Arizona governor robs poor families to give middle-class foster parents a giant pay raise

 

It’s almost as if Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs stole a page from Donald Trump’s playbook. She’s moving to attract greedy potential foster parents to join the majority who are not in it for the money. And the way she is doing it is the equivalent of telling poor families: We’re going to build a wall between you and your children – and we’re going to make you pay for it! 

Fresh from giving a giant rate increase to a group home operator (and generous campaign donor) with a questionable record, Hobbs is lavishing an even bigger rate increase – 50% -- on state foster parents, who already do quite well. 

As of 2022, depending on a child’s age and needs, foster parents got anywhere from $637 to $1,465 per month. That’s per child, not per family. Hobbs says that, with the rate increase, foster parent reimbursement will average between $1,000 and $1,700 per month. 

All of that is tax-free. Foster children’s health insurance is covered, and in some cases, working foster parents can even get childcare aid; the kind of aid that, had it gone to birth parents, might have prevented children being taken for “lack of supervision.” 

I don’t think most foster parents are in it for the money. But wouldn’t we all like to keep it that way? Do we really want someone who says, “I won’t do it for less than $1,000 a month, tax-free, plus health insurance for the kids and maybe a childcare subsidy” to be a foster parent? 

Now, let’s consider who’s footing the bill: 

When Congress replaced “welfare as we knew it” with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the money was supposed to help impoverished families become self-sufficient. But the rules are so vague that some states have turned TANF into a child welfare slush fund. 

In that regard, Arizona is a national leader, diverting more than 60% of TANF funds away from impoverished families.  As ProPublica explained: 

Welfare in Arizona largely goes not to helping poor parents financially but rather to the state’s Department of Child Safety — an agency that investigates many of these same parents, and that sometimes takes their kids away for reasons arising from the poverty that they were seeking help with in the first place. 

How much more good could that TANF money do if it were actually used to help poor people? There’s a clue in why Arizona children are taken away – it’s almost never because of the horror stories that make headlines. 

Of all the Arizona children torn from their families and thrown into foster care in 2024, 87%  did not involve even an allegation of physical or sexual abuse. In fact, almost as many children were taken because of “inadequate housing” as because of physical and sexual abuse combined. 

Hobbs claims the state has to lure in more foster parents with big bucks in order to have places for children now needlessly confined to group homes and institutions. 

Arizona is, indeed, a horrific outlier in this regard. It throws 41% of foster children into group homes and institutions; the national average is 16%. (That kind of makes you wonder why she also gave that big increase to some of those same group homes and institutions.) 

But the solution to overuse of group homes can be found in another ugly Arizona statistic: The state still tears apart families at a rate 25% above the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. Stop taking so many children needlessly, often when family poverty is confused with neglect, and there will be plenty of room in the foster homes Arizona already has. 

Hobbs adds insult to family injury by implying that she is providing some special benefit to extended family members who provide kinship foster care. But the giant pay raise applies only to licensed foster parents. Federal law already requires that all licensed foster parents – whether kin or strangers – be paid the same amount. 

The biggest problem in foster care rates is the lack of support for relatives who provide safe, loving homes, but may not be able to meet licensing requirements that can be geared more to middle-class creature comforts instead of only health and safety necessities. Hobbs' giant pay raise doesn’t apply to them. 

And when it comes to discretionary spending, Hobbs took away $6.5 million in support for kinship foster care – and diverted it to group homes and institutions. 

Brick by financial brick, Gov. Hobbs builds an ever-higher wall between children and the families who love them – and makes those families pay for it.

Foster care in Nebraska: Beware of the teddy bear subsidy bill

Suppose your child had to be placed out of your care because of some emergency – illness perhaps – and no one in your extended family was available.

Suppose a stranger came forward and said:

I’ll take care of him, I’ll even love him as my own  – just as long as you pay me for absolutely everything.  Not just food and clothing, mind you.  But if you want me to send him to an after-school activity you pay me.  If you want him to go to a movie, you pay me.  If you want him to have a teddy bear to comfort him at night – you better pay me for that, too!

Oh, and by the way, your kid opens and closes the refrigerator door an awful lot, and he keeps leaving the lights on.  You need to pay me for the additional electric bill as well.

Bet you wouldn’t want your child placed with anyone that greedy.

Yet a bill scheduled for a public hearing today in Nebraska would require that the state pay foster parents to cover all of these costs and more.

