“Child welfare” in North Carolina: Take away poor people’s children. Pay strangers $100,000 to raise them.

Anybody out there know any Hollywood agents? ‘Cause I have a great idea for a film script: 

Scene 1: 

Two couples are sitting around a battered table in a broken-down trailer in, let’s say, North Carolina. They’re despairing over how to fix up their homes and put food on the table for their children.  Then one of the fathers spots an ad: 

“Will you look at this?” he says. “There’s a place that pays couples $100,000 to raise kids!”  

“Yeah, right,” says the other father. 

“No, look!  It’s $100,000 a year, plus fringe benefits, and they let you live in a really nice house, rent-free!” 

“No way! No one’s going to pay us $100,000 to raise our kids.” 

“No, no. Not our kids – it has to be someone else’s kids, who’ve been taken by CPS – you know, like when they can’t provide enough food, clothing or shelter, so CPS says it’s neglect.” 

And so is born a plan: The couples sign up and get the training to join this program. Then they convince the people running the program that, since they already know each other, they should be given adjoining homes.  Then they call CPS and turn each other in. Then they become “professional foster parents” for each other’s children! 

This idea catches on, more and more people sign up, and soon an entire small town is lifted out of poverty with six-figure incomes and free housing!  

The real-life version

I know what you’re thinking: No Hollywood producer will ever believe that there is a place that would  take away poor people’s children, often because of housing, and then pay two total strangers a combined total of up to $100,000 (plus free housing) to care for them.  

So just be ready to show them this exposé of just such a plan for children taken from their parents in North Carolina. It’s run by Crossnore Communities for Children with the enthusiastic support of the state family police agency. Did I say expose? My mistake. It’s 2,000 gushy, worshipful words in Business North Carolina about Crossnore, the program in question and the man behind it, CEO Brett Loftis. 

As is almost always the case, Loftis and those who work on the project, including the $100,000 foster parent couples, have the best of intentions.  As is also almost always the case, there is no reason to take any comfort from that. 

Loftis is running Bridging Families, in which couples are hired and trained to be “professional foster parents.” They do no other job and, in exchange, get up to $48,000 each plus a $3,000 signing bonus,* the fringe benefits and the rent-free accommodation. There's also "an insured agency vehicle for transporting the children, a budget for food, household supplies, and clothing for the children and an allotted stipend for family vacations."

Though the worshipful story in Business North Carolina portrays it as an amazing innovation, it sounds more like a group home with highly-paid “house parents.”  The program is paid for by a combination of federal Title IV-E and Medicaid funds, state funds, and private donations – North Carolina philanthropies seem to love it. 

So to review: 

● In North Carolina, the state Supreme Court has ruled that children can have their right to live with their parents taken from them forever for no other reason than a parent’s failure to help cover the cost of the children’s foster care. (They call it "child support," but when you take someone’s child and make the parents pay money to get the child back, the proper term for the payment is “ransom.”)  Some of that ransom might even wind up contributing to that $100,000 the professional foster parents are getting. 

● In North Carolina, one-third of the children placed in foster care are taken for reasons related to housing – that’s double the number taken because of physical and sexual abuse combined. So there may be roughly a one-in-three chance that a child living with strangers who are paid a combined $100,000 a year and are living rent-free was taken because her or his own parents couldn’t afford the rent on a decent place to live. 

The family police agency loves it 

Does any of this bother the family police agency in North Carolina? Not a bit. On the contrary, Lisa Cauley, division director of the North Carolina Department of Social Services, which oversees (badly) more than 100 county family police agencies (like the ones responsible for this case, and this one and this one), is thrilled with the program. The reasons why are unintentionally revealing. 

From the story: 

Bridging Families “allows us to keep siblings together, especially larger groups … Volunteer parents seldom accept more than two children at a time, and usually accept just one. The best option is to place (kids) together. They’ve lost their home, their parents. They don’t need to lose (siblings), too. And then the children get to visit with their parents, and the parents learn skills through demonstrated change. The professional aspect means there’s a consistency to it as well, which is rare in this world.” 

Parents in Bridging Families also come with no desire to adopt the children for whom they care. That’s a contrast to many volunteer foster parents who view the program as a test run for adoption. That can create problems when a court orders the children to be reunified with their birth parents. 

What Cauley really is saying amounts to: Here in North Carolina, we have a whole lot of selfish foster parents who view the system as the ultimate middle-class entitlement: Step right up and take a poor person’s child for their very own! They’ll undermine anything that would help lead to reunification, including regular visits! (And the term "volunteer" is inaccurate. Even regular everyday foster parents in North Carolina get at least $702 per month per child, tax-free.)

