HHS should reject Wisconsin’s
child
welfare waiver proposal
There
is nothing unusual about a rivalry for resources between a big city and the
rest of the state. Think New York City
vs. Upstate, Chicago vs. Downstate, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh vs.
rest-of-state etc.
But
I’ve rarely seen anything as blatant as what the Wisconsin Department of
Children and Families proposes to do to Milwaukee. In shocking, explicit detail, its proposal
for a child welfare funding waiver describes how the state would confiscate
savings made by improving Milwaukee child welfare and use that money in every
Wisconsin county – except Milwaukee.
Wisconsin
is one of 13 states that have submitted formal proposals to the U.S. Department
of Health and Human Services (HHS) for waivers from federal child
welfare funding rules, though only
eight of the proposals currently are available on the HHS website. Under the waivers, federal money that
normally can be spent only on foster care can be spent on better alternatives
as well. Since the better alternatives
also cost less, reducing foster care generates savings. Under a waiver, the state can keep the
savings, as long as the money is reinvested in child welfare.
In
most states, child welfare is run directly by the state. In about a dozen states, individual counties
run child welfare. Wisconsin is among
those dozen, but it’s a curious hybrid: At least partly as a consequence of a lawsuit
by the group that so arrogantly calls itself “Children’s Rights,” the state Department
of Children and Families runs child welfare in Milwaukee directly, through a
division known as the Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare (BMCW).
The
Wisconsin proposal is a slapdash, slipshod effort. (Contrast it to, for
example, the much bolder, far-reaching proposals from Arkansas,
Utah
and Washington
State.) Wisconsin proposes to make extremely limited use of waiver funds to
finance only one innovative service: help to families after they have been
reunified to prevent the children from reentering foster care. And the services they propose to provide
appear to be largely “soft” services, like counseling, instead of the concrete
help families need most.
Even if everything goes the way the state wants, by the end
of the waiver period, only $7.1 million per
year of what now is spent on foster care would be shifted to better alternatives. That’s less than ten percent – and it would
take five years even to achieve that.
But
here’s where Wisconsin’s plan goes from merely pedantic, mediocre and
unambitious to appalling: Of that $7.1 million, $1.2 million, or 17 percent,
doesn’t come from the waiver at all – it comes from money that is, in effect,
stolen from the vulnerable children of Milwaukee County to be redistributed to
the rest of the state.
DCF is arguing that in Milwaukee County they’ve already done
such a great job putting plans in place, that they’re sure they will reduce
reentries even without the waiver. Since
the waiver lets them keep money saved through this reduction, DCF plans to take
these savings and divert the money to Wisconsin’s other 71 counties, instead of
spending it on bolstering services in Milwaukee.
Or, as the waiver proposal itself puts it, on page 13:
To the extent that [the
Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare] BMCW experiences success in reducing its
re-entry rate, the IV-E demonstration project waiver will build on the
successful experience in BMCW to replicate and expand post-reunification
support to the 71 non-Milwaukee counties.
Specifically, federal IV-E and
state matching funds that are not utilized for [foster care] maintenance costs
in Milwaukee due to lowered out-of-home care caseloads will be reallocated to
non-Milwaukee counties to fund the administrative and service costs of
twelve months of post-reunification support.
[Emphasis added.]
And check out pages 21 and 22, where the state seems almost
gleeful as it explains in detail how Milwaukee savings will be siphoned off to
the rest of the state.
As far as I know, the group that so arrogantly calls itself “Children’s
Rights” (CR), has been silent about Wisconsin’s waiver proposal – I don’t know if
they’ve even read it. Will they actually
stand silent as the state of Wisconsin proposes to siphon child welfare funds
away from the county where they have a consent decree? Unfortunately the answer may be yes. These are funds to keep children out of
foster care, as opposed to funds to “improve” foster care. And, of course CR has made clear over and
over that it is indifferent, at best, and hostile, at worst,
to keeping kids out of the system.
CR may well remain silent even though CR has a special
responsibility to speak up. It was CR’s lawsuit
that set in motion the chain of events that led to the state taking over child
welfare in Milwaukee. Were county
government still responsible for child welfare it would have been a lot harder
for the state to pull a stunt like this.
Under
federal law, HHS can award up to ten waivers per year for the next three years.
There are 13 proposals for this first round of waivers. The Wisconsin proposal
should be sent immediately to the scrap heap.
The state should be informed that the federal government will not be an
accomplice to siphoning funds from one part of a state to another.
Next week NCCPR will issue a Report Card on
all eight publicly-available waiver proposals.
