association of Social Workers).
Fagan, Patrick and Dorothy B. Hanks. 1997. ``The Child
Abuse Crisis: The Disintegration of Marriage, Family, and the
American Community,'' Backgrounder (Washington, D.C.: Heritage
Foundation, May 15).
Ford, Mary and Joe Kroll. 1995. There Is a Better Way:
Family-Based Alternatives to Institutional Care (Washington,
D.C.: North American Council on Adoptable Children, Research
Brief no. 3, March 1995).
Gelles, Richard. 1996. The Book of David: How Preserving
Children Can Cost Children's Lives (New York: Basic Books,
1996).
Goldsmith, Heidi. 1995. Residential Education: An Option
for America's Youth (Hershey, Pa.: Milton Hershey School).
Goldstein, Howard. 1996. The Home on Gorham Street and the
Voices of Its Children (Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama
Press).
Matlick, Justin. 1997. Fifteen Years of Failure: An
Assessment of California's Child Welfare System (San Francisco:
Pacific Research Institute, March).
McKenzie, Richard B. Rethinking Orphanages for the 21st
Century (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1998).
Pelton, See L. 1989. For Reasons of Poverty: A Critical
Analysis of the Public Child Welfare System in the United
States. (New York: Praeger)
Sedlak, Andrea J. and Diane D. Broadhurst. 1996. The Third
National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect: Final
Report (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services, National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect,
September).
Seita, John, Martin Mitchell, and Christi Tobin. 1996. In
Whose Best Interest: One Child's Odyssey, A Nation's
Responsibility (Elizabethtown, Penn.: Continental Press).
TataraT. n.d. Characteristics of Children in Substitute and
Adoptive Care (Washington, D.C.: Voluntary Cooperative
Information System, American Public Welfare Association).
U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect. 1993. Child
Abuse and Neglect: First Steps in Response to a National
Emergency: 1990 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services).
Zmora, Nurith. 1994. Orphanages Reconsidered: Child Care
Institutions in Progressive Era Baltimore (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press)
Appendix
Rethinking Orphanages for the 21st Century
A Symposium in Search of Reforms for the Nation's Child-Welfare System
Newport Beach, California
June 6-8, 1997
List of Symposium Attendees and Observers
Ms. Melissa Beall
Office of Congressman Todd Tiahrt
428 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-6216 Fax 225-3489
[email protected]
Dr. Cassie Bevan
Ways and Means Committee
B317 Rayburn House Office Building
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, D.C. 20515
(202) 225-1025 Fax: 225-9480
[email protected]
Mr. Dennis Braziel, Director
Group and Residential Care
Child Welfare League of America
440 1st Street, NW
Washington, DC 20001-2028
(202) 942-0314 Fax: 638-4004
[email protected]
Mr. Robert Chitister
Idea Channel
10539 Edinboro Rd.
McKean, PA 16426
(814) 476-7721 Fax: 476-1283
[email protected]
Ms. Conna Craig, President
Institute for Children, Inc.
18 Brattle Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
(617) 491-4614 Fax: 491-4673
[email protected]
Professor Michael DeBow
Cumberland Law School
Samford University
Birmingham, AL 35229
(205) 870-2434 Fax: 970-2587
[email protected]
Dr. Glenn Ellmers, Research Fellow
The Claremont Institute for the Study of
Statesmanship and Political Philosophy
250 First Street, Suite 330
Claremont, CA 91711
(909) 621-6825 Fax: 626-8724
[email protected]
Professor Richard Gelles
Family Violence Research Program
University of Rhode Island
509A Chafee Social Science Center
Kingston, RI 02881
Phone/Fax: (401) 792-4138
[email protected]
Ms. Heidi Goldsmith, Executive Director
International Center for Residential Education 3726
Conn. Avenue, NW, #109
Washington, DC 20008
(202) 966-4304 Fax: 244-0820
[email protected]
Mr. Derek Herbert
Institute for Children
18 Brattle Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
(617) 491-4691Fax (617) 491-4673
[email protected]
Ms. Carolyn Hicks
Legislative Director
Office of Congressman Dan Burton
2185 Rayburn House Office Building
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, D.C. 200515
(202) 225-2276 Fax: 225--0016
[email protected]
Mr. James Jones
Milton Hershey School
Founders Hall--Box 830
Hershey, PA 17033
(717) 520-2445 FAX: 520-2444
[email protected]
The Honorable Kathleen Kearney
Circuit Judge, 17th Circuit of Florida
Broward County Courthouse
201 SE 6th Street
Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301
(954) 831-7093 Fax: 831-5572
[email protected]
Professor Dwight Lee
Department of Economics
University of Georgia
Athens, GA 30602
(706) 542-3970 Fax: 542-4144
[email protected]
Dr. Allen Leland
20/20/20 Project, Lutheran Church
90 Faculty Street
Thousand Oaks, CA 91360
(805) 492-1121
Mr. Justine Matlick, Senior Researcher
Pacific Research Institute
755 Sansome Street, Suite 450
San Francisco, CA 94111
(415) 989-0833 Fax: 989-2411
[email protected]
Ms. Karen McKenzie
3 Owen court
Irvine, CA 92612
(714) 854-7156
[email protected]
Professor Richard McKenzie
Symposium Organizer
Graduate School of Management
University of California, Irvine
Irvine, CA 92717-3125
O: (714) 824-2604 H: 854-7156 Fax: 824-8469
[email protected]
Professor Douglas Magnuson
College of Street Catherine
Project on Vocation, Work, and Youth Development Box 4165
2004 Randolph Avenue
Phone: (612) 690-8718 Fax: 690-6024
St. Paul, MN 55105
[email protected]
Dr. Richard Pierce
Dean of Community Life
Milton Hershey School
Hershey, PA 17033
(717) 520-2061 Fax: 520-2068
[email protected]
Mr. Robert Stansel, President
Barium Springs Home for Children
PO Box 1
Barium Springs, NC 28010-0001
(704) 872-4257 Fax: 838-1541
Mr. Bernie Stumbras, President
SOS Villages, USA
1906 Capital Avenue
Madison, WI 53705
(608) 238-4584 Fax: 238-4611
[email protected]
Mr. Donald Verleur, CEO
Olive Crest
2130 E. Fourth Street, Suite 200
Santa Ana, CA 92705
(714) 543-5437 ext. 115 Fax: 543-5463
[email protected]
Mr. David Villiotti
Executive Director
Nashua Children's Association
125 Amherst Street
Nashua, NH 03060-2043
(603) 883-3851 Fax: 883-5925
Mr. John Walters, President
Philanthropy Roundtable
1150 17th Street, NW, Suite 503
Washington, DC 20036
(202) 822-8333 822-8325
[email protected]
Dr. Delores Wardell
Licensed Clinical Psychologist
540 N. Golden Circle Drive, Suite 114
Santa Ana, CA 92705
(714) 558-0971 Fax: 550-0166
[email protected]
Ms. Margaret MacFarlane Wright
Attorney
A Professional Corporation
2472 Chambers Road, Suite 150
Tustin, California 92780
(714) 832-9440 Fax: 832-9545
[email protected]
Chairman Johnson. Joe Kroll, the executive director of the
North American Council on Adoptable Children.
STATEMENT OF JOE KROLL, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, NORTH AMERICAN
COUNCIL ON ADOPTABLE CHILDREN (NACAC), ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA
Mr. Kroll. Thank you, Mrs. Johnson. I apologize for
arriving late. I didn't travel as far as Mr. McKenzie, but
those red-eyes can knock you out sometimes.
I just wanted to do a quick followup to the good news that
was presented in April. We had a report from Hawaii just
yesterday on the number of adoptions in this country. It is now
up to over 8,800 above the baseline from last year. Hawaii went
from 85 to 300 in 1998, so that is quite a remarkable story.
I probably will get as emotional as my colleague by the end
of the presentation, because I too have been affected by
orphanages, but I will wait till the end to describe my
personal experience.
From my written testimony you will see statements by older
children, who had experiences with institutional or long-term
foster care, who cried out to be adopted; and I think we have
to remember those children. And I was concerned about the 87
percent that Mr. McKenzie mentioned who have never contemplated
adoption. Today, I don't believe that would happen because
children are aware of their options. We are doing more for
families who are adopting older children.
And I also wanted to report from our poster event that a
sibling group of five Native American children from South
Dakota were recently placed. These are tribal children and they
have been placed in a permanent home. They had many calls for
five children, ages 4 through 13. That is not a small sibling
group.
So I think that times are quite different than they were 40
or 60 years ago, or 70 years ago when my father spent time in
an orphanage.
Another thing that we know is that most of the children
that are adopted from the public child welfare system are
adopted through their foster families. Sixty-four percent of
children who were adopted in 1997 were adopted by foster
parents and another 14 percent by relatives. If the children
weren't placed in a family, they wouldn't have that opportunity
to be adopted by their foster family, and I think that is a
very important issue. It is one that I forgot to put in my
written testimony, which I wanted to emphasize today.
Also, if we look at the group of children who are preparing
to be adopted, 69 percent are under 5, and 91 percent are under
10. Obviously, families are what these children should be
eligible for. If we would choose an institutional setting, we
wouldn't find families.
When we look at some of the items in the testimony, I think
that we have to look at some of the outcomes that we have
discovered in the research, and when Newt Gingrich in 1994
called for orphanages, we did a paper countering the call for
orphanages. We looked at research on children who had been in
institutional care, as compared to a control group of children
who hadn't been in institutional care, and the children in
institutional care from the research findings did not fare as
well. That doesn't mean other studies haven't come along that
suggest they fare very well. I think the point is that we know
that children fare well in families.
I, too, had a strong work ethic, moral upbringing, a sense
of responsibility in my family. I was raised by a single mother
after my father died.
When we talk about the families who are adopting the older
kids, I think one of the things we have to look clearly at is
that the children who are being adopted today may be the very
children for whom a residential treatment facility is needed.
It is sometimes very difficult to get adopted children into
those facilities because of the way the IV-D child support
enforcement operates. States won't support families after they
have adopted. I think we could place more older children if we
said to the families, you will have support after the child is
adopted. I think that is a very important message that we have
to carry, and I think as the adoptions of children in the
country continue to increase, as they appear to be, even in
1999, that more support is needed for the families.
One of the fears that I have had over time is that as more
and more public agencies become bankrupt in the sense that they
cannot handle the children in their care, they will turn to an
institutional setting because someone can provide 50 beds when
it can't find 50 foster homes. In Sunday's paper in Minneapolis
it was noted that Ramsey County is desperately in need of
foster homes. I don't think the alternative to lack of foster
homes is institutional placements, but in some cases, it is
easier for administrators to choose that. We have to be very
careful to make sure that doesn't occur.
We also have to remember that today there are over 46,000
children in institutional placements, according to the AFCARS
data. I think it would be useful for the committee to ask why
they are there, what kind of placements they are in, ask some
hard questions before you start considering legislative
alternatives.
Finally, I did want to say that children who have grown up
in families take something with them forever. Even though my
father died when I was 9 years old, it was very clear to me
that he had made every effort possible to keep his family
together the way his mother had been unable to keep her family
together when his father died at a very young age, and he went
into an orphanage with his younger brother. My mother raised 4
children. She had the support of the family, and today, that
84-year-old uncle, who was in an orphanage with my father, is
like a father to our family. He never had children of his own,
but he is our father, and he is the only living relative on my
father's side of that generation, and he is like family; and it
is not something you can have if you graduate from an
institution and have no family to go back to.