Cauley seems to be saying that rather than get rid of these selfish foster parents, and rely only on the many good foster parents who are in it for the right reasons, we’ll let the selfish ones keep on undermining families, and defying federal law, which requires “reasonable efforts” to reunite families. But we’ll find some foster parents we can persuade to not behave this way by giving them a six-figure income, fringe benefits and free rent. 

(By the way, when great foster parents really do fight to reunite families in North Carolina - without being paid $100,000 -- the system sometimes fights them every step of the way - as in this case).

What is striking here is that Cauley is admitting something damning about a practice known as “concurrent planning” – which encourages this sort of rotten behavior by telling agencies, and foster parents, to plan for reunification and adoption simultaneously. 

For decades, critics have been saying that concurrent planning has a built-in conflict-of-interest. That conflict may help explain the steady decline in the rates at which families are reunified. Cauley’s tolerance of this behavior may help explain why North Carolina has the second-worst rate of reunification in the country. 

That brings us to another claim made in the story about Bridging Families: The story says they have an 80% reunification rate vs. 40% for the state as a whole. (The figure the state gives the federal government is even worse - 29% in 2024.) 

For starters, that may not be accurate. Crossnore repeatedly tries to sell us on the idea that the best way to help birth parents is to pay a couple of strangers $100,000 to raise their children. But Crossnore itself doesn't actually say 80% of the children in its program are reunified. Rather, Crossnore claims that 82% of children "have been discharged to permanece with parents, relatives or pre-adoptive foster families." [Emphasis added.] Both the article and Crossnore itself compare the combined total for all these categories to the state total for reunification alone. And a case Crossnore itself chooses to highlight on its website ends with adoption, not reunification.

In any event, it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. The statewide figure includes children in group homes and institutions, those least likely to be reunified.  We also don’t know how the families in the Bridging Families program are chosen - except that Crossnore gets to choose who to accept and who to reject.  

Crossnore says: "The parents are highly motivated to progress through their court-appointed reunification plan and desire to partner with the Bridging Families team to accomplish that." A detailed addendum to the form agencies must fill out to request any Crossnore service uses the degrading, demeaning term "bio mother" and "bio father" to describe the birth parents.

But most important, if, in fact, the reunification rate for conventional foster care is lower, well, what do you expect when you tolerate foster parents who undermine reunification at every turn? 

The usual excuse about siblings 

And finally, there’s that claim about siblings: Cauley claims they just can’t find enough strangers to take in sibling groups – unless couples are paid $100,000, plus free housing, plus fringe benefits. If the claim about siblings sounds familiar, it’s because that is at the top of the excuse list for everyone defending institutionalizing children as well. 

But a key reason North Carolina has trouble placing siblings together is that North Carolina, far more than most states, hates the one group most likely to take in sibling groups: extended families providing kinship foster care. North Carolina uses kinship foster care at a rate nearly 20% below the national average. 

Ah, but I forgot that intangible benefit, you know, how, as Cauley puts it: 

“The parents learn skills through demonstrated change.” 

As one well-intentioned “professional foster parent” explained: 

“Mom is watching how we do things, picking up cues on that. We’re giving advice and we are really just involved with the whole family. 

Because you know what those people are like, right? They can’t possibly know how to be parents unless their saviors model it for them – notwithstanding the wealth of studies, like this one, indicating that families caught up in the family policing system do better with less “modeling” and more money. 

What else might all that money buy? 

What could $150,000 a year buy in North Carolina? 

50% child care subsidies for 28 families. 

50% rent subsidies for 16 families. 

1 pair of “professional foster parents.”

 Now let’s do a little “modeling” of our own and consider how else the money might be spent. 

First let’s add up the money: There’s $100,000 in salary plus fringe benefits, which typically equal 30% of salary, so that would be another $30,000.  Average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in North Carolina is $1,551 per month; the average monthly mortgage payment is $2,125. So we’ll be conservative and say that the free housing adds another $20,000 or so – making the total roughly $150,000 per year to subsidize this one foster home (not including training, administrative costs, etc.). 

What else might that buy? 

●As just noted, the average rent is $1,551 per month.  So $150,000 would buy 50% rent subsidies for an entire year for 16 families. 

● The average cost of childcare in North Carolina is roughly $892 per month per child.  So $150,000 would buy a year’s worth of vouchers covering half the cost of child care for 28 families. 

Now, consider that Crossnore’s CEO wants to set up 100 of these so-called Bridge Family homes. 

So imagine what would happen if, instead, that money were used to prevent poverty from being confused with neglect for anywhere from 1,600 to 2,800 North Carolina families every year. 

Now that would be a real Hollywood ending.

*-Yes, that's a mere $99,000; but Crossnore says "The recommended salary for each Bridge Parent is between $45,000 and $50,000 per year, plus benefits."