On our Blog at Youth Today: Another child welfare success story

Much like Maine, child welfare in Florida has undergone a transformation – the good kind.  Of course, rather than learn from this success, expect America’s foster-care industrial complex to try desperately to “Yes, but…” to death attempts to let the rest of the nation do what Florida did.

We review Florida’s success on this installment of our monthly Blog at Youth Today.  It all boils down to strong leadership, and a smart waiver.

UPDATED, JANUARY 19: Even Florida's big private agencies have learned that if they adapt to helping families they can thrive in a system that emphasizes keeping children safely in their own homes.  Read how one of the largest, the Children's Home Society, favors the waiver in this Miami Herald op ed.

In honor of Martin Luther King day…

…The NAACP asked Twitter users to use the hashtag #IHaveADream to answer the question “What’s your dream?” Here’s my answer:

#IHaveADream that one day no child will be taken from his parents because family poverty was confused with “neglect.”

Foster care in America: The day child welfare changed? (Part two)

On Monday, I wrote that we are approaching the tenth anniversary of what might come to be known as the day child welfare changed.

It was the day a five-year-old girl named Logan Marr died, killed by her foster mother, a former caseworker for the Maine child welfare agency.

At first the response to the death of Logan Marr was what it usually is when a child dies in foster care: The press focused on issues like whether there were enough visits by caseworkers to foster homes, were the licensing standards good enough, were background checks adequate, etc. Those are reasonable questions, and it’s understandable that they are the first to pop into people’s heads.

But whether a system will reform in the wake of a foster-care tragedy depends on whether journalists get beyond that and move on to the real problems. In Maine, that meant confronting a culture of child removal embedded in the child welfare agency. At the time Logan died, the proportion of children trapped in foster care in Maine was among the highest in the nation. 

And in Maine, it seemed, the assaults on families always were accompanied by an extra helping of meanness. – for every injury, the Maine Department of Human Services was determined to add an insult. 

The head of DHS at the time, Kevin Concannon, would not even tell Logan Marr’s mother he was sorry for what happened to her little girl – until after she went public with his refusal (at which point he wrote a very nice letter).  On another occasion Concannon, who would, of course, hide behind confidentiality when it suited him, persuaded a newspaper to print an entire court decision terminating parental rights in a case where the family had dared to challenge him publicly.  There was no warning to the family.  They just woke up to find it in their morning paper.  Remember, Concannon did this after his agency had “won.”  (I’m not opposed to newspapers publishing things like this, though the courtesy of a warning from Concannon to the family, so they would have had a chance to respond at the same time, would have been nice.)

NCCPR began raising these larger questions – within weeks of Logan’s death we were in  Maine to meet with journalists and issue a report on the system - and the state’s newspapers began pursuing them. (In part, I think, they were willing to listen because, even before Logan’s death, that other family, the one Concannon picked on, had bravely gone public and made a compelling case – so some seeds of doubt about DHS already had been planted.  It was that family that first put Maine on my radar.  We all owe that family a debt of gratitude.)

Story after story and editorial after editorial zeroed-in on the high numbers of children trapped in foster care.  Two legislative committees held hearings, and NCCPR’s testimony received prominent coverage.  An independent office of child welfare ombudsman was created, under the auspices of a leading state child advocacy group, the Maine Children’s Alliance.  And unlike most such offices, which often do more harm than good, this one took seriously the mandate to look at errors in all directions.

At about the same time, two other things happened.

First, producers working for the PBS series Frontline contacted NCCPR.  They said they were interested in doing a documentary about child welfare and were looking for ideas.  “You can always go to Florida,” I said, “something’s always happening there.  But if you want to look at something that’s not on anyone’s radar, take a look at the case of Logan Marr in Maine.”  I mentioned that, among other things, there was video of Logan complaining about being abused in her foster home, just weeks before she died. 

NCCPR provided extensive briefing material to the Frontline producers, and we were in touch several times over the following year-and-a-half.

A FOSTER PARENT SPEAKS OUT

Even more important, a very good foster parent got fed up. Mary Callahan kept finding that the children placed with her could have remained in their own homes if only the birth parents had gotten the kind of aid she received as a foster parent. Already a published author, she decided to write a book about her experiences. It’s called Memoirs of a Baby Stealer (Pinewoods Press, 2003). She organized the Maine Alliance for DHS Accountability and Reform, a grassroots organization that demanded systemic change.   And when NCCPR released the second of our two reports on Maine child welfare, Callahan joined us, and spoke at the news conference. 