My father made sure we stayed together. We have had family
forever, and it is something that carries over to our children
and our grandchildren, hopefully.
Thank you very much.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you very much, Mr. Kroll.
[The prepared statement follows:]
Statement of Joe Kroll, Executive Director, North American Council on
Adoptable Children (NACAC), St. Paul, Minnesota
Madam Chairman and Members of the Committee, I thank you
for this opportunity to appear before you today.
I am Joe Kroll, executive director of the North American
Council on Adoptable Children (NACAC). I also serve as the
adoption chairman of the National Foster Parents Association.
More importantly, I am a parent of two adult children, one by
birth and one by adoption.
NACAC represents adoptive parents and parent groups,
adoption agencies, adopted children, and most importantly the
110,000 special needs children waiting for families in the U.S.
For 25 years we have been involved at the local, state, and
national level as advocates for these children.
In this discussion we must listen to the voices of children
who have experienced institutional care. The following comments
are by David Forderer at the closing session of NACAC's annual
conference in Toronto in August 1986. David was a 16 year old
adopted youth confined to a wheelchair because of cerebral
palsy, but in no way confined in his perspective on life and
family.
There are 350,000 children in foster care in the United
States. Sixty thousand of them are legally free and waiting for
adoptive parents. Of all these kids in foster care, about
35,000 are in institutions.
We are not getting enough children out of institutions. We
have to get them out. Child caring institutions are NOT a
family.
Let me share an example. When my brother Nicky had to go
into an institution temporarily, we met a boy named Jonas.
Jonas was 13 and had cerebral palsy. He went into the
institution healthy. In a year and a half's time he went
downhill. He got thinner and thinner, sicker and sicker. My
brother was fortunate; he was able to come home. Jonas stayed.
My friend Jonas reached his 15th birthday in the institution
just before he died. He was an intelligent boy who never had
the opportunity to leave and to share a family and give that
family the chance to know what he could give. I know Jonas
would NOT have died if anyone understood adoption and kept him
out of that institution.
I want to issue you a challenge. I challenge social workers
and lawmakers to find out how many kids are really in
institutions and pass laws to put them in families, into
adoption. GET THEM OUT. Parents and prospective parents too,
GET THEM OUT.
As David said, ``Child caring institutions are NOT a
family.'' Even the best-run institutions are a poor substitute.
Do house parents, who turn over every year or so, and shift
workers provide the consistency of parents? The graduates of
foster care who lived in institutions have no home to return
to. Where do they go for Thanksgiving and Christmas? The
institution cafeteria. Who calls on their birthday? The third
shift worker?
Children should not be raised in institutions. Research
clearly demonstrates that institutions frequently have adverse
psychological effects that can impair people throughout their
lives. In addition to the psychological harm to children,
institutions are extremely expensive and create unnecessary
financial burdens for the community. Yearly care in an
institution costs at least four times as much as foster care
and six times as much as welfare payments.
Countering the Call for Institutional Care of Children
Given this information, why would anyone consider
institutional care alternatives to family care? Let me
summarize some arguments used to support the use of
institutional care and offer a response to each of them.
1. Some children are too disabled or so old that they cannot be
adopted.
NACAC's experience suggests that children with every
possible disability or age or history of the most severe abuse
have been adopted if parents receive an adequate level of
support. The following statement was written in 1999 by a young
man who spent more than a decade in foster care before finding
a permanent family.
Hello my name is Jim. Let me start off by saying that my
family is the most important thing to me. I would do anything
in the world for them. I say this because I know what it's like
to not have a real family.
I had lived in foster care from the time I was 4 years old
until I was adopted when I was 16 years old. In those 12 years
I moved 10 times and lived with many different families
including my biological family. But for some reason nobody
wanted to make me a part of their permanent family. We all know
that rejection is painful. But could you imagine how a kid
feels when a family rejects them? Not once or twice but many
times. Time after time.
As I grew older I became withdrawn with my emotions and I
didn't trust anyone. By the time I was 15, I had pretty much
given up hope of ever having a normal life which included a
family. I was doing poorly in school and didn't really have a
plan for my life. I figured if nobody else cared why should I.
Then something good finally happened to me. I met my mom and
dad. I could not believe somebody would actually want me as
part of their family especially since I was so old. It took a
long time for me to believe that there were actually good
people out there who did not want to hurt me.
I'm grateful that I have parents that were there for me. As a
young adult I've come to realize the importance of having a
family. I know that them being there has been instrumental in
my development as a productive adult and a caring person.
I'd like to finish by saying that everyone deserves a family
regardless of how old they are. Everyone deserves a family.
Jim's experience has been duplicated time and again by
``unadoptable'' children, who have cried out for parents and
have found one once someone believed they deserved a family.
2. Some children are so troubled that they cannot be raised in
family settings.
All children--birth, foster, and adopted who are in need of
residential treatment should receive adequate care. One reason
adoptive parents fear finalizing adoptions of emotional
troubled children is the failure of the state to guarantee
residential treatment for adopted children. Since some families
have gone bankrupt or been forced to dissolve the adoption in
order to obtain proper treatment, other families are afraid to
adopt. These children do not need to be condemned to a life of
institutionalization, as long as states guarantee support in
their adoption assistance agreements. The committee should
consider amending the Title IV-E Adoption Assistance program to
allow for federal reimbursement of residential treatment.
3. There are not enough foster and adoptive families to care
for all the children.
We all know that the demand for foster and adoptive
families exceeds the supply. If we are willing to invest more
than $50,000 per year to care for a child in institutional
care, could we not invest in finding and supporting families.
Through some perverted logic, the social welfare system is
willing to pay more money as children move emotionally and
geographically further from their families. Welfare costs less
than subsidized adoption or family foster care, which costs
less than group care, which costs less than residential
treatment. By the time children reach residential facilities
they are being parented by a business, not a family.
With resources, we can find the families children need. The
dramatic increases in adoption reported to this committee in
April are a testimony to the work of public and private
agencies which engage in targeted and community based
recruitment campaigns, offer post-adopt support, and raise
foster family reimbursement rates and adoption subsidies to
make parenting more attractive to middle class families who are
already successfully raising children.
4. Successful people have been raised in institutional care.
I'm sure you will hear stories of successful adults who
spent time in institutional settings. I am pleased that they
succeeded. However research suggests that outcomes for children
raised in institutions are not always positive.
In 1995, NACAC published here is a Better Way: Family-Based
Alternatives to Institutional Care as a response to calls for
orphanages by former Speaker Newt Gingrich and Governor Edgar
of Illinois. Our research showed the true effects of
institutionalization on children:
Institutionalized children are denied the
opportunity to form a consistent relationship with a caregiver
in their early years and are at serious risk for developmental
problems and long-term personality disorders.
Many insecurely attached, institutionalized
children lack empathy, seek attention in negative ways, exhibit
poor self-confidence, show indiscriminate affection toward
adults, are prone to noncompliance, and are more aggressive
than their non-institutionalized counterparts.
Insecurely attached children rebound from
adversity far less effectively than securely attached children.
With few exceptions, children reared in poor
quality institutions fail to sit, stand, walk, and talk by age
four.
Close examination reveals that even good
institutions harm young children, leave teens ill-prepared for
the outside world, and cost over three times more than a
permanent, loving family.
5. Institutional solutions are attractive to child welfare
administrators.
According to AFCARS data as of March 31, 1998, 31,200
foster children are living in group homes and 46,800 foster
children are living in institutions. Why do some social service
administrators and politicians prefer institutional solutions
for children in care? Because it is an easy way out of a
perplexing dilemma. Where does this tendency to institutional
solutions lead us?
For example, a county anticipates the need for 100 foster
care slots for teenagers, so it decides to license 50 family
foster care slots and contract 50 to a local institution. The
family slots cost $25 per day and the institutional slots cost
$200 per day. To guarantee the institutional slots, the county
contracts with an agency for 50 beds at $200 per day for 365
days at a total cost of $3.65 million dollars. The foster care
maintenance payments cost only $456,250 for the year. To make
matters worse, when a child is in need of placement, the
institutional slot is likely to be used first because the bed
is already paid for. An additional danger of this approach is
that these institutions become self perpetuating. Once an
institution is open, it is not likely to close. Once it is
full, it is easy for institution operators to build more
institutions to keep up with the demand for open beds.
6. Children are abused in family foster care.
Horror stories abound in the child welfare system. Children
returned to birth parents are murdered, children are sexually
abused in foster homes, state-operated institutions run
prostitution rings. Anyone promoting institutional care because
children are abused in foster homes must acknowledge similar
and worse abuses in institutions of all types.
Conclusion
As our mission clearly states, NACAC believes that every
child has the right to a permanent family. This right should
not be denied or compromised. Family is at the core of child
development and lifetime relationships.
It is clear--from the passage of the Adoption and Safe
Families Act of 1997 and the celebration of the dramatic
increase in adoptions of foster children in April--that this
committee cares deeply about children who need families. Why
would you now consider an option that condemns children to a
future without a family?
Chairman Johnson. Nan Dale, the president and chief
executive officer of the Children's Village, Dobbs Ferry, NY.
STATEMENT OF NAN DALE, PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER,
CHILDREN'S VILLAGE, DOBBS FERRY, NEW YORK
Ms. Dale. Thank you. I have been president and CEO of
Children's Village for the last 18 years, and during that time
there has been a significant shift. I would like to talk for a
minute about what some of that shift has been and whether, in
fact, we are in debate with one another about what we are
calling large group care facilities.
Children's Village runs a range of programs. We run foster
boarding homes, adoptions, group homes, independent living
programs, therapeutic foster homes, kinship foster homes, the
entire range of services; but in the minds of many, when you
think of Children's Village, you think of an orphanage, and we
are often asked if we are an orphanage.
We are not an orphanage. It is something we are rather
prickly about. The reason that we are so prickly about it is
because indeed we once were under the warm, fuzzy name of the
New York Juvenile Asylum, founded in 1851, but since that time
not only has the physical plant itself changed dramatically,
but the kinds of services that we provide to children and
families is vastly different from that which we provided when
we were indeed an orphanage. We have had to reinvent ourselves
as the kinds of children, who are referred to us, change
dramatically.
I would say, on the one hand, that we are closer to the
kind of school that Heidi Goldsmith describes as a boarding
school, albeit for very, very, very troubled kids, than we are
like an orphanage. We are also closer to being a children's
psychiatric hospital than we are to an orphanage. Indeed, we
are accredited by the Joint Commission of Health Care
Organizations in much the same way that a children's
psychiatric hospital is accredited; and the reason for that is
because the only kids--the only kids who are referred to us
these days are kids with serious and pervasive emotional and
behavioral problems.
It was just said that only 7 percent of the kids in the
Nation are sent to institutions. Well, if only 7 percent of a
very vulnerable population to begin with, the foster care
population, are being sent to residential treatment centers,
then you can imagine that that end of the spectrum is a very
troubled group of kids.
We are today, the sort of institutional descendants of
orphanages referred to as residential treatment centers, and I
underscore the word ``treatment.''
I would like to try to make five quick points in the 5
minutes allotted to me, now probably 4\1/2\ minutes. The first
is that the issues are indeed very complex, as has been said.
H.L. Mencken once said something I always thought was very
important, which is that to every complex problem there is a
solution that is simple, elegant and wrong. There is no simple
solution to this. Neither adoption nor orphanages nor boarding
schools nor kinship foster homes is the answer because the
second point is that we need the full array of services. There
is no one-size-fits-all, and if we skimp on any of these, we
will have a system that doesn't work, and we have been skimping
on what exists.
