A Kansas City police officer, with a lot of backup, saves three children from needless foster care. But look what it took to achieve that result.
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| Gina English talks about the family whose poverty wasn't confused with neglect in this Kansas City Star video. |
On one level this very good
story, written by Cortlynn Stark, an intern for the Kansas City Star, is inspiring. On another level it’s frustrating.
And and on still another it’s outrageous.
On June 28, at about 2:00 a.m. Kansas City police Sgt. A.J.
Henry found a Chantre Russ and her three children, ages 4, 2 and 7 months,
sleeping in a parking lot stairway. They
had arrived on a bus from California. The family had to leave that state after
the father of the oldest child was murdered.
Sgt. Henry took out his phone and made a call – but not the
one you might expect.
He did not call Missouri’s child abuse “hotline” to have
child protective services rush out and throw the children into foster
care. Instead, even though it was 2:00 a.m.,
he called Gina English. She’s the Kansas City Police Department’s Social
Services Coordinator – a job that exists only because of grants from a private
foundation.
The inspiring part
Sgt. Henry wasn’t going to let these children be thrown into
foster care. “It was not going to happen on his watch,” English said. “That
family was not going to be separated.”
And it wasn’t. But oh, what it took to achieve that
result.
The story goes into great detail about all the different
people who had to be contacted and mobilized just to keep the children in this
one family out of foster care: The people who came up with car seats for the
children, the officers who pooled their own money to get the family a hotel room,
the groups that supplied diapers and baby wipes. As the story said: “Support from across Kanass City poured in…”
It all happened just in time. Ms. Russ was on the verge of
calling child protective services on herself.
The frustrating part
This amazing collective effort is the part of the story
that’s inspiring. Here’s the part that’s frustrating:
I’m sure this isn’t the first time Sgt. Henry, Ms. English
and others have extended themselves for families this way. But no one can sustain this kind of
collective ad hoc volunteer effort
for every family who needs it. So it’s
frustrating that this risks becoming one of those feel-good stories that warms
our hearts about the family that was helped, as we forget all the others who
are not.
Nationwide, multiple studies
have found that 30 percent America’s foster children could be home right now if
their parents had decent housing. So I
hope readers, and other journalists, who see this story will remember the
thousands of other families, just like this one, whose children are in fact torn from their parents
every year because their parents lack housing.
And I hope they will realize that those children suffer the same sorts
of trauma as that endured by children taken at the Mexican border.
The outrageous part
The part of the story that’s outrageous can be boiled down
to a single question:
WHY IS IT SO DAMN HARD?
Why is foster care so easy, while everything else is so hard? Why does it take foundation grants and police chipping in their own money and this enormous collective effort to do what’s right and keep one loving family together, while doing what’s wrong – consigning children to the chaos of foster care -- takes little more than a phone call?
The technical answer has to do with arcane child welfare funding formulas that reimburse states for a
significant share of the costs of foster care in many cases, while providing
far less to keep families together. (And by the way, the grossly
overhyped Family First Act would do nothing for the family in this case –
the kind of concrete help they need isn’t covered.)
The larger answer is that foster care is easy and everything
else is hard because so much of America wants it that way. Foster care is easy and everything else is
hard because so much of America hates poor people in general and nonwhite poor
people in particular.
That leaves good people like Sgt. Henry, Ms. English and the
others who banded together in this case to do the best they can, largely on
their own.