Others also got fed up. A state legislator organized a four-day 80 mile march to the State Capitol – in the middle of a Maine winter - to protest the policies of DHS.

Concannon began feeling the heat.  Once NCCPR and the local advocates “kicked down the door” he had to let other reformers walk through.  So having once scorned the success of states that took away fewer children because they were “southern states” (and if you’re in Maine, pretty much every place else is a southern state) Concannon turned for help to the Child Welfare Policy and Practice Group, an organization founded by the reformer who transformed child welfare in Alabama.  DHS also brought in the Annie E. Casey Foundation.  But, as a Casey publication about the Maine reforms makes clear, albeit in a genteel sort of way, things didn’t really start to change until Concannon and his old guard were out of the way.

As Casey put it:

Without the right players in the right places at the right time, large scale change in any organization is often doomed. By 2004, a new group of leaders moved into key positions in Maine, people who would be absolutely essential to putting the state on an entirely new child welfare path.

That required a new governor.  Fortunately, in January, 2003, Maine got one.  Gov. John Baldacci saw immediately what the problems were. He got rid of Concannon and brought in that new leadership team.  (Concannon, alas, proved to be a classic example of “failing up” – he wound up with the same job in Iowa and now he’s in charge of the entire U.S. Food Stamp program). 

When a committee was formed to reorganize the Maine human services agency, each member of the group found a copy of Callahan’s book at her or his place at the table. Her presentation to the committee is on NCCPR’s website.

A lot more committee work, and much frustration followed. But the change has been remarkable and, by child welfare standards, remarkably swift.

● Since 2001, the number of children taken from their homes has dropped by 30 percent, and the number of children in foster care on any given day has been cut in half.

● Under Concannon, Maine workers used to brag about their hostility to placing children with relatives instead of strangers.  As Casey’s report put it: “Adding to the overall misery in Maine’s child welfare system was a clear institution-wide prejudice against placing children with relatives.”   But now, Maine has nearly tripled the proportion of children placed with relatives; Maine now exceeds the national average.


And the progress continues.  Just this week, Time Magazine reports in its print edition that the Maine division of Casey’s direct services arm, Casey Family Services, has launched an “extreme recruitment” program to find relatives to take in foster children.  The program was pioneered in Missouri, and the story of how it works is beautifully told in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

● Most remarkable: The proportion of Maine foster children who are institutionalized has been cut by at least 73 percent.

In November, 2003, Maine had 28 percent of its foster children in group homes and institutions and only ten percent with relatives (and even that ten percent was an improvement over the Concannon era, when it was only four percent).  By now that’s reversed – 30 percent are with relatives and only ten percent are in so-called “congregate care” – making Maine one of the best in the nation at avoiding such placements.

The independent child welfare ombudsman has found that the reduction in substitute care has come with no compromise of safety. He strongly supports the reforms.

It all prompted Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government to make the transformation of child welfare in Maine a finalist for its prestigious Innovations in American Government awards.

CHANGE ACROSS THE COUNTRY

But it isn’t just Maine that has changed.  Things are starting to get a little better in much of the country, though there is, of course, a long, long way to go.  And I think the progress has a little bit to do with something else that happened in January, 2003: The Frontline programs aired -  three hours in all.  NCCPR contributed an essay to the Frontline website.  There was a lot wrong with the programs, and a lot wrong with how the producers dealt with some of us – so much so that when, a few months ago, they came back to NCCPR and asked for ideas for another program, I declined to help.

But that doesn’t change one simple fact: Logan Marr was a very charismatic child, and Logan’s mother made her own case with enormous power.  They simply overwhelmed any master narrative that anyone, be it Maine DHS or the Frontline producers, tried to impose.

As a result, these programs became the first time in well over a decade that a big national news organization created a work of journalism that called into question the conventional media wisdom about child welfare – the false claims that the system supposedly bends over backwards to give too many chances to sadists and brutes who torture their children. 

For those who weren’t following child welfare then, it’s hard to conceive of just how bad it was.  But imagine that the worst of the recent reporting in the Los Angeles Times was the norm, repeated over and over anywhere and everywhere, and you get some idea.