My third point is that we need to try to expand our
thinking about what permanency means, and I think that is some
of what you have been hearing from the other panelists. We need
to include the notion that subjecting children to the fewest
possible substitute care placements should be a critical
consideration. Ideally, permanency should mean a permanent home
in a family, whether that is biological, kinship or adoption,
but for the two subsets of kids that I just mentioned--those
with serious emotional problems and behavioral problems--a
boarding school or residential treatment center, some form of
long-term group care is the best option, and there is evidence
to prove that it is a good option that works well.
I would like to talk, if I can, toward the end, if there is
time, about who exactly these kids are; but let me say just
very briefly that these are kids who have been so traumatized
in their early life that they can't tolerate the intimacy of a
family, and they are the kids who behave in foster homes in
ways that are so frightening to most foster parents that they
say, get this kid out of my home. And as was just said, we at
Children's Village regularly see kids who have been in 5 and 10
and 15 foster homes.
My personal record is 23 homes, if you include kinship
homes, foster home, back to grandma, back to a foster home, to
an aunt, back to a foster home, to a hospital, back to foster
home, to another hospital, finally to Children's Village 23
placements later. That child, by the way, was 10 years old, and
yes, there are 10-year-olds and there are 5-year-olds whose
conduct has become so frightening that even they cannot be
adopted.
So the next question is what works for such kids, and I
know I have only a minute left, if that, but let me just tell
you very quickly that in a study we just completed of one of
our programs, called the WAY program, which is fundamentally an
independent living program--we are grateful to the Committee
for the work that you have done on independent living--we
looked at a group of our kids who had left Children's Village
in a 5-year period who are now all between the ages of 21 and
30, and what is unique about this study from the other studies
is that these were all, 100 percent of them, were the kids who
are the most severe emotionally- and behaviorally-impaired
kids; and even with those kids, we achieved 80 percent high
school graduation rates which compares to--well, I won't give
you the comparison since the light is on--but 80 percent of
those kids also were working full-time with a mean average
salary of $23,000, and if you looked at arrests for criminal
behavior, only 8 percent of them had been arrested, this from
that tiny percent of severely disturbed kids.
So, in conclusion, it is clear that there is a need for
residential services but not just for kids who are simply
disadvantaged but for the super at-risk kids who one of my
colleagues referred to as the ``frequent fliers.'' we need to
do more and we need to do better for them, and the existing
resources are not meeting the needs even of this very, very
needy population.
Thank you.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you very much, Ms. Dale.
[The prepared statement follows:]
Statement of Nan Dale, President and Chief Executive Officer,
Children's Village, Dobbs Ferry, New York
My name is Nan Dale and, for nearly two decades, I have had
the privilege of serving as President and CEO of The Children's
Village, one of the nation's oldest child welfare agencies. The
Children's Village is a member of the Child Welfare League of
America (CWLA) and I am a member of the CWLA Board of Directors
and I chair its National Advisory Council of Executives. My
testimony today is intended to look broadly at the child
welfare system of care for children--at how best we can achieve
our collective aspiration of providing all children with a
decent life--and, to the extent possible, with ``permanency.''
Given the emphasis of the hearings on examining the role of
adoption and of orphanages as permanent placements, I will
include some critique of these issues in my comments.
Most people associate the name ``Children's Village'' with
being an orphanage. It is not an orphanage. We're very prickly
about that. Like many of the large group care facilities, we
once were an orphanage. In 1851 we were known by the warm,
fuzzy name of the New York Juvenile Asylum. Well over 1,000
children lived in a large building in the city, sleeping in row
after row of metal beds, eating in a cavernous cafeteria,
working, and attending school at the asylum. Then, at the turn
of the century, the Asylum Board bought 250 acres north of the
city and built a small town, changed the name to Children's
Village, moved the children into houses in small neighborhoods
around a central quad, constructed a school, recreation
facilities and hired mental health specialists. They proudly
pioneered in creating a therapeutic community--a safe,
predictable, stimulating environment with an emphasis on
treatment services.
Today, Children's Village operates as a residential
treatment center (RTC), one among many of the institutional
descendents of orphanages. Our RTC is the largest such child
welfare institution in the United States. It is not the only
program we run--in fact we provide a full continuum of child
welfare and mental health services--preventive, foster/adoptive
(including therapeutic and kinship foster homes), group homes
and residential treatment. But, in the minds of many,
Children's Village is synonymous with orphanage. There is, in
fact, an enormous difference--a difference that is driven by
the necessity of re-inventing ourselves over the last several
decades to serve the highly disturbed and immensely difficult
children and adolescents who are referred to us. We see those
youngsters with serious emotional and behavioral problems. Our
RTC, like most, functions more like a boarding school than an
orphanage--more like a children's psychiatric hospital than an
orphanage. Essentially, it is a highly structured, heavily
supervised boarding school with intense treatment services for
children and their families. Most importantly, it is very, very
successful in working with a shockingly troubled and even
dangerous population of kids. Our RTC is accredited by the
Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations
(JCAHO), as is a children's psychiatric hospital. No one
requires that RTCs be accredited, an issue I'd like to return
to later.
I'd like to make 5 overarching points and then to present
some general comments and facts that bear on the question of
whether or not we should be ``bringing back the orphanage.''
First, the five (5) overarching points:
The issues are complex.
We need a full array of services.
We need to expand our thinking about what
``permanency'' means.
There are some children who do best in long-term
residential placements--especially seriously mentally ill
children and those with early, dangerous criminal patterns of
behavior.
There is strong evidence that residential group
care works well for that population.
I will take each of these in turn:
(1) The issues are complex--I agree with H.L. Mencken, who
said that, ``For every complex problem there is a solution that
is simple, elegant and wrong.'' Any one size fits all solution
is doomed to failure. The idea that all kids are adoptable or
that bringing back orphanages will solve our problems is,
simply put, ``wrong.''
(2) We need a full array of services for children--and for
families. We need preventive services to help preserve
families; we need foster families and supports for kinship
family care; we need strong adoption services; and we need
several different kinds of group care facilities (group homes,
residential treatment, supervised apartments, etc.), along with
after care and independent living services. If we skimp on any
of these, we will have a system that doesn't work. We have been
skimping.
(3) We need to expand our thinking about what permanency
means and include the notion that subjecting children to the
fewest possible substitute care placements should be a critical
consideration. Ideally, permanency should mean a permanent home
in a family (biological, kinship or adoptive), but for a sub-
set of kids in the child welfare system permanency is best
achieved by long term care in a group setting--a boarding
school or residential treatment center (RTC). And, let's face
it, most RTCs function like boarding schools--albeit schools
for very troubled kids from mostly poor families.
(4) Two categories of kids in the child welfare system
should be provided with long term residential care as the best
permanency plan--those with multiple family placement failures
who evidence severe mental health problems or those with
serious anti-social, criminal behaviors. These are the kids who
are repeatedly placed and replaced in foster homes and/or
psychiatric hospitals--they are the ``frequent fliers''--the
kids who require an enormous amount of child welfare, juvenile
justice and mental health resources.
These are kids who have been so traumatized by their early
life experiences that they cannot tolerate the intimacy of
family living, at least not until they get some long term
treatment in an environment that is highly structured and in
which they feel safe. These kids behave in ways that are so
scary to foster families that they kick them out again and
again. Not uncommonly they have numerous failed placements and/
or have been repeatedly hospitalized. They are not candidates
for adoption. It doesn't work for them--in too many instances
they've been compelled to go to a pre-adoptive home, only to
experience yet another placement failure. At Children's Village
(CV) we've had kids come to us after 10, 15, or more
placements. Our record is a boy who had 23 failed prior
placements (including back and forth to various kin and in and
out of the hospital). He was 10 years old. One kid who finally
got to CV, refused to unpack--that is, he refused to unpack the
few clothes he had from the green garbage bag the city had
given him for his belongings. ``Why should I unpack,'' he said,
``you'll be sending me somewhere else soon.''
Before describing these kids in greater detail, let me make
my fifth major point.
(5) There is strong evidence that residential group care
works well for very troubled youth. Over the last 15 years, we
have been researching one of our programs--the WAY Program, an
Independent Living Program, with a unique, long-term after care
component. WAY is targeted at our older youth transitioning out
of the RTC. The study examined the outcomes for those in the
program who left the RTC between 1989 and 1995, all of whom
were between the ages of 21 and 30 at the time of the study.
These youth were nearly all from New York City's most
impoverished communities, all had been special education
students when they came to CV, 66% were African American; 27%
were Hispanic--all had some constellation of the
characteristics I've just described.
High school graduation rates are generally viewed as the
single best predictor of adult success. Research showed that
80% of the RTC kids who had been in the WAY Program had
graduated high school, earned a GED or were still in school.
These results are dramatically better than graduation
statistics on comparable groups.
High School Completion Rates:
Children living below poverty level: 53%
New York City special education students: 61%
New York City Hispanic students: 64%
New York City African American students: 68%
WAY participants: 80% (all former RTC residents)
Further, 80% of WAY alumni studied were employed with mean
earnings for full-time workers of $23,000. The study also
checked criminal arrest records of alumni and found that only
8% had been arrested for violent crimes since age 21. On
average, these kids were in our RTC just over 4 years and
roughly half were then able to return to live with a family
member--the others moved on to live in one of our group homes.
Let me describe for you in slightly more detail the two
kinds of children who, I believe, should be provided with a
different kind of ``permanency plan.'' These kids need a plan
that recognizes their need for a stable, long-term placement
and that recognizes that they may never be able to live in a
permanent family. We don't want to automatically dismiss the
option of permanency with a family. However, we must not
presume that permanency with a family is the only, or the right
option. For these very troubled young people, graduating from a
group residential facility and becoming a productive adult
without serious problems--mental health or criminal--is a good
outcome. For many, family contacts have been maintained while
they have been in care at the same time that the youngster has
come to accept that his family is not available to him on a
permanent basis. He is not an orphan. He is a graduate of an
RTC--cum-Boarding School. Can we not find a way to see this as
``success,'' not a failure of permanency planning--both for the
child welfare community and for the individual children who
work so hard to overcome such overwhelming odds?
Youth with severe mental health problems: With the advent
of Managed Care and the concomitant near elimination of long
term psychiatric hospitalizations, the child welfare system is
serving alarming numbers of serious emotionally disturbed
children and adolescents. Funding from the state departments of
mental health have not made the same journey across systems.
More importantly, RTCs, the best-equipped programs to serve
these kids, have not been given the freedom to develop new
models of care for these kids.
Some of these children could be kept at home or prevented
from a record of foster home failures if we could provide a
combination of intensive, community-based services, with the
back up of using RTCs as short-term treatment options for the
whole family. Funding among and between systems must be
flexible. Mentally ill children in the foster care system must
be able to access services and resources under federal and
state mental health programs.
Who are they? They are kids who have been
chronically and repeatedly abused or neglected--many have been
sexually abused. At CV, there is evidence that nearly half the
boys in our care have been sexually abused. Some have not been
abused but have neurological and bio-chemical pre-dispositions
to mental illness--and, often have been cared for under chaotic
circumstances by a family member with serious mental illness or
substance abuse problems. These children are nearly always far
behind (or barely functional) in school, they have virtually no
age-appropriate social skills. They have had no childhood. They
are filled with despair--and, sometimes, with rage. About half
have no viable family member willing or able to care for them;
the other half do. With help and support, these families are
eager to be good parents. Not all kids get into this kind of
condition because of inadequate or dysfunctional families--
sometimes it's quite enough to be living in a community of
violence, with decrepit schools, no jobs and drugs everywhere
you turn.
