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| New York Governor Andrew Cuomo |
To help prevent some foster youth from becoming homeless, the state Office of Children and Family Services is using money meant to help keep children out of the system in the first place.
Every year about
18,000 young people “age
out” of foster care. Their own parents were taken from them, and that
promised “forever family” never showed up.
It’s the last in a long line of traumas, injustices and betrayals inflicted upon
them by child welfare systems in the name of “saving” them from their
parents. Other young people may
depend on their parents for all sorts of support, from love to money, into
their mid-20s or beyond. Foster youth, who often need such help more than anyone, are
on their own at age 21 – or sometimes, age 18.
This comes
on top of the trauma of being torn from their own parents in the first place –
sometimes for good reason, but often not – then often separated from their
brothers and sisters and moved from foster home to foster home.
The
assorted patchwork of aid programs for such youth is a tiny fraction of what we
owe them.
Now, add
coronavirus to the mix: At a time when the best advice is to stay home,
thousands of foster youth are being made homeless.
At least nine
states and Washington, D.C. have responded by saying foster youth can remain in
care during the pandemic. But in New York, where individual counties and New
York City run child welfare, the state had said to counties the same thing it’s
said to foster youth: You’re on your own!
Until now.
Now the state is telling the
counties they need to help these youth – but to do that, the state is, in
effect, stealing money from preventing another generation from ever entering
foster care in the first place.
In a letter sent July 3, Sheila Poole, commissioner of the Office of Children and Family Services, advised county social services leaders that they are now required to identify young adults in foster care who have no identified permanency resources and who are either at risk of homelessness, applying for welfare benefits, or have significant unmet service needs.
“Youth who meet the above criteria must be affirmatively offered the option to remain in their current placement setting or other financial support for a setting of the young adult’s choice that is of equal or better safety and stability,” she wrote.
This covers
only a narrow subset of the youth who need help. But even this is being paid for in part at the
expense of helping families stay together.
To fund this extra assistance the state is allowing counties and New York City to use about $3 million in state aid originally intended to be used to meet the requirements of a new federal law, the so-called Family First Prevention
Services Act.
Family
First, is supposed to help curb the misuse and overuse of foster care in the
first place. In fact, for a variety of reasons, it’s not
likely to do very much of that – but that’s still the intent. The $3 million in state aid is meant to help localities meet the requirements of the act.
That money is less than one-one-hundredth-of-one-percent of the state general
fund portion of the New York State budget. Surely a governor as brilliant as New York’s
Andrew Cuomo can find, somewhere in that budget, even more than $3 million to
spare. He should be able to find enough to fund more
comprehensive proposals to help the current foster youth New York State has
let down all these years, without stealing it from a program designed, however
feebly, to reduce the number of youth the state will let down the same way in
the future.
One place
to look: The $1 billion budget for the New
York State Police. That agency could probably use a little defunding.
