Maryland’s $1.2 billion "child welfare" blunder

It turns out this agency has an enormous amount of money to spend
on institutionalizing children

That’s how much the state is likely to spend over the next five years institutionalizing kids, instead of helping their families

The tragic death of Kanaiyah Ward, a foster youth filed away and forgotten in a hotel, called attention to the fact that Maryland was dumping scores of children in similar makeshift placements. 

Kanaiyah was not in the system because her mother abused or neglected her. Her mother was desperate to get her help with her mental health problems. But because she was poor, she couldn’t go out and buy therapy the way affluent parents do. So her mother had to surrender Kanaiyah to the family police agency – a more accurate term than “child welfare” agency. 

Kanaiyah’s death could have been a wake-up call; a chance to rethink the state’s entire failed “child welfare” system. Instead, the state has come up with the worst possible response: A $1.2 billion blunder that’s bad for taxpayers, and far, far worse for children. 

The state has signed contracts with a plethora of “providers” to spend $744 million over three years to buy 637 beds for foster children, an expansion of 37 over the current number. There’s an option to spend another $496 million to extend the contracts two more years, for a total of $1.24 billion. 

The financial cost is high: 

I’m a tax-and-spend liberal and proud of it. I have no problem with the mind-boggling sum of money. But we all should have a problem with spending that money on what is almost certain to be, by far, the worst form of placement – institutionalizing children at an average cost of $675,749 per bed per year. 

That’s the financial price of institutionalizing children in group homes and so-called “residential treatment centers.” Here’s the state’s breakdown of exactly what type of beds they are:

 

Source: Maryland Dept. of Human Services

 And here’s how much the state is paying, per day, per child, to warehouse children in these places:

Source: Maryland Dept. of Human Services

The human cost is much higher:

Now consider the much greater human cost. These are places that have been shown to be rife with abuse in state after state; places where a U.S. Senate investigation found “The risk of harm to children … is endemic to the operating model.” 

Even when there is no physical or sexual abuse, they are the kinds of places that have been found to be inherently harmful to children. Study after study has found the entire approach is a failure. As the Senate investigation put it: 

[Residential treatment facilities] are costly, not as effective as community-based behavioral health treatment options, and often harmful to youth in their care. 

So what could Maryland do with all that money instead? In 2024, Maryland authorities took 1,268 children from their families and consigned them to the chaos of foster care. For that same $744 million, it could spend $195,583 per year per child on every one of those children. 

How might one spend all that money? 

Consider who these children and families really are: Of all the children torn from their families and thrown into foster care in Maryland in 2024, 87% did not involve even an allegation of sexual abuse or any form of physical abuse. In 60%, there was no allegation of any form of drug abuse -- not just no allegation of opioids or meth, no allegation of any abuse of any drug or alcohol. Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect.” You could go a long way to solving those poverty problems with $195,583 per child per year. 

But what about all those cases in which, the providers love to tell us, the children have such complex needs that no family could possibly handle them? In fact, there is nothing an institution can do that can’t be done better by bringing intensive Wraparound services right into a family home or, when placement really is necessary, a foster home. Once again, here’s a video offering a classic example. 

 

 That intervention almost certainly cost a lot less than $195,583. So imagine what the full $195,583 could do. It might not be quite enough to provide a live-in therapist for every child 24/7, but it comes pretty close – and it sure can buy a lot of intensive therapy for children and families. 

Had Kanaiyah Ward’s mother been given that kind of help, she never would have become so overwhelmed that she felt she had no choice but to surrender her daughter to the system that let her die. 

Maryland has shown it has a whole lot of money to spend on child welfare. But when it comes to guts, vision and imagination, the system is bankrupt.