What do they do? Mostly, they are terribly
destructive to themselves and to others. At the mild end of the
spectrum, they are so despondent, disoriented and distracted
that they cannot learn. They don't know how to play or to ask
for help. They wake up screaming at night, they wet or soil
themselves--though they are long past the age that such
behavior is accepted in the real world. They are volatile and
seem to have little or no control over their impulses. They are
wary of everyone--especially adults. The more seriously
troubled kids are suicidal or seriously self injurious. One boy
we had would stick pins in his scalp. Some eat objects like
batteries and tacks and suck their skin raw. Some set fires,
hear voices telling them to do bad things, act out in sexually
inappropriate ways, torture animals, and lash out at others at
the slightest provocation.
Youth with a history of serious anti-social, delinquent
behaviors: David Fanshel, whose work inspired the permanency
planning revolution, also identified a ``second stream'' of
children in child welfare, which he says should not be subject
to the same rules. These kids, he estimates, represent about a
quarter of the children in child welfare. For them the goal
should be to ``forestall the evolution of full-blown deviant
careers,'' not to find them permanent homes quickly.
Who are they? They are often kids who have been
out on the streets and out of school for a long time, living by
their wits or involved with a gang. Many regularly use drugs
and alcohol--some are addicted. They often have a string of
juvenile arrests for both petty and serious crimes. They may
have been used and abused sexually (we've had kids who had been
sold into pornography from the time they were babies--one boy
had been dressed by his mother as a girl and sold to a porno
ring). They've learned to steal and to con at an early age and
they've been rehearsing those skills for many years before they
come to us.
What do they do? Sometimes they are
indistinguishable from the group I've just described in that
they often show tremendous depression but more of their actions
are focused outward, at others. They steal, lie, and stalk
victims. They hurt people. Some seem to have lost the ability
to feel empathy. All seem to see the world as a hostile place
and to behave in ways that reinforce their alienation from it.
Now, here's the most shocking news of all. These kids are
kids. They are afraid of the dark, afraid of themselves, and
afraid of the world that has offered them so little protection
and help. Underneath the despair and the rage there is a child
who desperately wants our help. They are not all that difficult
to reach or to turn around. But it takes time and it takes
money. And, it requires that we take them out of the revolving
door of foster home placement and replacement . . . out of the
adoption failure syndrome . . . and provide them with a sense
of permanency through long-term group care.
Are Orphanages the Answer?
The question of whether or not to bring back orphanages has
been lurking in the wings of child welfare for a least a
decade. Unfortunately, people on both sides of the debate frame
their arguments in such extreme terms that the best interests
of children are being sacrificed to the controversy. If there
is to be a thoughtful debate on the issues, we need to hear
what each side is not saying.
On the one hand, most child welfare professionals--people
like myself--cannot even bring ourselves to say the O-word, at
least not in public. To us, bringing back the orphanage means
dropping down a rung on the evolutionary ladder. But, here's
what we're not saying. We are not saying that group care
facilities are bad for kids or that no child should ever live
in an institutional setting. We are saying that we are mighty
skeptical because what we really think is that society is
looking for easy, cheap solutions to immensely complex issues.
We believe that if orphanages are brought back, no matter what
you call them--they will be so poorly funded, like all other
child welfare services, that we'll be back to talking about
kids sleeping in rows of metal bunks, eating mush, and the
like. Therefore, we reject out of hand any discussion about
orphanages or any variation on the theme.
Most of us believe that the notion of orphanages is a cop
out--a way of avoiding fixing neighborhoods and schools so that
low income families can rear their own children in safe,
thriving communities. Also, most child welfare professionals
genuinely believe that foster homes (with their potential to
become adoptive homes) are the best option for most children
who must be removed from their families and cannot be placed in
a kinship foster family home. We further believe that only
those children who cannot be served in foster or kinship homes
belong in residential treatment centers. Most of us believe
that if the entire array of child welfare services--from
preventive services to foster family and kinship care to
residential group care were better funded, there would be no
need to talk about orphanages.
So, on one side of the debate, you have child welfare
professionals saying ``before you do anything as drastic as
bringing back the orphanage, why not fund what you have
properly so that we can do our jobs really well--then you won't
need orphanages.'' Our fear of a return to the bad old days is
so great that we are unwilling to deal with the arithmetical
fact that, in some areas of the country, there are simply not
enough willing, able foster parents. Something must be done.
On the other side, you have people who say, ``the child
welfare system is broken beyond repair . . . there aren't
enough decent foster homes to go around . . . let's bring back
the orphanage.'' What proponents of orphanages are not saying
is that orphanages are the best option. Rather, they are saying
that ``a good orphanage is better than a bad home''--a phrase
that was much bandied about at the turn of the century when
orphanages were in their heyday. But, when you really press
most of the proponents of orphanages, what they are really
describing is what might better be called ``boarding
schools''--facilities where kids from really horrible home
situations--or no home situation at all--can live safely and
get a good education, discipline, supervision and strong moral
teaching.
What they are not saying is that this is cheap. To run a
responsible ``orphanage,'' with a good school, in today's
economy is expensive. And, what they are not saying is that
kids prefer orphanages. They, too, acknowledge that what most
children, even those from really abusive homes, want most is
``parents.'' What they are saying is that we've run out of
parents--and, that they are skeptical, at best, that kinship
families can fill the void.
If we are going to have a serious, realistic public debate,
some of us will all have to overcome our reflexive revulsion to
the word ``orphanage'' and others will need to give up their
off-handed rejection of the child welfare system. We need to
examine fairly and honestly what it is we believe kids need and
whether we can fund and implement the best options. To do so,
I'd like to divide the rest of these comments into two
categories:
(1) What are the real costs, practical considerations and
options to rear productive citizens?
(2) Can existing child welfare services and constructs be
strengthened or better targeted to meet the need?
What are the costs, practical considerations and options?
Most of those calling for bringing back the orphanages are
talking about removing children from impoverished, high-risk
communities and families considered unhealthy for children.
Without debating who gets to decide what is ``unhealthy,''
let's assume that \1/4\ of the children receiving TANF funds
would be so designated--or some 1,372,296 children (as of 9/
97), not counting the current 500,000 already in the child
welfare system.
To provide around-the-clock care to children costs, at an
absolute minimum, $100 a day (not counting construction of the
facilities, schooling, medical or mental health care)--$36,000
a year per child or $49.3 billion to cover the cost of basic
care for \1/4\ of those on TANF. By comparison, the cost of
keeping a child in a foster home is roughly $25.00 a day, under
$10,000 a year.
If one of the reasons for considering orphanages over
foster homes is that there are not enough good foster families,
there are other options worth considering. When there is a
market shortage of needed personnel in a particular field,
salaries go up and training programs are created to lure people
to the profession. Nothing comparable has happened in the
foster parent profession. In 1996, the average monthly board
rate paid to a foster parent was $431 per month. Yet, the USDA
Report on Expenditures on Children by Families in 1998
estimates $686.67 to $778.33 per month to cover the expenses of
a child in a middle income family. Would it not be worth
experimenting with increasing the reimbursement to foster
families and providing training and other incentives to
encourage more good people to pursue foster parenting as a full
time vocation. If it worked, the savings would be enormous and
kids would be able to experience family living as well as the
possibility of adoption if they were not able to return to
family in the long run.
Another option worth considering is the real boarding
school model--possibly as a 5 day a week program. I have mixed
feelings about this option, as I do about Charter Schools. We
need to fix public schools so that they provide a good
education to all children in a community but, like many people,
I have grown impatient with those willing to sacrifice another
generation of children while they wait in crumbling buildings
for someone to fix that little problem. Providing
underprivileged kids with boarding schools is a terrific idea
but it is not cheap. There is the potential to combine pots of
money--education and social services--in a way that can make it
cost effective. One thing for sure is that in terms of kid's
self image, it's a whole lot more acceptable to say you're
going away to private school than that you're living in a
orphanage. This is not small consideration. Boarding schools
for high-risk kids is a terrific way to support families on the
edge and to turn around a generation of under-educated kids.
When people come to visit Children's Village, their most
frequent observation is that it looks and feels like a private
boarding school. I've even had government officials say to me,
``We ought to close those institutions and open more places
like this.'' Then, I explain we are an institution, by
government designation. But, in every way that matters, we
function like a boarding school, albeit one for extremely
troubled kids--and, because our students are so severely
troubled, it is a school with intense staff supervision, small
classes and intensive mental health and medical treatment
services. As I've already mentioned, any private school for
disadvantaged kids would be proud of our school success. But,
what they don't want to hear is that such success comes at a
high cost, some $50,000 a year, without counting the school
costs.
There are those who argue that the cost to run an
orphanage-like program is much lower than the $100 a day I've
estimated. I don't believe it. The model they are talking about
involves hiring ``moms and pops'' to care for kids and using
the kids to do much of the work at the facility. I don't
believe such a model is realistic today, except on a very small
scale, for two reasons. First, if the ``mom and pop'' you hired
don't work out and you need to fire them, it is like firing the
kids' parents--and hitting the kid in the gut with yet another
traumatic loss. I used to run such programs but stopped because
they rarely work for long. Mom and Pop teams burn out quickly
and they have a nasty habit of wanting to go to sleep at night.
That brings me to the second reason this cheaper model rarely
works. Kids--especially adolescents--need awake care at night.
The kids, even the less troubled ones, often have night
terrors, and some kids victimize others at night. With a house
full of adolescents, someone always is out past curfew, needs
hand-holding and the like.
My experience is that having a core group of approximately
6 people per home, around the clock, works best. The kids
become attached but if one person leaves or is fired, their
world doesn't collapse. Facilities must be open 24 hours a day,
7 days a week. When you factor in social work services to work
with the family, to maintain sibling contacts and to ensure
appropriate case planning plus food, clothing, recreation and
other essentials, it costs over $100 a day.
Further, the days of teaching kids to farm or to be a
cobbler and then placing them in apprentice positions are long
gone. We need to teach them computer skills and how to use high
tech equipment, along with work ethics, if they are to have any
real chance of success in their future.
There are two other practical considerations:
(a) Site-ing is an enormous barrier. Finding available
sites for large facilities or even group homes, and getting
local zoning board approval, is extremely difficult and
lengthy--as in years and years of work. NIMBY (Not In My Back
Yard) is alive and well. It is always an ugly and lengthy
battle to get all the required permissions to open even one
group home for 6-10 kids. I've been turned down for ideal
locations. I've often tried to imagine the scene that would
ensue if I tried to open Children's Village today in the small,
picturesque town we're in--with our 40 buildings and 150
acres--and 325 seriously troubled, inner city kids. It wouldn't
happen. I'd lose. No doubt about it.
(b) Assuming land or facilities are acquired, who will pay
the construction or renovation costs? Currently, most states do
not provide capital funding for facility renovations, much less
construction. At Children's Village, our 100 year old buildings
were falling apart because there was no mechanism for acquiring
public funding for restoration and major repairs. Ultimately,
we sold land, took out loans and raised private dollars to
acquire the $23 million needed just to repair the 21 houses in
which some 300 children reside. Where would the funding come
from for orphanages? One proposal being whispered about is to
convert defunct military bases to orphanages. Now there's a
step forward. What makes places like Children's Village work is
that the environment is home-like and children live in as close
to a family like environment as any institution can provide.