Looking back now, I think the Frontline programs are where that started to change nationwide.   And that’s why January 31, 2001, just might have been the day child welfare changed.

WHEN PRAISE HURTS

There is always a dilemma in praising a system that has reformed.  It’s important to acknowledge improvement wherever it can be found, in order to encourage more improvement.  At the same time, this can wind up rubbing salt in the wounds of those who were horribly harmed by that system and never benefitted from the changes.  It can do the same to families who suffer right now because there is so much that still needs to change.

The changes in Maine came too late for the family that first took on Kevin Concannon.  And, of course, they came too late for Logan Marr.

Here’s how Mary Callahan sums it up:

There is one more person the reforms would never have happened without and that is a five year old girl named Logan Marr. Long before her death at the hands of her foster mother people had been trying to call attention to the fact that DHS was out of control. Her death made lawmakers listen. Her beautiful face made the public care.


I know her family would rather have her back than hear how important she was to the state of Maine but no one can do that for them. All we can do on the 10^th anniversary of her death January 31 is thank them for their dignity and say we are sorry. 

Foster care in America The day child welfare changed? (Part one)

            Someday, people just might look back at January 31, 2001 as the day child welfare changed.  Of course no one knew it at the time.  And there was no guarantee that anything good would come of the terrible tragedy that occurred on that day.

            But what happened that day started a chain of events that transformed child welfare in one state, and may have been a turning point for the nation.

            To understand that day, we need to go back some months earlier, to when a little girl in Maine named Logan Marr, and her sister Bailey, were taken from her mother, Christy.

Christy had some problems, but she had never harmed Logan nor had she allowed anyone else to harm her. Mostly, Christy’s problem was, she was poor.

Logan may have been abused in her first foster home. After that, Logan and her sister, Bailey, were moved to the home of Sally Schofield, herself a former caseworker for the child welfare agency.

In her searing account of the case, Logan’s Truth, award-winning independent journalist Terrilyn Simpson published a letter that Christy wrote to Logan’s new foster mother:

Dear Sally, 
My name is Christy. I'm Logan and Bailey's Mom. I'm writing this so you can know and understand my children. I thought I would let you know their likes and dislikes. 
Logan - she likes butterflies, pizza (what kid doesn't?), flavored noodles, pitted black olives (she likes to put them on her fingers), white cheese, grape soda, Babes in Toyland (her favorite movie) the Cartoon Arthur. Logan's dislikes - peas, fish sticks, going to bed early, not picking out her clothes. Bailey's likes - her brown teddy bear blanket (she takes it everywhere, including visits), dry cereal, pitted black olives, cheese, eggs, cooked carrots. 
Bailey's dislikes - having her poopie diaper changed (if you haven't noticed), someone taking her pacifier, fish sticks, someone feeding her (she likes to do it herself). Please ask [caseworker] Allison Peters what the kids are allergic to. 
I don't blame you for not wanting me to know who you are, I will respect that. Regardless of what you have heard or read, I love my little ladies with all my heart. I have never hit, spanked or put my hands on my girls. I do respect my children. I'm not saying you would or wouldn't, but Please don't hit or hurt my children. The girls have already been through enough they don't need the added stress in their life. 
Every night I look up at the sky about 7:45pm and say goodnight to my girls. In closing, I want to thank you for taking the time to read this. Please tell the girls before they go to bed I love them and give them a big hug and kiss. Thanks again! 
--Christy

A few months later, in December, 2000, Logan could be heard on home video during a supervised visit complaining that her foster mother hurt her. Nothing was done. Indeed, at one point, the caseworker who was supposed to be supervising the placement sent an e-mail to Sally Schofield gloating about the prospect of terminating parental rights, so Logan could live with Schofield forever.

About six weeks after that visit, - on January 31, 2001, to be precise, Logan was dead.

Sally Schofield was convicted of taking Logan down to the basement and tying her to a high chair with 42 feet of duct tape. She died of asphyxiation.

The story easily could have ended there.  How and why it didn’t, and how January 31, 2001 may have become the day that changed child welfare, is the topic of the next post on this Blog.

Two notable works of journalism

…one to read, one to see.


