Last
month on this blog, I reported that the Wisconsin Department of Children and
Families (DCF) is trying to misuse a federal waiver process
to siphon child welfare funds from Milwaukee to the rest of the state.
Last week, the news
website Urban Milwaukee followed up
and reported
on DCF’s excuse. Fredi-Ellen Bove, a
DCF division administrator, first tried to claim that “any savings realized by Milwaukee
[through reducing foster care] would have reverted back to the federal
government.”
That’s grossly misleading. Savings revert to the federal government
under the current system, in which
states are reimbursed for every eligible child they place in foster care. But a key advantage of a waiver is that you
get to keep the savings from reducing needless foster care, as long as the funds are reinvested in child welfare.
Urban
Milwaukee
wasn’t suckered. The website reports
that when she is pressed on the matter …
Bove concedes the state made a choice to spend the money in
a different way. “We reached the conclusion we don’t need waiver dollars to
meet the needs in Milwaukee.” Bove says Milwaukee has a stronger support system
than other counties, with 12 months of “post-reunification” care by counselors
after a child’s case is over, while other counties lack this.
But this, too, is an
evasion. For starters, it was DCF’s own
stupid decision to seek only a narrow waiver focused exclusively on
post-reunification services. (The Wisconsin proposal and proposals from other
states are
available here.) Second, the
existence of this one program has not magically wiped out all of Milwaukee’s
child welfare problems.
Indeed, it strains
credulity to think that Milwaukee, where children are torn from their families
at a rate significantly higher than many other cities and where the child
poverty rate is more than 34 percent, really needs the money less than, say, Ozaukee
County, where the child
poverty rate is six percent.
But if Wisconsin DCF
really believes the issue is spending waiver money most efficiently, that’s all
the more reason for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to turn
down Wisconsin’s waiver proposal entirely.
Thirteen states have
applied for ten waivers. Massachusetts, for example, is proposing to spend $20 million per year on its five-year waiver
initiative. Wisconsin, in
contrast, proposes to use only $7.1 million in funds for its waiver, and the
total doesn’t get that high until the fifth year.
Since the law only allows
ten waivers per year for three years, surely the federal government owes it to American taxpayers to use
those waivers to provide the most real benefit to the greatest number of
children. So it would be a huge waste of
taxpayer money to waste a waiver on Wisconsin’s current proposal.
Fortunately, the federal
government can issue ten more waivers in 2013 and another ten in 2014. Wisconsin should go back to the drawing board
and return with a comprehensive proposal to serve all children who otherwise
might be placed in foster care or remain trapped there.
If Wisconsin DCF needs
some help, the current proposals from Arkansas, Utah and Washington State are
good models. You can read about them in
NCCPR’s Report Card on all of the publicly-available waiver proposals, on our website here.