The bill would require that monthly pay for foster parents be jacked up to the point that it meets meet the level called for in a so-called study conducted by, among others, the group that so arrogantly calls itself “Children’s Rights” (CR) and the National Foster Parent Association (NFPA).  The study estimated a so-called “minimum adequate rate” that foster parents supposedly should be paid in each state.

“Minimum” sounds like they mean enough to cover the basics. After all, any parent who “loves a foster child like my own” would have no problem paying for a teddy bear or a movie ticket, right?

Not according to the twisted logic of CR and NFPA.

Their so-called “minimum” rate includes all of the items I just mentioned, and more.  (See for yourself: Check out the hard-to-find “technical report” issued by CR and NFPA which explains how the “minimum” was calculated.  I suspect it's called a “technical report” precisely because they hope no one will read it.)

THE PRICE TAG

This won’t come cheap.  Even though the report actually understated what Nebraska pays foster parents now, according to an estimate from the office of the Nebraska Legislative Fiscal Analyst, raising the rate to cover every toy, game, movie ticket and almost-everything-else-you- can-think-of will cost the state nearly $3.6 million in state funds every year, with the federal government forced to shell out nearly $900,000 more.  That's a lot of money for a small state.

Here’s what else $3.6 million can do:

● Provide $600-a-month rent subsidies for 500 families for a year, so their children aren’t taken away because of lack of housing.

● Provide $100-a-week day care subsidies for 692 families so their children aren’t taken on "lack of supervision" charges.  (By the way, the so-called minimum rate in the NFPA study includes reimbursing the foster parents for all day care and babysitting expenses.  So, under this bill, a child can be taken from impoverished birth parents because they can’t afford day care and then handed over to middle-class foster parents whose day care expenses would be  fully reimbursed by Nebraska taxpayers.)

● Provide Intensive Family Preservation Services interventions for 480 families. 

● Provide inpatient drug treatment at a family treatment center where children can stay with their parents for 144 families.

This would be outrageous in any state, but especially in Nebraska.  Any list of worst child welfare systems in America would be incomplete without Nebraska.  Year after year, Nebraska tears apart families at one of the highest rates in the nation – and traps proportionately more children in foster care on any given day than almost any other.  Most other lousy systems across the country could adopt as their slogan: “Hey, at least we’re not as bad as Nebraska.”

So at a time when Nebraska already tears apart families at one of the highest rates in the nation, some legislators in that state actually want to take scarce funds that finally could reduce Nebraska’s obscene rate of removal and divert those funds to cover a giant, needless subsidy for middle-class foster parents.

AN INSULT TO FOSTER PARENTS

On top of everything else, the bill is incredibly insulting to foster parents.  

When foster parents are polled on why they leave foster parenting, low pay consistently ranks low on the list.  Far more important to most foster parents is the fact that child welfare agencies so often treat them the same way they often treat birth parents – like dirt.

 Foster parents often say that they can’t be in it for the money because there is not enough money.  For the overwhelming majority of foster parents it’s true.  But if this bill passes it will attract a lot of the wrong kinds of people to foster parenting.

The whole bill raises a fundamental question I’ve discussed on this Blog before: What is our “social contract” with foster parents?  If, as I believe, most foster parents really are in it for  the right reasons, including the good feeling it gives them to help children in need, why is it unreasonable that reimbursement not quite cover every expense – for children who, after all, foster parents say they love as their own?

If someone volunteers to tutor children at an after-school program, or serve meals at a soup-kitchen, he doesn’t get reimbursed for the mileage to get to and from the program.  He may even dip into his own pocket for some supplies.  Why is it wrong to expect the same of foster parents?

The best foster parents understand this.  Here’s how one I’ve quoted often on this Blog, Mary Callahan, explained it in an op ed column for the Los Angeles Times.

In addition:

● Existing rates aren’t as low as  CR and NFPA want people to think.  The existing rates cited in their “study” always are the “base rates.” But many states add additional payments and/or have additional tiers of rates.  In the case of Nebraska, for example, the Legislative Fiscal Analyst found that CR and NFPA failed to factor in the state’s coverage of liability insurance for foster parents.

Payments are tax-free since they are considered “reimbursement.”  In addition, foster children’s health insurance is covered by Medicaid.

