Every few years media and politicians fall in love with another Magic Orphanage. News stories assure us that the Magic Orphanage is nothing like those mean old Victorian places. Now “house parents” supposedly work miracles with happy children rescued from their horrible parents.
60 Minutes spun that story about Maryville Academy near Chicago. Florida reporters flocked to SOS Children’s Village. And of course former House Speaker Newt Gingrich cited Boys Town when pushing the idea of orphanages for the children of parents whose only crime was poverty. (Give Gingrich credit for this much: He was honest about the purpose of orphanages.)
And now,
behold! Marie Cohen offers a new candidate for Magic Orphanage: The
Crossnore School. Apparently based on that most objective of sources, the school’s website, Cohen
gushes about the place. Nineteen – count ‘em, 19! – different forms of therapy!
An adventure playground! Almost all the kids graduate from high school! What
could be better?
A family,
that’s what. A “house parent” is not a parent. (For starters, they
typically quit every year or two.) And “homelike,” a word that appears
all over the website, is not home.
When
people with no ax to grind look at orphanages, they come to very different
conclusions. It takes three single-spaced pages just to list
the studies describing the harm of institutionalization. Institutions
that rebrand as “residential treatment centers” do
no better. The younger the child, the worse the harm. Crossnore
institutionalizes children as young as one year old.
As for all that therapy: Now that we’ve invented the automobile,
it’s possible to bring children to therapists and therapists to children
without actually making children live in an institution. It works for
playgrounds, too.
The graduation rate probably is helped by the fact that
Crossnore decides whom to take and whom to exclude. Crossnore also takes
private placements, so not all of those graduates are foster children.
But the big advantage Crossnore has is, of course, money.
Crossnore spends $66,265.06 per year per child – and that’s just the operating
budget.
A Better Way to Spend $66,265
Now, let’s
consider a case from another Cohen column: a 19-year-old who came forward to
adopt his 3-year-old son. Cohen bemoans the fact that a judge placed the
child with his father – who had never abused or neglected him – instead of
letting foster parents adopt him. She notes that the father was unemployed and
had not finished high school.
But what would happen if we provided the father with a new
house, and $66,265 per year to help him finish high school, go to college, get
a job and provide whatever other help he and his son needed?
But Cohen is horrified at the thought of this child being raised
by his own father, and joyous at the prospect of children like him, and even
younger, being raised in institutions.
The people
working real magic are those who have realized institutions are a failure and
are working to change their own institutions – including some that
used to get the Magic Orphanage treatment in the media.
There’s one other problem with Magic Orphanages. Sometimes, things
are pretty ugly behind the curtain.
§ Six years
after 60 Minutes visited
Maryville Academy, it was revealed to be a place of terror for many of the
children confined there. The Chicago Sun-Times reported
that “the place is often up for grabs, with staff struggling to handle suicide
attempts, sex abuse, drug use, fights and vandalism…” In 2001, police were
called to Maryville 909 times.
By 2004, Illinois had pulled all 270 state wards out of
Maryville – something it could do because it had done such a good job of
reducing needless foster care.
§ At SOS
Children’s Village in Florida, between 1999 and 2001, 33 reports were filed
with Florida’s child abuse hotline alleging abuse of children at the 50-bed
facility; 21 were “substantiated” or “indicated.” During the same time period,
13 “house parents” and 14 “parent assistants” quit or were fired.
§ And in
2010, the state of Nebraska suspended admissions to two programs run by Boys
Town amid allegations of misuse and overuse of “restraints” and medication.
Those are just
the magic orphanages. When it comes to typical institutions, we’re not talking
rotten apples, we’re talking rotten
barrels.
Get the children who don’t need to be in any form of substitute
care back into their own homes, and there will be plenty of room in good, safe,
foster homes for the children who really need them. And no one will even think
of warehousing more children in orphanages.