Most of the large residential facilities opened long ago, when
there was land near to the urban areas. It has been a happy
coincidence that as agencies have recognized the need to
maintain family contacts, most residential facilities are
within easy transportation reach for regular visiting. Building
such facilities today would be astronomical. If they could be
built at all, the locations would likely be far from family
contacts. Kids need to maintain those contacts even when they
are unable to live with their family--there are costs
associated with maintaining these contacts.
Can existing child welfare services and constructs be
strengthened or better targeted to meet the need? Broadly
speaking, the child welfare system needs to be far more
adequately funded to prevent the need for out of home care of
any kind. Too many families are struggling to rear their
children in communities that resemble war zones, with
inadequate and under-funded schools, little or no health care,
lack of adequate and affordable housing and lack of community
recreation or work options. That families find it nearly
impossible to reverse the odds and make a solid future for
themselves and their children should come as no surprise to
anyone.
Removing children from homes where they are not being
abused and neglected is no solution to the problems that plague
America's families. Rather, it is an abdication of our
responsibility. To renege on the future for entire communities
by pouring money into orphanages--or boarding schools--instead
of providing decent neighborhood schools, affordable housing
and general preventive counseling services is unjust.
We already have a system for removing children from their
families who have been abused or neglected. The major problem
with child welfare is that as the needs of kids have changed
and as their problems have been made all the more serious with
the three headed monster of Crack, Homelessness and AIDS at
their doorstep, the system has not kept pace. There has been a
steady erosion of available resources.
The entire array of child welfare services is needed--along
with some new approaches--so that we can tailor the help to the
needs of individual families and children. What follows are
some specific suggestions on how existing services can be
strengthened followed by two new, proposed approaches to using
group care differently, no matter what you call it. First, the
overarching recommendations:
Every community must be expected to provide the
full array of services: prevention, foster care, kinship care,
boarding homes care, adoption, residential treatment, group
homes (and related community support programs), and independent
living services. These must be adequately funded.
The federal payments to states through the Title IV-
E Foster Care and Adoption Assistance must not be capped. It
must be maintained as an open-ended entitlement.
Congress should pass this year, the Foster Care
Independence Act, H.R. 1802, which doubles the federal funding
for the Title IV-E Independent Living Program.
Federal funds for prevention should be drastically
increased. The Adoption and Safe Families Act reauthorized and
made some increases in funding for the Promoting Safe and
Stable Families Program (Title IV-B, Subpart 2) which states
use to provide services to children and families so that
children will not need to be placed in foster care.
Congress should provide the authorized level of
funding of $325 million for the Title IV-B Child Welfare
Services Program and $2.38 billion for the Title XX Social
Services Block Grant. These two programs provide major sources
of discretionary funding for states to protect and care for
abused and neglected children.
After-care services must be mandated. The work of
this committee on the Independent Living bill was magnificent
and I thank you. The only thing missing, in my opinion, was the
expectation that every child leave care with long-term after
care services, especially with the help of a paid professional
mentor. Our own research bears out the importance--and the cost
effectiveness--of such a model. This can't be left to the
states--they're not doing it. You must make it happen.
Child welfare services in general, and residential
treatment centers in particular, must be required to meet
certain national standards and be accredited. We would not
think of sending our own child to a hospital that wasn't
accredited but we expect poor people to send their children to
facilities that aren't. This is an easy, low cost improvement.
We need increased resources in order to make
better initial assessments so that children are quickly placed
into the most appropriate service. Kids shouldn't have to fail
to get to residential treatment. Everywhere there are long
waiting lists of extremely troubled youth waiting too long for
the help they need. Now, while they wait, they bounce from home
to home, often ending up on the streets, further victimized, or
in the criminal justice system, having committed some heinous
crime. To meet the needs of these children and young people,
residential services that can respond to their complex problems
must be increased.
New approaches are needed to address the needs of the two
specific, poorly served populations mentioned above: the youth
in the child welfare system who seem to be headed for a life of
crime and those with serious mental health problems. These two
populations cost us the most in child welfare budgets. The
first might be better served by longer term care akin to a
boarding school; the other, by highly targeted stays in RTC to
preserve placements in their own, foster, kinship or adoptive
homes--or, for some, with long-term residential care.
Arguments for ``permanency'' and shortened length of stays
for all children must fall when confronted by the actualities
of troubled children, whose current problems cannot be
adequately resolved and whose future potential cannot be
adequately realized within such wooden standards.
In summary, there is a clear need for more residential
services--but not for kids who are simply disadvantaged, but
for super, at-risk kids and for those who require intensive
treatment. Now a-days, the Residential Treatment Centers are
more or less filling that role. They are serving a very, very
troubled population--kids who have been repeatedly abused,
physically and sexually--kids who are filled with
incapacitating despair and/or frightening rage. Even with these
kids, who almost no one argues should not be in a group care
facility, we are fighting constantly for the funding we need to
run such facilities effectively.
At present, there is little evidence that we, as
individuals and tax payers are willing to do what it takes and
pay what we must, to have the full array of good child welfare
services--or, good orphanages. Indeed the record shows, over
and over again, that we are not willing to pay more than lip
service to the welfare of our children. And that is why nobody
who really cares about children wants to say the O-word.
Thus, we bridle at any discussion about bringing back the
orphanage. Secretly, we admit--only to one another--that there
are many, many other children who ought to be in some kind of
group care facility if we are to achieve the best possible
outcome for them. We worry that if such facilities are built
and funded, then the essential services to the most needy will
be further shredded. Nonetheless, when we talk about it, we
envision places that are well run, well funded, residential
schools--the B-word--Boarding Schools, not the O-word. Never
the O-word.
Chairman Johnson. Reverend John Smyth.
STATEMENT OF REVEREND JOHN SMYTH, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, MARYVILLE
ACADEMY, DES PLAINES, ILLINOIS
Rev. Smyth. Good morning, Madam Chair and the committee
members.
Chairman Johnson. Sorry, I forgot to mention, the executive
director of the Maryville Academy of Des Plaines, IL.
Rev. Smyth. Correct, I have been there since 1962.
Maryville was started in 1882. The kids think I have been there
since 1882, but I am struggling through that.
Last year we served over 16,500 children who were
physically and sexually and emotionally abused. We receive all
the children from the Illinois Department of Children and
Family Services and through the juvenile court system, and we
have developed Maryville in a no-decline situation so that
Maryville can be a safety net and a help, because I totally
believe in adoption, as I totally believe in foster care--I
totally believe in all those--but in the social service world,
they have limited the options of permanency, and I wish they
would expand them.
Insofar as adoptions today, Director McDonald has done an
excellent job in getting adoptions. I think they went up to
5,500 last year, and the goal for the year 2000 is 6,500. My
only worry about that is, many of these homes--I haven't got an
exact number--many are set to explode because there has been a
rush to meet the Federal mandate and they are not getting the
support. But I have developed Maryville to be a safety net for
the children who are exploding out of foster care, and I think
that is what part of an agency goal today is.
Maryville is different now than when I came in 1962. It is
a therapeutic center. It has options for many children, and the
idea is that if any child in the Cook County, Chicagoland area
has a problem, we can go out and serve them. We operate on a
no-decline system. We would never kick a youth out. If a boy
has to leave or a girl has to leave for incarceration, when
their term is up, they come back to Maryville, or if they go to
a psychiatric hospital, they come back to Maryville. I want to
have Maryville as a unique safety net to promote adoptions and
promote foster care.
We do run a big foster care program ourselves which--about
45 percent of them become adoptive parents, and we do have, I
hope, a very good support system for those adoptive parents.
I am talking about the people, as was just mentioned, that
fall through the system. They need help, and I believe that the
role of the agency today is a lot different than it was 25 or
30 years ago. The agency today has to stick with the youth much
longer, they are more fractured. Yes, they have gone through
10, 15, 20 foster homes, but that doesn't mean that that child
is useless, and I think every agency should really look to a
point of--really, independent living is extremely important,
which we run, and transition living, to get those youth that
are ready to face the world in the economics and in skill
development.
I believe there is a role of agency today to specialize in
taking care of this population that falls through the cracks
and that is happening very, very rapidly, and those children
that are not adoptable, and they will never be adopted, and
anybody who works with children know that there are a certain
number of children that will never be adopted and will never go
into foster homes. They are the youth that I think agencies
should look to and say, ``Hey, we can serve this population''
and you have to develop your own service complex to be able to
serve those in a very thorough way, a very permanent way, and
you can give them permanency.
I believe permanency is a state of mind, heart and soul. It
is not written on a piece of paper that you are adopted or you
are in a foster home or you are in an agency. I think an agency
has to be operated for the sake of the child, not for the sake
of the agency; and it is a world of difference if you are
operating one. If you are operating for the sake of child, you
never close 365 days a year. You look at the individual--and I
say ``individual''--treatment plan and the God-given abilities
of that child and you go to that child and say, ``Why was this
child kicked out of 15 foster homes or 20 or whatever it may
be?'' And every case is unique. You look, and that child has to
be answered. Or she will answer and say, ``I want to be this or
I want to be that''; and then you open the doors for that child
to make that child a developing person so they can face the
community.
I think that the social service world would take a very,
very great step forward that--when it comes to say, this child
should go from an agency or to some place, into a foster home
or adoptive home, and especially when they get to that tender
loving age of 13 or 14, I would think they would ask the child,
what do they want, instead of mandating a permanency plan.
It would be a novel idea to think what we are going to do
for the best interest of the child. I think if an agency looks
at the best interest of the child, saying, what do you want to
be and we will create the road for that and we will open the
doors for that.
One of the big things that I would like to mention, too, is
the success of many of our children in the residential care at
Maryville reflected in our alumni association, which was
mentioned before, successful young men and women coming home
and giving back, and these men and women with intact, loving
families have formed a strong alumni group that continue to
support children in need and to volunteer at Maryville events
and the family affairs and realize that they would not have
become the productive citizens without Maryville.
I think there have to be many resources for the children
and don't deny any of them. Thank you.
[The prepared statement follows:]
Statement of Reverend John Smyth, Exective Director, Maryville Academy,
Des Plaines, Illinois
I. Introduction
Good morning Chairman Johnson and Committee members. My
name is Fr. John Smyth. I am the Executive Director of
Maryville Academy located in Des Plaines, Illinois. I have been
at Maryville Academy since 1962.
Maryville was founded in 1882 by Archbishop Patrick Feehan
as St. Mary's Training School and today is the largest
residential child care facility in Illinois. From the
beginning, Maryville has been home to children of all races,
religions, and ethnic backgrounds. Over the last year, on a
long-term and short-term basis, Maryville has been home to over
16,500 physically, sexually, and emotionally abused, abandoned,
and neglected children and drug dependent newborns.
Children come to Maryville from the Illinois Department of
Children and Family Services and through the Juvenile Court
systems. Maryville will not decline entrance for any child; and
once they come to live here, we will under no circumstances ask
for that child's discharge. At times, children will have to
leave to serve time for offenses committed or for periods of
psychiatric hospitalization, but we will re-admit that child
upon release.
Today, Maryville Academy operates twenty-one facilities
offering short-term shelter care, long-term residential care,
foster care, therapy and counseling, services for addicted
mothers while giving care to their drug addicted newborns,
providing safety for children who must testify as witnesses in
criminal cases, residential care for pregnant teens and their
infants, and mentors for children who leave our facilities.