● CR’s executive director, Marcia Lowry has suggested that if you don’t favor the rates she demands be paid to all foster parents, you want to take toys from foster children.  On the contrary, we want children placed with foster parents who care enough about those children to give them toys without demanding government reimbursement.

● Some proponents have argued this kind of huge increase is needed to help kinship foster parents who often are poor.  But it’s absurd to spend $3.6 million on mostly middle-class stranger-care parents because a little of it will trickle down to grandparents who provide kinship care.  There are other ways to target aid specifically to kinship care parents.


It will be interesting to see how many Nebraska foster parents really are so greedy that they'll come out and testify today demanding teddy bear subsidies.

Foster care in DC: As a matter of fact, most foster parents ARE middle class…

…AND IT TAKES QUITE AN ACT OF STATISTICS ABUSE TO PRETEND OTHERWISE

The previous post to this Blog dealt with a response to an op ed column I wrote for The Washington Post.  The response came from Marcia Lowry, executive director of the group that so arrogantly calls itself “Children’s Rights.”

Of all the things I wrote, the item that seemed to upset Marcia the most was a line at the very end in which I referred to the highest-in-the-nation pay rates for foster parents in D.C. (From $10,000 to more than $11,000 per child per year, tax free) as giving “middle-class foster parents … more than they need.”

Marcia insists foster parents really aren’t middle-class. She writes:

A recent survey in Illinois found that the average wage income for foster parents was just $35,500 a year and was $28,600 a year for relative caregivers.

Thus, she makes it sound like relatives earn $28,600 and strangers get $35,500.

But it’s not true.

I went back and took a look at the actual study.

Turns out, the $35,500 figure is the average income for all foster parents, kin and stranger combined. And the study in question was done in Illinois, which has one of America’s most progressive policies of placing children with relatives, so the unusually high proportion of kinship care parents brings down the average.

When you look only at what should best be called “stranger-care” parents, the average income is $41,220. That’s just short of what the same study said was the median family income in Illinois, $44,459. (Before anyone says “Hey, you switched from a mean (average) to a median,” that’s what the study did, you’d have to ask the authors why they felt it was the fairest comparison.  And it’s Marcia Lowry who cited the study in the first place.)

As for kinship care parents, NCCPR long has noted that they do, indeed, tend to be poor. And that’s precisely why it’s such a tragedy that Marcia Lowry runs around the country fanatically demanding that they comply with precisely the same licensing requirements as those middle-class strangers. Having waged a war against grandparents that forced at least 1,800 children out of such kinship homes in Michigan as a result of imposing such requirements, Marcia is in no position to pose as a champion of such parents. And to really see how much harm this licensing fanaticism can do in DC, just check out Jason Cherkis’ story in Washington CityPaper

Marcia would argue that she demands licensing because when grandparents are licensed state and local governments have to pay them the same amount as strangers, and the federal government reimburses states for part of those costs at the same rate as for foster care with strangers.

Those are good reasons to demand that states streamline licensing requirements for everyone, limiting them to those genuinely essential for health and safety and eliminating those geared to middle-class creature comforts.  They are good reasons to encourage kinship care parents to become licensed and help them to meet licensing requirements.  They are not good reasons to demand that impoverished grandparents comply with requirements that are far more onerous if you happen to be poor – or risk having their grandchildren taken away.

It is particularly disingenuous to hide behind kinship care parents when talking about the lavish pay for foster parents in Washington D.C.  The District does a particularly poor job of placing children with relatives.  The most recent data, from 2006, show that only 16 percent of D.C. children are placed with relatives, compared to a national average of 25 percent.  (In Illinois it’s 35 percent).

The way to help kinship care parents is, as noted above, to streamline licensing requirements for all foster parents and then provide kinship care parents with extra assistance.  Marcia, however, apparently prefers a “trickle down” approach in which $10,000 per year per child tax free, is lavished on, yes, middle-class strangers, just because it also will trickle down to the grandparents and other kinship foster parents.

We can do better than that.  And we would, if things like Marcia Lowry’s ill-conceived lawsuit settlements didn’t keep getting in the way.

Foster care in DC: An unflattering view of foster parents from a surprising source

 I’m sure Marcia Lowry, executive director of the group that so arrogantly calls itself “Children’s Rights” (CR) would insist she’s the last person to believe most foster parents are in it for the money.  But a recent op ed column she wrote for The Washington Post raises questions about how she really views the motives of foster parents.

