Maybe the Family First Act has a better chance of passing than I thought.
I assumed passage was unlikely. But the
latest argument from those who think the bill would go too far is so absurd
that it sounds like an act of desperation. In fact, I wasn’t going to bother
writing about it, until I saw that the Los Angeles Times cited
it in an editorial as a reason to oppose the bill.
The argument goes
like this: Under current law, under a collection of highly unlikely
circumstances, a small subset of kinship foster care placements could, at some
point, lead to a situation where a later placement that otherwise would be
eligible for federal aid would not be eligible for such aid.
That’s because, under these narrow
circumstances, the income of the former kinship caregivers would be used to
determine if the subsequent placement is eligible for reimbursement. Normally,
the income of the birth parents is used. (Yes, we’re talking about that
important, and very helpful, provision of current
law known as the “lookback.”)
But if the Family
First Act passes, then – oh, wait, this has nothing to do with the Family First
Act.
And that’s the first problem with this
lame excuse for opposing the Family First Act. The problem isn’t in the Family First Act – it’s in existing law.
So, given the
penchant of child welfare agencies to whine about anything that doesn’t bring
in money, why haven’t we heard about it until now? Probably because it
affects so few cases.
How the Quirk Works
In order for a case to be ineligible
for federal Title IV-E foster care funds because of this quirk in existing
law, all of these things have to happen:
§ The child must be
placed in a kinship foster home that is not licensed the way homes with
strangers are licensed. That doesn’t mean the placement isn’t foster care, it
just means the grandparents or other relatives were unwilling to go through
licensing or, more likely, unable to meet hypertechnical licensing requirements
geared more to middle-class creature comforts than to actual health and safety
issues.
Some of these placements are reported
when states tell the federal government how many children they’ve taken away,
but many are not. It amounts to a foster-care Twilight Zone that allows states to
understate how often they tear apart families.
The issue does not
arise with licensed kinship foster parents since they are treated identically
to all other foster parents.
§ The relative has to
give up caring for the child after six months. That happens, of course, but one
of the many benefits of kinship foster care is that it tends to be more stable
than what should properly be called “stranger care.”
§ The next placement
for this child has to be with a licensed relative or a stranger care home or an
institution. (Otherwise it’s not eligible for federal reimbursement anyway.)
§ The grandparent’s (or
other relatives’) income has to be higher than the level allowed for a case to
receive federal reimbursement under the lookback. That’s not likely to happen,
often because part of the reason many grandparents and other relatives are
unlicensed is that they, like the parents, are poor – so they can’t meet those
hypertechnical licensing requirements.
Many cases may meet
one of these criteria, but how many are likely to meet all of them?
The feeble attempt to
link this to the Family First Act goes like this: The bill would make more
services available to help families stay together, and those services sometimes
might be provided to those families while their children were placed with
relatives, so more children will be placed with relatives, so this tiny little
quirk will be ever so slightly less tiny.
But the services that can be reimbursed
under the Family First Act are extremely limited – that’s one of the
reasons I’m still against it. And the top priority
for use of those services is supposed to be birth families while their children
stay with those birth families – avoiding any kind of disruption in the child’s
life. So there should be only a very small increase in kinship placements due
to the Family First Act.
Escape
from the Twilight Zone
I would like to
suggest, however, a modest proposal to fix this modest problem. Exempt any
unlicensed kinship care placement from the quirk in current law, on one
condition: The placement must be reported to the federal government as a
foster-care placement. Actually, that’s already required under federal
regulations defining an entry into care, but the requirement is not
enforced. In other words, no more hiding these placements in the foster
care Twilight Zone.
Substantively, this
changes nothing. It’s a truth-in-labeling clause. Twilight Zone placements were
foster care placements all along. This suggestion simply would provide an
incentive for child welfare agencies to be honest about what they’ve been doing
all along.
Dredging up this
obscure quirk in current law is a bizarre effort to kill a bill that already
didn’t seem to be going anywhere.
That very desperation illustrates how
deeply the foster-care industrial complex clings to the status quo. And it illustrates why real reform
requires much stronger medicine than the Family First Act.