Despite the gangs, crack cocaine, drugs, and violence of
today, Maryville's mission remains to protect and provide
specialized services for youth in need and to insure their
rights and always advocate for the least restrictive program
alternative for children. Whenever possible, youth will be
returned to their natural parents, extended family, foster care
homes, or community-based group homes.
II. What is Behind Illinois' Numbers?
Illinois has done a commendable job increasing the number
of adoptions to 5,500 this past year, with the goal for the
year 2000 of 6,500 adoptions. What statistics don't show is the
number of adoptive or foster placements that have failed.
Abused, neglected, and abandoned children have difficulty
adjusting to a family environment and the adoptive or foster
parents ask for their removal. Many foster placements end
abruptly and adoptive parents receive no help since these
children are no longer in the child welfare system. Agencies
such as Maryville Academy are there to provide a ``Safety-Net''
for these children with no alternatives.
Illinois is making it increasingly difficult for children
to be placed in residential care. The number of residential
beds in the Illinois budget is continually in jeopardy.
Illinois does not list residential care as a permanency option
in published materials. Illinois' permanency measures are:
subsidized adoption, subsidized guardianship, adoption,
guardianship, and kinship foster care. If residential care is
eliminated, thousands of children in Illinois will have no
where to go. The LANS (wrap-around services) to keep a child
successful in adoptive or foster care reads as an excellent
document; however, after several months or years of placement,
children and families still do not have these services in place
due to the bureaucracy of funding to provide these services.
III. Children Need Continued Support When Placed in Adoptive or Foster
Care Families
Children who achieve early permanent placements in adoptive
families have better chances of achieving strong self-esteem,
self-identity, and self-worth. For Illinois to achieve early
permanent placement for children, it must provide the services
to assure successful placements. Children bounced between
multiple foster families or placements have difficulty bonding
with others. Children must be provided with services to help
them deal with the trauma and to provide the skills to bond
with foster or adoptive families. Many of these children are
not adoptable. Many of these children will require the
professional expertise of an agency that can provide
psychiatric care, therapy, special education services, and one-
on-one staff if necessary.
While states continue to promote adoption as the best
permanency goal, the state must also provide the services for
these adoptions to succeed. They must provide pre-placement
services, counseling and therapy, and respite care.
IV. Residential Care as a Safety Net
For children that do not have adoption as an option,
permanency goals and stability must be provided. Residential
Child Care Facilities can provide stability and permanency
goals to prepare children for adulthood and matriculation into
society. Realistic goals must be set for children and states
should not follow a policy of imposing one permanency option on
every child. Individualized needs of each child must guide the
placement decision. Residential care must be viewed as a viable
placement and permanency option, along with adoptive and foster
care.
Maryville Academy has been successful because we focus on
teaching children to live within a family environment. Under
the ``Family Teaching'' model of child-care, which was
developed at the University of Kansas, professionally trained
live-in teaching parents supervise a carefully structured home
environment. The parents work to ensure that the needs of each
child are being met. The premise of the program is that
behavior is influenced by the consequences of that behavior. We
reward proper conduct and discourage improper conduct and help
the child develop skills to live independently and successfully
in society, without relying on the welfare system.
For children striving toward independent living, Maryville
offers a career development program which prepares youth to be
economically independent and self-sufficient. The program
stresses the values and ideas of the work ethic as an
alternative to welfare. The program offers employment
opportunities and corporate-sponsored junior achievement
programs. Maryville also provides a scholarship to any child
who is accepted into a college program. During their college
years, Maryville continues to mentor and support these children
and provide summer jobs if necessary.
All Maryville children are offered a year-round athletic
and recreation program which promotes sportsmanship, team
cooperation, and fun. Volunteer coaches are trained through the
American Coaching Effectiveness Program which teaches
``Athletes First and Winning Second.'' Maryville's children
participate in a variety of organized sports and teams are
evaluated on ten sportsmanship criteria and rewarded for
cooperation, team play, and sportsmanship.
The success of children in residential care at Maryville is
reflected in our Alumni Association. Successful young men and
women coming home and giving back. These men and women with
intact loving families have formed a strong Alumni group to
continue to support children in need and to volunteer at
Maryville events; and realize that they would not have become
productive citizens without Maryville.
We must continue to provide residential care for children
who cannot succeed in foster care or adoption. Years ago, I
would receive calls from parents begging for help with their
adolescent son or daughter. I still get those calls, but now
the children are six, seven, or eight, not thirteen, fourteen,
or fifteen; and now the parents are not the natural parents but
foster or adoptive parents. By eliminating residential care for
children you will eliminate the ``Safety-Net'' and these
children will be doomed. For the children, who cannot succeed
in adoptive or foster homes, residential agencies can provide a
nurturing environment, specialized services, individualized
treatment plans, and hope for a successful future.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you very much, Reverend Smyth, and
I thank the whole panel for your excellent testimony.
Before we proceed to questioning, I am going to ask Ms.
Goldsmith if she would just yield her seat to Congressman
Bliley, who has just arrived--and I thank him for joining us--
and give him an opportunity to present testimony on his bill.
STATEMENT OF HON. TOM BLILEY, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM
THE STATE OF VIRGINIA
Mr. Bliley. Well, first of all, I want to thank you, Madam
Chair, for holding this hearing.
Second, I want to apologize to you and Ranking Member Ben
Cardin for being late, but the higher pay grades called me to a
meeting.
Chairman Johnson. We can accommodate to your schedule.
Mr. Bliley. They made me an offer I couldn't refuse, so I
had to go. I am going to ask unanimous consent to put my full
statement in the record.
Chairman Johnson. It is so granted.
Mr. Bliley. In a very short space of time, I will summarize
the bill.
On Father's Day in 1998 Newt Gingrich spoke about
increasing the adoption tax credit. As an adoptive father, I
set about to work with Newt to make it a reality. When I
adopted through Catholic Charities many years ago, it was
relatively simple, and it was relatively inexpensive. Today, it
can cost anywhere from $8,000 to $25,000, and that is a huge
hurdle for young people to climb, particularly if they are
paying off college loans, automobile loans, paying rent, or
they are buying a house. It is huge. Today, the adoption credit
is $5,000, and it is $6,000 if you adopt a child with special
needs, but it expires in 2001.
So what we propose in this legislation is to, make the
adoption tax credit permanent and increase it to $10,000. This
will help enormously for prospective adoptive parents to get
over the hurdle.
One of the reasons that adoption is so expensive is that
you have legal fees, agency fees, and then frequently you have
the cost of the pregnant woman going to term and her hospital
expenses and her living expenses and this is what dramatically
raises the cost. So I am deeply appreciative of you holding
this hearing, and I hope that we can pass this bill. I mean, at
a time when we are running trillion-dollar-plus surpluses, we
ought to be able to afford this very modest bill to grant some
relief to people who otherwise wouldn't have it.
And with that, I will stop, and if you have a question or
two, I will be happy to try to answer.
[The prepared statement follows:]
Statement of Hon. Tom Bliley, a Representative in Congress from the
State of Virginia
Thank you Madam Chair and members of the Subcommittee.
Before I address several adoption related bills I have
introduced, I would like to thank Chairman Johnson for holding
this hearing today. Chairman Johnson, you have consistently
shown your commitment to promoting adoption throughout your
service in Congress. By holding this hearing, you again
demonstrate your dedication to ensuring children find loving
homes, increasing adoption awareness, and helping to reduce the
high cost of adopting a child.
Adoption has touched my life personally because my wife and
I are adoptive parents of two. We consider ourselves very
fortunate to have been able to adopt many years ago. Mom and
Dad are the greatest titles in the world.
My personal involvement with adoption has been a rewarding
experience I have brought to Congress as one of the founding
Co-Chairs of the Congressional Coalition on Adoption. I have
been blessed by my experiences with adoption so now I am doing
what I can to help thousands of innocent children find a mom
and dad.
During the 106th Congress, I have focused a great deal of
effort on finding ways to reduce the high cost of adoption.
Adoptions today can cost upwards of $25,000. Needless to say,
this high cost puts adoption well out the reach of many
parents. I hear from constituents and people all across America
who are taking out a second mortgage or dipping into savings to
adopt a child. The result is that parents who would like to
provide a loving home to a child in need are simply unable to
do so. I firmly believe that the federal government must do
more to help fight this high cost. There are simply too many
parents with love to give and too many children in need of a
home for the federal government not to act.
With this in mind, I have introduced three bills, the Hope
for Children Act (H.R. 531), the Families First Act (H.R. 2282)
and House Resolution 238, which will help parents fight the
high cost of adoption. The idea to seek a legislative solution
to the high cost of adoption began to take shape on Father's
Day, 1998. Speaker Newt Gingrich was visiting the Hope for
Children Adoption Agency in Marrietta, Georgia. Speaker
Gingrich met with adoptive parents and their children and spoke
about increasing the adoption tax credit. As an adoptive
father, I set out to work with Newt to make this bill a reality
and the Hope for Children Act was born.
Speaker Gingrich and I introduced the Hope for Children Act
in the final days of the 105th Congress. The Hope for Children
Act would be the last bill Speaker Gingrich and I sponsored
last Congress and the last bill Newt ever sponsored in
Congress. The adoption tax credit Congress passed in 1996 as
part of the Small Business Job Protection Act was a good start
and it has helped a lot of families adopt who could not afford
to do so in the past. Still, the Federal Government can do more
and that is why I reintroduced the Hope for Children Act this
year. I am pleased to say it has 147 co-sponsors and bipartisan
support that crosses party-lines because 41 percent of the co-
sponsors are Democrats.
The Hope for Children Act seeks to increase the adoption
tax credit to $10,000 for all adoptions. The current tax credit
provides only a $5,000 tax credit and a $6,000 tax credit for
children with special needs. The tax credit would also become
permanent law and would be exempted from the Alternative
Minimum Tax. Finally, the tax credit would be indexed for
inflation and the earnings limitation expanded to families
earning $150,000 and gradually phased out for families making
up to $190,000.
At this time, I want to bring to the committee's attention
a letter I received from Mr. Scott Thompson, a constituent of
mine from Richmond, Virginia. Mr. Thompson writes about the
Hope for Children Act:
To give some background, my wife and I have been going
through the adoption process for about two years. During that
time we have pursued many different paths and options, all
unsuccessful, so far. As it stands now we are abut six months
from getting our child, hopefully. We have invested to date,
roughly $6,000. We will surely invest another $10,000 before it
is all over . . . It is, however, very sad that two people who
wish to provide a loving and stable home to a child must endure
. . . outrageous costs as well. In our case we will have to
obtain a second mortgage on our home and use all of our savings
to make this a reality. These payments will make it more
difficult for us to give all that we want to our child. Passage
of this bill will cost the Federal Government so little in the
grand scheme of things. It will, however, provide much needed
help to the searching families and the waiting children.
More recently, I, along with Representatives James
Oberstar, Dave Camp, Bobby Scott, Dan Burton, Earl Pomeroy, and
Jim DeMint, introduced the Families First Act to give parents
more options when addressing the high cost of adopting a child.
This bill will allow penalty-free withdrawals from IRA's (up to
$5,000) for adoption expenses. Presently, withdrawals from an
IRA before age 59\1/2\ incur a 10% excise tax on taxable
amounts withdrawn. The Families First Act will enable families
to use their own money to start a family as opposed to taking
out a second mortgage or going into debt.
The Families First Act would also make tax free employer-
provided adoption benefits permanent law. You may remember the
Congress passed legislation in 1996 to make employer
contributions for adoptions expenses tax free. Unfortunately,
this tax free status will expire on December 31, 2001. It also
exempts up to $10,000 from taxation any employer-supported
adoption benefits while increasing the income eligibility for
tax free employer supported adoptive benefits. This act makes
it clear--families come first, not the IRS.