As I noted in a previous post to this Blog, back in December, I wrote an op ed column for the Post decrying the fact that the D.C. Council was pitting programs to help keep children out of foster care against programs to help kids already in foster care, while ignoring far better places to cut.  Such places include D.C.’s overuse of group homes and institutions (like the residential treatment centers exposed by Washington CityPaper’s Jason Cherkis in an excellent story last week) and the lavish pay rates for foster parents - the highest such rates in the nation.

Specifically, D.C. pays at least $10,428 per year per child.  For older children, it’s more than $11,280 per year per child.  The money is tax free.  The government also covers foster children’s health insurance through Medicaid.

           

CR itself admits, in its own study, that this is more than enough to cover not only the basics for foster children but also every toy, game, after school activity, movie ticket, amusement park ride, etc.  In short, all of the things foster children (and children in general) should have.  (Check out CR’s “technical report” for the study so see all the things CR believes the government should reimburse.)

But Marcia Lowry seems to think that unless foster parents are reimbursed by the government for every penny they expend on these items, the foster children won’t get them.

In a response to my op ed column Lowry wrote that

 In his commentary [Wexler] went on to suggest that the District has “lavish[ed] . . . money on foster parents” and that it should consider cutting the “fat pay raises” for families willing to give abused and neglected children a safe home — and perhaps a few small pleasures of childhood, such as a toy, game or amusement park ride.

So, tell me Marcia: Do you really believe that D.C. foster parents are so greedy that if they were paid less than $10,000 per year per child, tax free, and actually had to dip into their own pockets to buy a foster child a teddy bear they wouldn’t do it?  Would they really deny foster children they say they love and treat as their own “a few small pleasures of childhood” if those pleasures are not government-subsidized?  And if that is what you believe, do you really think it’s a good idea to place children with people like that?

Are you not at all concerned that these lavish payments might attract foster parents who whine at great length even at the prospect of paying for a foster daughter’s sanitary napkins?  (That’s not a hypothetical – it really happened).

Maybe you hold foster parents in such low regard, Marcia, but I don’t. I think the overwhelming majority are not in it for the money, and some are true heroes.  I think they have no problem dipping into their own pockets a little for children they sincerely try to treat as their own – just as people who, say, volunteer to tutor inner-city children may buy some supplies themselves and don’t expect to be reimbursed for the mileage getting to and from the school.  The whole issue of our “social contract” with foster parents is one that CR regularly avoids.

Marcia continues:

… it is the availability of foster parents that keeps children out of costly, ineffective and often harmful group homes and institutions. 

That’s partially true.  But it doesn’t follow that lavish reimbursement is required to get people to volunteer to open their homes to children.  Indeed, when foster parents are surveyed about why they quit, money ranks low on the list.  Ill-treatment and lack of respect from child welfare agencies ranks much higher.  (That’s why, when speaking to foster parents, I always ask: If that’s how they treat you, imagine how they’re treating the birth parents.)

To the extent that there are “shortages” of foster parents, it’s almost always an artificial shortage, created by states taking too many children needlessly in the first place.  Get those children back into their own homes and there will be plenty of room for children in real danger, without having to institutionalize them.

In addition, more and more states are finding that, using everything from Wraparound programs to “extreme family finding” institutionalized children can be returned directly to their own homes or the homes of relatives, bypassing what should properly be called “stranger care” homes entirely.  So, in fact, lavishly-paid foster parents are not the only alternative to institutionalization.

It also is flatly wrong to imply that all foster children were “abused and neglected” before the foster parents took them in.  In fact, children can be trapped in foster care for months before a judge ever decides if they actually were abused or neglected.  The status of these children is roughly analogous to that of poor people who remain in jail before trial because they can’t make bail.  (This distortion actually is at the root of a huge campaign by CR, something I hope to get to in a future post.)

Marcia goes on to argue that

…birth parents, foster families and relatives all need support when caring for a child, and they should not be pitted against one another as funding decisions are made. 

Nice thought.  It would be nicer, however, if CR’s lawsuit settlements didn’t constantly pit these very groups against each other.

