Food or foster care? Places that say they never take children because of poverty get ready to take more children because of poverty

Pittsburgh, Pa. and the State of Georgia are prime examples

Georgia makes its child welfare priorities clear

Got time for a one-question pop quiz? 

With SNAP benefits cut off, poor families are under even more stress. Faced with a family going hungry and desperate to find food for the children, the stress causes a parent to “maltreat” the children. Do you: 

A) Put the family under investigation, interrogate everyone, rifle through cabinets, drawers, cupboards and refrigerators, stripsearch the children (often standard practice regardless of the investigation) and leave the entire family traumatized.

B) Do all of the above and tear the children from their parents, consigning them to the chaos of foster care, from which only one in five is likely to do well in later life: a system that leaves emotional scars so great it may make it more than four times more likely they’ll die by age 20, while putting them in places where there’s at least a one in four chance, and probably more, they will be abused.

C) Get the family some food.

The answer should be easy, of course. But in Allegheny County, Pa. (metropolitan Pittsburgh), they seem to prefer A or B.  Because this is how a story from the Pittsburgh Media Partnership Newsroom begins: 

Fewer families are stepping up to foster, just as experts warn a surge of children could soon flood the system if the state and federal budget standoffs drag on. 

Allegheny County is now preparing for an increase in referrals to the Office of Children, Youth, and Families. 

“Parental stress is a big predictor of child maltreatment,” said Julia Reuben, an administrator for Allegheny County’s Department of Human Services. “And so, when there’s not enough money to feed your children … I think we can surmise that that will lead to increased maltreatment.”

Well, it certainly will lead to increased maltreatment if more children are forced into foster care, which often is an act of maltreatment itself, and, as noted above, a place where independent studies keep finding high rates of abuse. 

It’s another indication of how much child welfare in Pittsburgh has deteriorated.  Once a model for reducing needless foster care, the county turned its back on its own success. Now it’s a leader in targeting families using an algorithm that its own co-designer described as “Big Brother,” an algorithm that reportedly was* investigated for bias by the Biden Justice Department.  

The county also is a leader in tearing apart families. The most recent comparative data for Pittsburgh are from 2022, but they show a rate of removal more than 50% higher than the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. 

Pittsburgh does continue to be a leader in using the least harmful form of foster care, kinship foster care, but for how long? Kin are also likely to be poor and so also likely to face additional stress due to the cut-off of SNAP benefits. 

As it happens, Pennsylvania is in the midst of a state budget impasse as well. That threatens payments to foster parents.  So Allegheny County has been dipping into reserve funds to pay the foster parents.  Maybe they should try using more of those funds to get food to birth parents so their children aren’t “maltreated” due to all that extra stress. 

It’s not just Pittsburgh 

Notice how in Pittsburgh, they use a rhetorical fig leaf to cover the naked truth about taking children due to poverty.  Oh, no, it’s not the poverty, they say, it’s the maltreatment caused by the stress caused by the poverty. 

In Georgia, they’re not even pretending.   

Kate Blair, director of the Savannah Court-Appointed Special Advocates Program (which expanded into additional services and now calls itself “Brightside”), offered up exactly the sort of comments one would expect – if you know CASA. She told WTOC-TV: 

“For a lot of our parents working towards reunification, they need to have a safe place for their children to return to, as well as food in those cupboards,” Blair said. “And without SNAP benefits, they may not have both.” 

The organization is anticipating families needing to be separated longer, and even more children possibly entering the foster care system. 

When a child is removed, parents need to come up with a case plan for the court to determine that their home is safe. Those factors include having warm shelter and food. 

“We’re taking away one really important piece,” Blair said. “And in the end, who’s going to suffer the most are not the politicians, are not adults like myself. It’s the children.” 

It’s not that Blair wants this to happen, in fact, she was appealing to people to donate food. But there’s something else her agency could do: Those CASA volunteers could oppose delaying reunification because of poverty and demand that the Georgia family police agency (a more accurate term than child welfare agency) find a way to put food in all those cupboards. 

DFCS makes it worse 

Instead, that agency is making things even worse. 

The Imprint reports that 

In emails sent late Friday to child welfare agencies in Georgia, state officials announced that the federal government shutdown has required them to suspend new services that protect children from entering foster care and ensure family reunification — unless approved in writing by the state. 

Under the directive, without that level of approval, caseworkers cannot initiate contracted services for child and family assessments, aides for parents, wraparound care, measures to prevent foster care, including “unnecessary out of home placement,” and “early intervention” services. [Emphasis added.] 

The only exceptions are “court-ordered or emergency services.” 

Local offices of the state Division of Family and Children’s Services remain free to shovel children into foster care and even ultra-expensive ultra-useless institutions,  with no new restrictions. 

Of course, this makes explicit that Georgia is willfully violating federal laws. One law – almost universally ignored – requires states to make “reasonable efforts” to keep families together. Another requires states to make “active efforts” in cases involving Native American children. Neither law has an exception for government shutdowns. 

Yet now DFCS is explicitly cutting back on services to prevent “unnecessary out-of-home placement.” 

As for where Georgia might come up with the money to pay for all those services it’s cutting back, there’s actually an untapped gold mine.  

The most expensive form of “care” for foster youth is institutionalization. It can cost hundreds of dollars per day per child. It’s also the least effective – in fact, it’s not effective at all. As a U.S. Senate Committee then chaired by Georgia’s own Sen. John Ossoff recently reminded us, the entire model is a failure. 

And that’s before we get to the fact that institutions are the placements where children are most likely to be abused, as can be seen in scandals that have engulfed institutions in Arizona, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Utah, Iowa, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Washington state , Arkansas, New York, Connecticut, Idaho -- and Georgia. 

Here’s what else is so significant about places that institutionalize children: They cost a fortune, often hundreds of dollars per day per child. 

Which brings us to the goldmine. 

Nationwide, two percent of foster children are institutionalized.  But in Georgia, it’s 12%. As of Sept. 30, 2024, Georgia was institutionalizing 1,331 children! And while Georgia institutionalizes children at what is probably one of the highest rates in the nation, it uses the least harmful form of foster care, kinship foster care, at one of the lowest rates, 22% - barely over half the national average. 

So what DFCS should be doing is reexamining the case of every institutionalized child. Figure out which could go straight home (yeah, I know, these are supposedly the most difficult children, but that’s often according to those who run the institutions), which can go to the homes of extended families as kinship foster care placements, and which really do need more intensive help – the kind that can be provided far more effectively and at far less cost through the very wraparound services DFCS is now cutting back. 

The children would be far better off, and, though the federal government would reap some of the savings, Georgia still would have millions in additional funds to provide the help needed to keep children out of the system in the first place. 

*-If there was such an investigation, as the Associated Press reports, it may still be going on, but given who’s in charge of the Justice Department now, that seems less likely.

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