Increasing numbers of corporations now offer adoption
benefits as part of their employment benefit package.
Corporations such as Apple Computer, Inc., Coca-Cola, IBM, Time
Warner, Walt Disney Co., Wendy's International, and others
provide their employees with financial assistance to adopt and
other benefits designed to promote adoption. Of the top 100
companies for working women, 85 percent offer financial
assistance for adoption. These benefits allow companies to be
competitive in recruiting qualified employees. Unless Congress
acts to extend this tax free status, however, the effectiveness
of employer-provided adoption benefits will be severely
diminished.
Adoptive parents and I eagerly await the January 1, 2000
Treasury Department report on the effectiveness of the 1996
adoption tax credit. The longer the American people and I look
at the benefits of the adoption tax credit proposed by the Hope
for Children Act and the Families First Act, the more I
envision the American people having an opportunity to adopt
again. I hope the study will determine what you and I both know
that it takes years of saving and planning for middle-income
parents to afford adoption.
I believe the House of Representatives should follow the
lead of the private sector and offer the same assistance to
families who want to adopt children. Accordingly, Rep. James
Obertstar and I have introduced House Resolution 238, a bill to
reimburse employees of the House of Representatives for
qualified adoption expenses. According to House Resolution 238,
the maximum amount that may be reimbursed to employees of the
House of Representatives is $2,000. The resolution lets each
office decide whether to provide adoption reimbursement to its
employees. Reimbursement funds would come out of existing
salary accounts.
The largest employer in the U.S. should follow the lead of
the private sector and provide some assistance to families who
decide to adopt. Accordingly, I am also pleased to announce
Rep. Oberstar and I will introduce similar legislation for
federal government employees. The Federal Employee Adoption
Assistance Act will mandate that federal agencies reimburse
employees up to $2,000 for expenses associated with the
adoption of a child. Any benefit paid by this legislation would
be paid out of funds available for salaries and expenses of the
relevant agencies.
Employer support of adoption results in increased employee
satisfaction, higher productivity, and increased loyalty and
commitment towards one's employer. At a time when a young
couple is experiencing the cost and stress of creating a
family, financial assistance for adoption is the right thing to
do. We should continue to promote this benefit and we can
increase public awareness of this adoption benefit by passing
these two employee adoption assistance bills.
There are 100,000 children in state care waiting to be
adopted who are in search of parents to read to them, to teach
them how to tie shoe laces, to say bedtime prayers with them,
and to eat ice-cream with on a summer night. We need to create
additional incentives and eliminate disincentives for parents
to adopt these children. If we are successful, there will be
thousands more parents who will feel a love they did not know
could exist until they adopted their new son or daughter.
We have done a lot in recent years to improve the situation
but lets continue to work harder on behalf of children.
Chairman Johnson, I want to thank you again for holding
this hearing and I want to thank all of my colleagues who have
become co-sponsors of the important adoption bills I have
talked about today.
Chairman Johnson. I thank you very much for your testimony.
Certainly permanence is very important in looking at why the
costs are going up, and keeping the credit somehow balanced
with the costs is very important.
Mr. Bliley. Well, one thing I forgot to mention, too, we
phase this out. If it is at $150,000 joint income, it begins to
phase out, so by the time you begin to get to 190,000, you
would not have this credit, but it wouldn't figure you would
need it when you get up into that income category.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you.
Mr. Bliley. And we also waive the Alternative Minimum Tax
because I had a letter to the editor in my paper where somebody
said, well, the adoption credit is fine, we thought it was
going to be great, but all of the sudden we get hit with the
Alternative Minimum Tax.
Chairman Johnson. Hopefully, we will repeal the Alternative
Minimum Tax so that the $500 credit and all the wonderful tax
benefits to help kids go to college will not be countered by
that very regressive provision in the tax code.
Ben, do you have any questions?
Mr. Cardin. Let me first ask that my opening statement be
included in the record and thank all of our witnesses today,
including my colleague and friend, Mr. Bliley, for his interest
in trying to assist those who are able to adopt children.
I think there is a general consensus here we have got to do
a lot more in regards to children and special needs, and that
is where the real difficulty is. Where we have long-term
placements, we need long-term placements.
I was particularly impressed by Mr. Kroll's comment about
the loss of certain financial incentives if you move towards
adoption for a child who has special needs and these additional
services, and I think what has come out of this panel
particularly is that we do need to have flexible options, that
each child is different as Reverend Smyth has said. Each child
is truly different. We need to have more flexibility in dealing
with long-term situations including the ability for adoption,
particularly for children with special needs, and I appreciate
all of your statements today.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you. We do have a vote on, and for
some extraneous reasons, I won't be able to return. So we have
10 minutes, and I will try to focus a couple of questions and
give Ben a chance, and if you have an opportunity to come back
and pursue that, we will see.
I think that there is really broad understanding that we
have to do a better job of supporting adoption, that too many
kids--you know, the first round of adoptions was really kids in
foster care by foster parents. We have been surprised at the
number of adoptions that haven't worked and a lot of those
haven't worked because there hasn't been the support and there
isn't the belief that for the next 5 years there will be the
support, and so we understand that we have to make that change.
Part of that is a funding change, and in my State, there is
a demonstration project that gives a residential facility the
flexibility to do all the things that you do and, you know, let
the child visit short-term placements and let the child and the
adoptive parents choose each other through knowledge and
experience and familiarity and friendship. So, you know, we see
a lot of those things to do.
What I want to ask, what has concerned me the most--and
this comes from visiting kids from our program called The
Bridge, which are difficult kids awaiting placements, and
placements are hard to find for those kids--they are teenagers,
they have troubled pasts; and it does strike me that they would
do better in a residential, a permanent placement, in a family-
type group home, not 50 kids you know, not 30 kids, really the
kind of a group home or an institution that is capable of
giving them permanency, confidence. And also they often are
sufficiently troubled that they don't need just intensive help,
but they need long-term support that carries through on what
they learned in that intensive treatment.
So there is a group of kids that are coming into the
system, some of whom could be supported with better support of
foster care, but some of them actually who would do better in a
supportive system. And I couldn't possibly tell you, you know,
which kid, but when you have kids who are 13, 14, 15, coming to
you with a history that some of these kids have, it just seems
to me we are better off being more serious about developing the
kind of group home option or, you know, that historically
orphanages provided in the past.
So I am very interested in the alumni data that you have.
The orphanages in the past, however, did have kids that were on
the whole sort of healthier and hadn't been through quite the
level of trauma that kids with addicted parents and dangerous
neighborhoods have. I think we have never had children who have
witnessed so much violent crime or been the recipient of such
extraordinary violence.
So I would just like you to comment on, how do we define
this entity, and is it defined under current law? Is definition
a problem or is it just funding? I mean, I like the idea of
beginning to notice residential educational facilities. So I
don't know what the definition is of this in between. Some of
you are actually doing it, and I think Mr. Kroll's point that
we don't want our absorptioness to relieve us of the
responsibility to get kids into foster homes because it does
increase their chances of adoption and into adoptive homes, but
do we have a definitional problem as we move forward?
You just indicate that you would like to speak and I will
just call you.
Mr. McKenzie.
Mr. McKenzie. I would simply say it is fairly well accepted
that children who have difficult problems belong in a
residential treatment center. The problem is making available
homes or residential facilities for those kids who have not yet
become traumatized by either their parents or by the system
itself.
The issue here today is not against adoption. It is about
or towards----
Chairman Johnson. Early intervention is very important.
Mr. McKenzie. That is right, and if you go to the head of
my children's home that has become a treatment center, they
will tell you that they can identify about 40 percent of their
kids should never go home, and they can identify them early on.
They can also point out that they cannot keep them, and so
people in the field can spot these people, spot these kids who,
they know if they put them back with their families, they are
going to be abused again; or if they put them into the foster
care system they are going to be abused again.
Chairman Johnson. Just a minute. It looks like we are going
to have 5 votes, so I want to be sure to give----
Mr. Cardin. Madam Chair, why don't you just continue. The
line that you are pursuing I think is the line that I would
want to pursue.
Chairman Johnson. If you all will comment, and keep it
short, so we can try to hear from many. Ms. Dale.
Ms. Dale. I want to respond to the kinds of kids you were
just describing, those 13-year-olds. We have some of them,
including some of them from Connecticut, at Children's Village
and those are the kids we serve every day. One of the myths
that needs to be debunked is that, ``large institutions are bad
for kids'' because I think what you have heard today is there
is plenty of evidence that is not true. The group homes that
are failing are the group homes that are taking kids directly
who haven't first come through a therapeutic experience in
residential treatment.
Father Smyth and I probably run the two largest residential
programs in the country. People come to Children's Village and
will say to me, see, we should close those big institutions and
open places like this, because the image is that we look like
we are low-brow. The reality is, we look like a small town and
children live in houses, but it is outside of the community and
they get the therapeutic help that they need, they get
stabilized before they move on to a group home.
So this notion, I just want to add, David Fanschal, who was
one of the architects of permanency planning legislation, spoke
from the beginning about what he called a second stream of kids
who were kids for whom permanency should not be the goal, but
to prevent a lifetime of criminal behavior, ought to be there,
that they are already demonstrating the deviant behaviors that
you can see, that you can catalog, that you can profile, that
clearly show that that is the road that they are on, and that
to interrupt that trajectory, we need to provide those kids
with long term care.
So I guess what I am arguing is that this small subset of
kids, we ought to take out of that permanency stream and put
into a different mindset.
Chairman Johnson. Reverend Smyth, because I think he wants
to carry on there, and then Mr. Kroll.
Rev. Smyth. I think what we are talking about right now is
the fairly rejected or damaged child. They should be held in;
if it is a large agency it doesn't matter, as long as they are
brought into a small setting and we use the teacher/parent
model, and every home is independent of the big agency of
Maryville and every child comes in with a treatment plan.
And I believe very, very strongly, as I said, permanency is
mind, heart and soul. If you reach that child, if they are
rejected from 15 foster homes, God bless them, they come in
here, they start new, they develop on their treatment plan what
is God-given talents of their own, and you develop that. That
is permanency.
Chairman Johnson. That is interesting. I certainly think
the individualism, and you can always come back. I know our
most successful pregnancy prevention program is, you are always
a member of the program.
Mr. Smyth. Don't run the big agency for the sake of the big
agency. It is the small.
Mr. Kroll. One quick example, a family has a child in
foster care for 5 years. The plan is to return the child home.
He is abused so severely he has to go into a treatment center.
While in the treatment center, parental rights are terminated.
The foster family hears about it, wants to adopt the child, but
is then told they have got to pay the bills in the treatment
center. When we look at the----
Chairman Johnson. You are kidding.
Mr. Kroll. I am not kidding.
OK, and IV-D, child enforcement, has done a terrible thing
for families right now who have adopted children who need
residential treatment, and this family, for this 15-year-old,
was an advocate. They weren't going to nurture that child. They
were the advocate, but it was where the child could return to.
It was the only positive family the child never knew, but the
funding system in Minnesota didn't allow that child to be
adopted; and that is something we need to change.
Chairman Johnson. I do personally think that we have got to
change the funding system, and I know we want to give the
community confidence that the money will be there, but it is
just like everything else. You have got to be able to tailor
things to the individual child and the individual situation,
and there has to be a lot more flexibility. And I know the
anguish about eliminating an entitlement, but there must be
some way of moving this money together, of giving the greater
flexibility and guaranteeing the resources.