Marcia’s Georgia settlement has led to diversion of funds to help alleviate the worst effects of poverty.  In Michigan, her settlement has led to slashing of programs to help keep children safely out of the system in order to fund a foster care worker/child abuse investigator hiring binge.  And, of course, Michigan is where CR’s war against grandparents has led to the expulsion of at least 1,800 children from the homes of grandparents and other kinship care foster parents – because they couldn’t comply with ten pages of hypertechnical licensing requirements.  (That CityPaper story I mentioned also illustrates the harm of the licensing obsession, by the way.)

Marcia also hides behind kinship parents in order to propound another myth, the myth that foster parents are barely getting by.  In fact, foster parents typically are middle-class.

More on that next week.

Foster care in DC: The perils of paying foster parents too much

As the new year begins, let us pause to consider the plight of a former foster parent in Washington, who wrote a searing account of what it was like to scrape by on nothing more than a six-figure income, her husband’s salary and about $45,000 per year – tax free – in payments for taking in four foster children.  

            The first thing I want you to know is, I did not write the comment I reprint below from the website of The Washington Post.  I did not make up some fictitious foster parent in an effort to make foster parents look bad.  As far as I know the post is genuine and the person who wrote it is real.  

            I reprint her comment below because it’s hard to imagine anything that better illustrates the perils of paying foster parents too much, as Washington D.C. does, or giving foster parents in much of the rest of the country giant pay raises, as is proposed by the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children’s Rights (CR).  I certainly don't believe that this foster parent is typical.  But this is the kind of foster parent you are more likely to attract when you pay them the way CR proposes to do.

            First, a little background:  The effort to close a budget gap in D.C. wound up pitting programs to help children stay out of foster care against programs to help children already in foster care.

            In particular, Roque Gerald, who runs the D.C. Child and Family Services Agency, tried to slash a program to help grandparents keep their children out of foster care.  He argued that since the children were not, in fact, in the system and the grandparents had not been accused of child abuse, this wasn’t really a child abuse prevention program. 

Yes, that really was his reasoning. As I pointed out in an op ed column for the Post:

If torturing logic were a war crime, that statement would get Gerald hauled before an international tribunal.

Every prevention program serves children who have not been maltreated. Maltreatment is what the prevention programs are created to prevent. That’s why they’re called prevention programs. Gerald’s logic is like saying a rent subsidy program doesn’t prevent homelessness because all of the people getting the subsidies are living in apartments.

The DC Council restored some of the cut – but at the expense of deeper cuts in help for children already in foster care.

Neither cut was necessary.  According to an independent monitor of a longstanding consent decree, CFSA warehouses far too many children in group homes and institutions, both the worst form of care and the most expensive.

And DC throws amazing amounts of money at foster parents, paying them at, by far, the highest rate in the country.  In fact, the rate is so high even CR couldn’t claim that DC foster parents weren’t getting enough. 

Keep in mind, CR wants foster parents paid not only for the basics but also for every toy, game, movie ticket and amusement park ride they buy for a foster child.  CR admits that the $940 per month – tax free - it estimates DC pays for a teenage foster child is enough to cover all of this and more.

But it wasn’t enough for “Bodymagicbykim.”  That’s the name a former DC foster parent used in a comment on the Post website under my op ed column.  Below you’ll find her comment, followed by my own response.

As you read Ms. Bodymagic’s comment I would ask you to ponder just one question: If something happened to you and your child had to be placed in foster care, would you want that child placed with this foster parent?

THE COMMENT FROM “BODYMAGICBYKIM”:

For those who commented on DC foster/kinship care parents receiving too much for the monthly costs of these children. I wholeheartedly disagree. I myself was a foster parent of four teenage female siblings. That was not enough money.

Please consider all of the projects these children are required to complete daily that require costly materials (i.e. assigned novels for book reports, magazines for collages, science projects, models of cells, one was even required to model a futuristic community). Please consider the number of leave requests the parents have to put in to get these children to doctor appointments, court hearings, CFSA family meetings, therapy, dentist appointments and include gas, car-maintenance and parking costs- the list goes on along with the hourly cost of leave at an over 6-figure salary.

These children also needed clothing, shoes, coats (replacements for the aforementioned), hair appointments (minimum $40 per head, per bi-weekly appointment - can range up to $180 per appointment for braids), bedding, linens, necessities (sanitary napkins cost us loads of money), etc.

Now, the food? If you have children, you are clear they're always feeding friends. Try feeding four teenagers and one friend each daily - that's about $1,200 per month right there. In raising productive citizens, you want to teach them how to budget and save - factor in allowance. Also, because these children had drivers' licenses, factor in the increased cost of auto insurance on TEENAGERS.

