There will be no sugar-frosted foster care in New York

 

NOT SOLD IN NEW YORK!

The state’s highest court slays what one critic called “a hydra-headed quasi-foster care monster, with all of the hallmarks of foster care but none of the legal protections the law demands.”

A scheme to create what amounts to a second, hidden foster care system in New York, without even the bare minimum due process protections in the formal system, has been shut down by the state’s highest court. 

In a unanimous decision, the New York State Court of Appeals ruled that the state’s family police agency, the Office of Children and Family Services, had no legal authority to allow a system of so-called “Host Homes.” The model is based on, and developed in close consultation with, an organization called Safe Families For Children, which has similar models in multiple states. 

In other states, Safe Families has gotten state lawmakers to authorize the program. We can only hope New York legislators won’t be suckered into doing the same. 

Proponents portray Safe Families / Host Homes as just a purely voluntary program in which parents under stress, perhaps due to an illness, or homelessness, or some other financial problem, get a total stranger to take in the kids for a while. Sometimes this “voluntary” arrangement is “suggested” by a state or local family police agency. The parents, it is said, can get the kids back anytime they want.  But Safe Families actually is sugar-frosted foster care. 

Here’s the biggest catch. 

Unlike a family that leaves a child with a relative or a close friend, these families are leaving children with total strangers who know, at the outset, that the family has some kind of problem. Odds are the strangers will be a different race and class from many of the children. 

So what happens if the parent says, “OK, I’m ready to take my child back,” but the stranger doesn’t agree that they’re ready? The stranger can call the formal family police agency, which almost certainly will launch an investigation. The risk is even greater if, as often happens, the family police agency already is involved with the family and is looking over everyone’s shoulder from the start. 

The family desperate to find a place for their children – because no one is offering the kind of help they might need to keep them in their own home – may not know that. There is no lawyer looking over the paperwork, no one to say: “Wait a minute, maybe we can get you food aid or housing assistance so your children don’t need to lose you for a matter of days or weeks in the first place.” And there’s no one to point out that the stranger always has the option to call the family police. 

No wonder OCFS received at least 17 letters from advocates for both children and parents, opposed to letting this program into New York. One letter called it “a hydra-headed quasi-foster care monster, with all of the hallmarks of foster care but none of the legal protections the law demands.” The lawsuit to stop the program was led by lawyers who regularly represent children in child welfare cases. 

The founder of Safe Families for Children, David Anderson, says the program has taken 77,000 children into its volunteers’ homes since 2003. A lawyer for OCFS told the Court of Appeals that 99% were returned to their own homes. The Imprint reports, however, that it’s 93%. Either figure represents, as the OCFS lawyer said, “better numbers than foster care.” 

But that is the wrong comparison. Safe Families is a program used for families that either have no connection to the formal family policing system or are referred there by family police agencies as a form of “diversion” because even the agency doesn’t think they’re so unsafe they need to be taken by force of law. Of course, such a program will have a better reunification record than those placed in formal foster care. But the best track record, of course, would be attained by not putting poor people in an impossible position where their only option is to “voluntarily” surrender their children, because no one will provide them the help they really need. 

And Safe Families’ own figures mean that anywhere from 770 to 5,390 times, parents who thought they could get their children back anytime – they didn’t. 

One of the very examples Safe Families showcases illustrates the problem. A story about the program in The Imprint begins with a family that Safe Families likes to showcase as a success: 

In the summer of 2012, Corisma Gillespie hit a crisis point. Pregnant with her second child, the 20-year-old from the west side of Chicago had lost her job at McDonald’s. Her car was impounded, and she was about to become homeless. Desperate to provide for her children, she asked herself: “How can I do this?”  

A local program had an answer. She could hand her daughter over to a volunteer family through Willow Creek Community Church, almost an hour away in the suburbs. There would be no court hearings, judges, or lawyers involved when her child moved in with these strangers, and it would take almost no time to arrange. Her daughter could live in this “Safe Family” home for as long as Gillespie needed. All she had to do was sign a form. … 

After three weeks, she found a job and her first apartment, and her daughter came home to Chicago. 

Gee, what might either government, a charity, a church or a group of churches do instead? How about simply providing enough cash to tide the family over so Ms. Gillespie could stay in her apartment until she found another job? How about helping with the job search? 

One need only compare the Safe Families white savior rescue approach to what happened when communities themselves developed networks of mutual aid during COVID – and the federal government provided families with cash: Child abuse decreased. 

Indeed, early in the program’s history, in a comment posted anonymously on a television news website, one viewer understood the problem immediately: 

During the second World war Jewish family were separating from their children for the sake of children survival. The Nazis were set to kill them all. And now in the richest and, so far, peaceful country the best solution to the economic crises it to give up your children to charitable Christians for the sake of survival. Millions of homes taken by banks stay empty. Parents cannot buy children shoes, there are sleeping in subways. Instead of buying shoes and providing decent shelter for families with children "Good people" solve the state problem and offer their solution, they take children to their Christians homes. What country is that? What country allows that to happen? Charity starts with courage of thoughts. Courage of social changes. But as long as this is acceptable and cherished solutions, any real change in hearts and minds is impossible. 

Safe Families cites a study comparing outcomes for children in Illinois involved in a family police investigation, in which those who were placed in a Safe Families home (which, for all intents and purposes, is foster care) were less likely to end up in, uh, foster care than those who got conventional preventive services. 

So, for starters, if a family police agency is saying: We’re investigating you and we recommend you put your child into this “voluntary” program while we’re investigating you, that’s not exactly voluntary. 

Second, a comparison to conventional preventive services misses the point. Conventional preventive services usually mean lots of counseling and parent education, while doing nothing to ameliorate problems like the kind Ms. Gillespie had. 

And third, the study author, Prof. Mark Testa, says he had to omit results from Chicago for a disturbing reason. As The Imprint explained: 

As part of his research, Testa found “anecdotal evidence” that some Cook County child welfare workers were using the host program “as a way station” and “holding-pen” for kids while they completed their investigations. He had to exclude that county’s data in his final study. 

David Anderson, the group’s founder, has said, “The Lord gave me the idea of Safe Families for Children.” 

I am not religious and certainly have no expertise in theology. But the public record leads me to wonder if The Lord may have had a broader array of preventive services in mind. Surely one of the best-known Bible passages is this, from Matthew 25:35-40:

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me. 

Nowhere in the Bible does it say: “I was a stranger and you invited my cute little kids in, but left me outside.” 

Illustraton via ChatGPT