Yes.
Ms. Spar. Just a note about the child welfare system itself
and the ways in which these decisions are made in terms of
where to place children: That it probably should be kept in
mind that this is not always an orderly and clean system. When
these kids are coming into care, they are often coming in in
crisis situations and so forth, so there is also the issue of
the caseworkers, who may or may not know what placement options
are available for a particular child, where vacancies may exist
at a particular time on a particular night for a child, and
that adds an element in terms of whether or not children do end
up in the best possible placement.
Chairman Johnson. The research does show that having a
single person to relate to is just terribly, terribly important
to the level of trauma that kids suffer as they move toward a
more permanent area.
Ms. Goldsmith.
Ms. Goldsmith. Just one quick answer. You asked about
definition, what definition do we use. I don't think we have a
definition. That is something we are always grappling with.
What do we call it? Do we call it ``residential education''?
Does that include ``treatment''? And sometimes residential
education programs are practically residential treatment
centers and vice versa because--for instance, in Children's
Village, the kids can stay for a longer period of time.
So some of these lines are not hard and fast, but I think
the point is that we need this whole range of continuums of
options for kids that right now are not prevalent.
Chairman Johnson. Unfortunately, we only have 2 minutes
left, which means that I really do have to go, but I want to
say one thing.
It may not be worth our time to do definitional stuff
because you are already out there doing this, and somehow the
money is moving itself around. Maybe what we need to
concentrate on is how do we make the money far more flexible;
and by that I mean, repealing the entitlement to foster care
placement dollars, and I know I see you, but you see there has
got to be a way where you can write in a decent trigger if
there is an increase and where you can gain maximum protection
against a reduction in resources.
But if you look at the model of welfare where we have stuck
by our guarantee; for the first time ever in history there is
more social service money in the welfare system than there has
ever been because, as placements declined, service money did
not, and there are a variety of forces at work in the foster
care system that may well decline placements, but the system
currently, as structured, will not reserve those dollars for
the fact that many of the kids in the system are going to be
much more difficult to help and care for.
So I now have 1 minute left. I am sorry.
If you want to sit here and discuss among yourselves and
have the staff come down, they would be happy to. I hate to
bring this to an end, but I am very appreciative of the quality
of your testimony and the variety of the comments you have
made, and you really brought to a head the conflicts and the
difficulties of, you know, individual placement and foster home
versus more of a group setting.
Thank you very much. The hearing is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 11:15 a.m., the hearing was adjourned.]
[A submission for the record follows:]
Statement of Hon. Christopher Smith, a Representative in Congress from
the State of New Jersey
Thank you Madame Chairman. I appreciate this opportunity to
discuss a matter that is close to my heart: adoption. Last
week, I reintroduced my Omnibus Adoption Act, H.R. 2540, and I
would like to outline some of its provisions, as well as key
issues that drive the adoption debate in America today.
As someone who has been a passionate advocate for helping
families and children through adoption, I urge all of my
colleagues to support this important proposal, because adoption
is truly a loving option for women and families who find
themselves in less than optimal circumstances.
The statistics about adoption reveal a downward trend away
from this life-affirming choice made by women who face an
unplanned or difficult pregnancy. For instance, the estimated
number of annual adoptions by families who are not related to
the birth mother, including babies and older children, has
ranged from a high of 89,200 in 1970 to an estimated 60,000 in
1998. The number of children from the foster care system
formally placed with relatives, known as kinship care, is
estimated at 200,000. Clearly, the benefits of adoption as they
pertain to non-familial placement are not being articulated to
women in America today.
Recognizing there was a need for legislation which
addresses adoption issues in a comprehensive fashion, I
introduced my first Omnibus Adoption Act in 1991. This
legislation proposed federal assistance to pregnant women,
children in need of adoptive families, and to families seeking
to adopt children. I have introduced this legislation in every
Congress since then and I am pleased to note the Republican
Congress has enacted some of its most important provisions,
including the `crown jewel' of the plan--a $5,000 tax credit
for adoptive families to defray the expenses associated with
adoption.
As with all things, the nature of adoption in America has
changed over the last decade, so this year's Omnibus Adoption
Act, HR 2540, reflects today's adoption trends and meets
today's needs.
As a result, the 1999 Omnibus Adoption Act seeks to use the
best and most creative ideas in promoting adoption today. The
Omnibus Adoption Act takes a three pronged approach to this
important issue. It is designed to assist: (1) the birth
mother, (2) the adoptive parents and (3) the non-profit
organizations that work with birth mothers and adoptive
parents.
The first goal of the Omnibus Adoption Act is to ensure the
birth mothers who are considering adoption are provided with
all of the resources, counseling and financial support, they
will need to help them make a free and fully-informed decision
during the nine months leading up to the birth of their child,
and afterwards. As such, HR 2540 retains a provision from the
original bill which provides certificates for pregnant women to
use residential and other services provided by a maternity home
or other non-profit organizations, including job training,
medical services, and nutrition counseling. H.R. 2540 also
provides for grants for the building or rehabilitation of
facilities that could be used by these charitable organizations
to provide such services to these women.
An example of a charitable organization which might benefit
from these grants, and therefore would be able to effectively
assist women in ``crisis pregnancies,'' is the Smithlawn
Maternity Home and Adoption Center in Lubbock, Texas. Frances
Phillips, director of the center, has informed me that 25% to
30% of the women who come through their doors ultimately decide
to place their baby for adoption.
Across America, women often find themselves without the
emotional and financial support that is so crucial during their
pregnancy and in the months afterwards. While the Smithlawn
Maternity Home is a non-profit organization and is able to
provide a variety of services to these women, the agency's
ability to expand its services to more women would be greatly
enhanced by both the certificate and grant initiatives in HR
2540.
The Omnibus Adoption Act would also require both the United
States Armed Services and the federal prison system make
readily available information about the choice of adoption. I
believe in an age when our military depends upon volunteers, we
must ensure that our personnel are fully informed about the
benefits of adoption, should they find themselves dealing with
an unplanned pregnancy. I have heard reports of women at
military bases who became pregnant and found no information
readily available about adoption. The same goes for our federal
prison system, where female inmates often have no alternatives
to abortion.
Military and prison chaplains should have information on
hand about adoption for anyone who comes seeking resources. My
vision is every federal chaplain should have at their disposal
a row of books about adoption. There are a wide array of
resources available, which run the gamut from ``Dialogues About
Adoption: Conversations Between Parents And Their Children'' by
Linda Bothun, to ``The Complete Idiot's Guide to Adoption'' by
Chris Adamec.
Furthermore, I am hopeful this provision will encourage the
Department of Defense to be forthcoming regarding information
on pregnancies within the military that has been impossible to
ascertain up to this point. For many years, Congressman Jerry
Solomon, my friend and former colleague, asked Pentagon
contacts to report on the outcomes of pregnancies within the
military: how many resulted in abortion, how many resulted in
adoption, how many women decided to be single parents, and how
many chose to marry the father of their child? These are
important questions which need to be answered because they
directly impact our military's readiness and morale.
The Omnibus Adoption Act would also permit Title X funds to
be used for adoption counseling as well as require
accreditation of those who provide counseling on adoption with
the use of federal funds. Health centers across the nation--
including Title X clinics, community health centers, migrant
health centers, centers for homeless individuals, school-based
clinics, and crisis pregnancy centers--need a resource to turn
to, so their staff are adequately trained in adoption
counseling.
Women with unintended pregnancies should have the best
resources at their disposal to make informed decisions which
will affect the future of their child. Adoption counseling in
these clinics should also be available for couples considering
how to manage infertility. Sometimes overlooked in favor of
riskier, more expensive and ethically dubious medical and other
procedures, such as ``surrogate parenting,'' adoption is a
positive option for infertile couples.
Furthermore, while counseling should be non-directive,
health centers should have excellent contacts, information,
counseling and referral to other appropriate agencies or
organizations in place for adoption for pregnant women and
infertile couples to consider. In my opinion, the federal
government should actively promote the option of adoption.
Besides addressing the needs of children and adoptive
parents, we must also boost our efforts to assist pregnant
women who are contemplating adoption. Too often these women are
forgotten as we focus on the child and his or her adoptive
parents. We must not forget that for most women, the decision
to plan an adoption for their child is difficult, and more
needs to be done to ensure that women are fully assisted as
they consider the benefits of adoption as well as the resources
that are available to them during and after this process, and
after the adoption has been legally finalized.
A central element of H.R. 2540 is a provision that would
provide a $5000 tax credit for medical expenses incurred during
the mother's pregnancy if she decides to place her child up for
adoption. According to Met Life, in 1996, the average medical
costs for a pregnant woman are $7,090 for a normal delivery and
$11,450 for a Caesarean section delivery. Approximately 15% of
deliveries are C-sections and they tend to occur among younger
women. Clearly, this $5000 credit would help ease the financial
hurdles faced by many women in an unplanned or crisis
pregnancy.
With regards to prospective adoptive parents, H.R. 2540
would expand the $5,000 adoption tax credit which I first
introduced in 1990 and double it to $10,000. As many of you
know, my friend, Congressman Tom Bliley, has introduced this
provision as the Hope for Children Act, of which I am a proud
cosponsor.
Similarly, H.R. 2540 incorporates legislation (H.R. 1573)
introduced in the 105th Congress by Congressman Jim Oberstar,
the lead Democrat and original coauthor of this year's Omnibus
Adoption Act. This provision seeks to expand the benefits of
the Family and Medical Leave Act to new adoptive and foster
parents. We should not discriminate against a child and his or
her parents merely because of the circumstances surrounding
their entrance into their new, loving family.
Lastly, but equally important, H.R. 2540 would require
states to collect more complete data on adoption and transmit
this information to the Department of Health and Human
Services. There is a dearth of reliable information on adoption
and foster care, not just from the public sector but also from
the private sector. How can we legislate on adoption if we do
not have accurate aggregate data?
My legislation also repeals the authority for the National
Adoption Information Clearinghouse (NAIC) because it is my
belief--and that of many others--that this Clearinghouse has
outlived its purpose, and with the advent of the Internet, it
is no longer needed. A general search of the Internet will turn
up hundreds of web sites, without the use of our tax dollars,
which provide a variety of resources on adoption. In this day
and age, NAIC is a duplication of efforts which are quite ably
being provided by a variety of adoption groups.
The existing evidence shows adoption generates
overwhelmingly positive benefits to all persons involved in the
process--including the birth mother. Research indicates women
who choose to make an adoption plan for their child are less
likely to live in poverty, more likely to complete high school,
less likely to have additional unplanned pregnancies, and more
likely to marry.
Adoption also provides a child who might otherwise face a
bleak or difficult childhood the prospect of having loving
parents who are ready and willing to take on the challenge of
raising a child. Adoption offers a child many measurable
benefits: a stable home, a higher standard of living and
enhanced career opportunities as the child matures into
adulthood. Adoption provides adoptive parents, who desperately
want to raise children and form a family or by reaching out to
a child in need, the opportunity to fulfill that dream. It is
estimated that about 1 million children in the United States
live with adoptive parents, and that between 2% to 4% of
American families include an adopted child.
In sum, I believe that the Omnibus Adoption Act addresses a
variety of issues that will jumpstart a renewed national
discussion which is long overdue. If we are committed to
raising a generation of children who are provided with secure
and loving homes, then we must make sure children who might
otherwise fall through the cracks are not forgotten.