This doesn't take into account high increases to utilities, property damage, birthdays, Christmas, graduations, back-to-school shopping, gifts for their friends' birthdays, prom, summer camps at $150 minimum per week for the two too young to work, transportation and work-clothing costs for the two that could work, tutors, computer and related equipment, SAT prep class & test costs, drivers' education class, college applications, college visits, extracurricular activity costs and supplies, vacations (or should I have left them at home while I traveled the world?? That would certainly be fair).

I could go on for days. The point of the matter is that I (thankfully) wasn't in it for the money, but I can assure you that I invested quite a bit out of my own pocket. The monthly cost was not enough, honestly, if I didn't have a good salary of my own and factor in that of my husband's.

If I were a poor/middle-class fixed-income grandmother, we wouldn't have survived. So, PLEASE before you make some farfetched statements like you have that effect our livelihoods, do your research by talking to the masses who have lived it. Leave the textbook, projections, forecasts based upon bad data alone. A PhD means little if you haven't lived it! Speak to those with their MRS or MOM first - those are the letters that count most when talking about our children. I'm offended, but willing to share more.

MY RESPONSE:

OK, so let me get this straight Ms. bodymagic. You make a six-figure income, you “travel the world” on vacation, and you’re whining because the taxpayers of Washington D.C. supposedly did not pay you enough to cover the cost of your own foster children’s Christmas gifts and school assignments? You demand this money even if it means cutting help to impoverished grandparents raising their own grandchildren?

At least I hope you never also ran around claiming that you treated your foster children “like my own.” And I hope the young people never found out that the thought of doing for them what any loving parent with a six-figure income does for her own children caused so much resentment on your part.

The good news for you, Ms. bodymagic, is that the group that calls itself Children’s Rights completely agrees with you. They think you shouldn’t be expected to do any of this out of caring or, God forbid, love, but rather you should be reimbursed for every penny. The bad news is that they’ve calculated that DC already pays you more than enough for this – even for teenagers, for whom foster parents are paid even more than for younger children.

It’s just that you wanted even more.

And lest anyone think that all foster parents are like Ms. bodymagic, take a look at this op ed, from the kind of foster parent I think we’d all rather see in the system, someone who has indeed “lived it” and who got her MOM degree by majoring in compassion.
                                 __________________

There’s much more at the Post website, including my exchange with Richard Barth, the Dean of the School of Social Work at the University of Maryland who was an advisor for CR’s foster parent pay report.  

The overpaid foster parents of Washington, DC

WOULD YOU WANT A CHILD PLACED WITH SOMEONE WHO DEMANDED GOVERNMENT REIMBURSEMENT FOR BUYING HIM A TEDDY BEAR?

Like most states and cities, Washington, D.C. is facing big budget problems. It was no surprise that, in his proposed budget, Mayor Adrian Fenty targeted for more pain and suffering those who already suffer most, but are least able to fight back – poor people.

In child welfare, the mayor wanted to cut a program that provides housing assistance to poor people on the verge of losing their children to foster care, and a program to help grandparents keep their grandchildren out of foster care. According to the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, the D.C. Council restored those cuts, but cuts in a separate emergency rental assistance program and in homeless services remain.

While the homeless and those on the verge of homelessness are made to suffer, the Council made sure to spare one group: The overpaid foster parents of Washington. They were spared a ten percent cut in their pay. The Council should revisit this issue next year, if not sooner. Because that's one budget cut that makes sense – provided the savings are plowed into restoring cuts in programs that help keep children out of foster care.

Right now, D.C. foster parents are paid significantly more than they need to cover foster children's expenses - and not just the basics. The DC payment is more than is needed to pay for just about everything. D.C. pays foster parents more than anyplace else in the nation; the payments are 60 to 70 percent above the national average.

Who says so? None other than the group that has been suing D.C. child welfare seemingly forever, the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children's Rights (CR).

Raising foster parent pay has become an obsession for CR; they've taken to demanding it in one lawsuit after another, even though studies show that pay ranks low among the reasons foster parents stay or quit (respect is far more important).

In order to push its case, CR published a report, in which it created a formula that supposedly represented the "minimum" foster parents need to cover expenses. It's more like a maximum. Buried in a separate "technical report" is the fact that CR defines expenses very broadly. They're not just talking about food, clothing and shelter. CR's definition of what foster parents should not have to pay out of their own pockets includes any increase in electric bills caused by foster children leaving the lights on and opening the refrigerator door a lot. It also includes movie tickets, amusement park rides, toys and just about anything else you can think of.

The point is not that foster children don't deserve these things. But here's the question: Would you want a child placed with someone who demanded government reimbursement for buying him a teddy bear?

Naturally, almost every jurisdiction fell short of providing "enough" by this absurd standard. Almost.

Two places pay foster parents more than enough by this standard: Arizona, and the District of Columbia. In fact, with base rates ranging from $869 to $940 per month per child, depending on the child's age, DC pays foster parents from $148 to $240 per month more than CR says they need. (Also, though CR doesn't mention it, in every state the payments are tax free and foster children's health care is covered by Medicaid.)

The report notes that no data were available to adjust the "target" figure for DC for inflation, so they used their national average target figure. But D.C.'s rates are so high that they meet CR's absurdly high targets in every state except three with extremely high costs of living, and even then they come very close.

So here's what Fenty and the council wound up doing: They made it more likely that families will become homeless. Then, the child welfare agency will take away those children because the family us homeless. And then that same child welfare agency will lavish more money than they need on the total strangers who take in those children.

D.C.'s ridiculously high pay rates also may cause problems for Virginia and Maryland. It's been argued that some foster parents in those jurisdictions take D.C. children because the District pays so much more - at least that was part of the rationale in 2008 for spending an extra $20 million per year on foster parent pay in Virginia – money that could have been used to keep kids out of the system in that state.

And D.C.'s rates create the wrong incentive for foster parenting. I agree with those who say very few foster parents are "in it for the money." The vast majority do it for the right reasons. But foster parents are fond of saying that the proof they're not "in it for the money" is that there isn't enough money. That doesn't apply in D.C.

There's also a larger philosophical issue, discussed in previous posts to this Blog and in this excellent op ed column by Maine foster parent Mary Callahan: What is our "social contract" with foster parents? If foster care is an act of charity, then why shouldn't it involve dipping into one's own pocket to a modest degree? The volunteer who helps tutor children after school does not demand reimbursement for mileage or any supplies he may bring to help that child. He does it because the psychic satisfaction outweighs the small financial contribution. Don't we want foster parents who feel the same way?

At a minimum, don't we want foster parents who see a problem in raking in nearly 1,000 a month to care for a child who could have stayed in his own home if his own parents had gotten far less in emergency rental assistance?

A Washington Post story left open the possibility that, had the cuts gone through, CR might have opposed them in court. It certainly would have been interesting to see how they'd justify such a stance, when their own report says DC foster parents are getting more than they need. But given the relative power of foster parents and poor people who lose their children to foster care, we're not likely to see the issue go to court anytime soon.

The myth of the underpaid foster parent

The photo dominated the front page of The Arizona Republic Tuesday. Mom, Dad, their two kids sitting around the table saying a prayer before family dinner. The only nonwhite person at the table (seen from the back): One of the family's foster children.

The huge headline above the photo: "Slashed foster payments make it HARDER TO HELP"

All the usual clichés followed – swipes at birth parents, the incredible nobility of the foster parents who rescued the children – and how it all might be in jeopardy because Arizona's budget deficit prompted legislators to impose a 20 percent cut in payments to foster parents.

Then, the story officially certifies this a "crisis," the reporter declaring that "Foster care advocates worry that the crisis has erased years of improvements to the foster care system."

They can stop worrying. First of all, with one tiny, recent exception, unrelated to foster parent pay, there haven't been any improvements to the foster care system in Arizona. On the contrary, it's one of the nation's most regressive. NCCPR issued a report on Arizona child welfare two years ago and, if anything, it's only gotten worse.

But also, no great harm is done by cutting payment rates that were, in fact, the second highest in the entire country – rates vastly above the national average. Even with the cuts, Arizona still is paying foster parents far more than most states.

According to the story, before the cuts, the average monthly payment to an Arizona foster parent was $910 per child. That's not including special allowances for clothing books education and other expenses. Now, with the cuts, it's a mere $728 per month per child. The extra allowances have been cut back, but they're still on top of that $728.

That was in the story. Not in the story: The money is tax free. And foster children's health insurance is covered by Medicaid.

The story did mention Arizona's second-highest-in-the-nation status, but the reporter got spun, big time, thanks to a study by guess who? Yep – the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children's Rights. (And yes, it is depressing that over and over this once progressive group reveals itself to have become one of the most regressive forces in American child welfare.)

Their "study" portrayed the exceptionally-high payments in Arizona and Washington DC as the bare minimum needed to care for a foster child – everybody else, the study said, was falling terribly short. Even a glance at the study methodology shows this is nonsense. But glancing at the methodology requires looking at a separate document called a Technical Report. Labeling something a "technical report" is like putting a great big sign on it that says HEY REPORTERS: DON'T BOTHER TO READ THIS!

And in this case, it seems to have worked like a charm. Because of all the stories written about this report, I've seen none that included the following information:

●CR's calculation of "minimum" requirements includes far more than food, clothing and shelter.

●It includes the full cost of day care for foster children – even those who were taken from their own parents on "lack of supervision" charges because those birth parents couldn't afford day care.

●The so-called minimum also includes the increase in the foster family's electric bill caused by foster children leaving the lights on and opening and closing the refrigerator a lot – even when the children were taken from their birth parents because those birth parents couldn't afford a decent place to live.

●The so-called minimum even includes every penny spent on movie tickets, amusement parks, games and toys.

But who in the world would want to place a child with foster parents who demanded government reimbursement every time they bought a foster child a teddy bear?

These are only some of the bizarre assumptions that make up CR's definition of "minimum." More are discussed in NCCPR's report on Virginia child welfare in which we argued, unsuccessfully, against a big raise for the state's foster parents.

I am among those who believe that the overwhelming majority of foster parents are not in it for the money. I'm sure the family in the Republic story, which is continuing to foster children in spite of the cut, deserves the praise it received. But you can't have it both ways: You can't say, as some others apparently do, "I'm not in it for the money, but I'll quit if I stop getting the second highest rates in the nation and have to use my own money the next time I take my foster child to the movies."

Similarly, you can't say, as many foster parents do, "we can't be in it for the money because there's not enough money" – and then keep demanding more money. Indeed, paying too much creates the risk that the wrong people will go into fostering.

And, in fact, precisely because most foster parents do care so much about the children they take in, when they are polled on reasons for quitting, pay actually ranks quite low. (Lack of respect from child welfare agencies – in other words, being treated the same way agencies treat birth parents – ranks much higher.) And that helps explain why, even with the second highest pay rates in the nation, Arizona still claims to have a so-called shortage of foster parents.

In fact, Arizona doesn't have a shortage of foster parents. Thanks to a take-the-child-and-run mentality that has left Arizona in a state of perennial foster care panic, Arizona has a surplus of foster children. Stop taking so many children needlessly, and the so-called shortage would disappear.

That's also why we shouldn't be fooled by claims that if Arizona pays foster parents at rates that are merely above average instead of second highest-in-the-nation that would force the state to throw even more children into group homes and institutions.

All these problems arise before we even reach the fundamental issue of taking so many children largely because they are poor and then giving vastly more financial help to the strangers who take those children in.

All that said, I'm not suggesting that the cuts in pay for Arizona foster parents are a good idea. They would be a good idea if the money was going to bolster prevention and family preservation programs. But those are being cut, too. The cuts are just making one of the stingier states in the nation when it comes to helping children even stingier.

This whole issue touches on something that doesn't get nearly as much discussion as it should: What is our "social contract" with foster parents? If foster parenting is an act of compassion, like volunteer work, done for the psychic satisfaction, is it unreasonable to ask that foster parents dip just a little into their own pockets – and shouldn't we be concerned about those who won't? I've raised that issue on this blog before, but there is a better discussion, by Maine foster and adoptive parent Mary Callahan, in this op ed column from the Los Angeles Times.

As for the one piece of good news from Arizona, that involves federal, not state money. As this story from Phoenix New Times explains, the state child welfare agency and local housing authorities in Phoenix, Tucson and Yuma, did an outstanding job in securing vouchers to help families in which children may be taken from their parents because of housing problems, or housing problems are preventing reunification. The vouchers also can be used for young people "aging out" of foster care. The federal program was restored, after an eight-year absence, thanks largely to the work of the National Center for Housing and Child Welfare (the executive director of which is a member of NCCPR's Board of Directors). You can find out how your state and locality did by checking the NCHCW website.