UPDATE: THE "NEED TO KNOW" SEGMENT NOW IS AVAILABLE ONLINE HERE.  (Best bet seems to be to click on "Watch the Full Episode" in the upper right; it's the first story.  When I try clicking on the video of the story alone it tends to cut out about half-way through.)

The cover story in the current issue of the D.C. alternative weekly CityPaper gives hope that the reports of the death of great investigative journalism have been at least slightly exaggerated.  The story is all about the ugly, expensive, soul-destroying world of “residential treatment.”

And tonight, the PBS series Need to Know airs a segment on the misuse and overuse of psychiatric medications on foster children.  Since PBS fiefdoms – I mean stations – consider it a violation of their God-given rights to cooperate and air programs at the same time more than a few days a week, you’ll have to check your local listings for the time.  But it’s on at 8:30pm in New York and 10:30pm in D.C.

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.  

Another LA foster care story ignored by the LA Times

Sadly, we must begin the New Year picking up where we left off – with still another story of child welfare tragedy ignored by the Los Angeles Times and possibly caused in part by the Los Angeles Times.

On August 20, 2009 I was in Los Angeles, holding a news conference along with the excellent local grassroots group DCFS-Give Us Back Our Children.  We warned that bad journalism, (particularly the bad journalism of Garrett Therolf, the embattled reporter for the beleaguered Los Angeles Times) was likely to set off a foster-care panic – a sharp sudden surge in children needlessly taken from their parents.  (The material we released that day is on our website here).

As we would confirm by filing our own California Public Records Act request, not only was there such a panic, one of the worst months of the panic was August, 2009, with the number of children taken from their parents that month 20 percent higher than the same month the previous year.

Even as we issued the warning, on August 20, 2009, a little boy named Eamon was becoming a likely victim of that panic.

Pasadena Weekly told the story of Eamon, his sister, and their mother Mary O’Connor with rare insight and compassion last month.  That story, and a heartbreaking follow-up,  make clear that Eamon was born with three strikes against him.  His mother is poor.  She is, as the lawyer who handled an eviction case for her puts it, “a little odd” – but not in any way that indicated the slightest danger to her son.  And strike three for Eamon was being born when caseworkers for the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services were especially paranoid about being scapegoated by Therolf for leaving a child in her or his own home and having something go wrong. 

FLUNKING THE ATTITUDE TEST

Actually, make it four strikes.  Ms. O’Connor flunked what a Los Angeles lawyer described to me decades ago as “the attitude test.”  She didn’t know how to put on an act of groveling before DCFS workers, begging forgiveness (not that there is any evidence that there was anything for which she needed to be forgiven) and promising to jump through every hoop set before her.  Instead, she fought back in ways even more likely to anger a judge and scare a DCFS worker.

None of which changes one basic fact: There was no problem in Ms. O’Connor’s home that couldn’t have been solved with help to cope with the concrete problems of poverty and the kind of mental health care that affluent families easily can buy. 

There are other factors that may be at play here as well.

It appears that Eamon was put on the adoption track very quickly – placed a middle-class couple of “UCLA graduates” who can’t wait to adopt the boy.  California law may be the most draconian in the nation when it comes to allowing this, letting DCFS to rush to seek termination for infants much sooner than required by federal law.   The alternative weekly in San Jose did a good story about this more than a decade ago.

THE PERNICIOUS PRACTICE OF “CONCURRENT PLANNING”

This case also illustrates the harm of a pernicious practice known as “concurrent planning,” in which child welfare agency workers supposedly do their very best to reunite a child with his birth parents while, at the very same time, placing the child with parents desperate to adopt.  This is like placing before a small child a bowl of broccoli and a bowl of ice cream and trusting that he will eat them both.

Similarly, middle class foster parents desperate to adopt a child are told: “now remember, your first job is to help work to reunite this family, but if by some chance you fail at that, then you get what you really want, a poor person’s child for your very own.”  As one such parent in New Jersey once told The New York Times, in real life the “mantra” for such parents is: “I'm on a plane to South America if they think they're getting this baby back.''

This also may be an example of the one and only time that that the racism that pervades child welfare may work in reverse.  Black families are more likely to be investigated, more likely to have cases substantiated and more likely to have children taken away than white families.  But then Black children tend to stay in foster care longer.

It’s a matter of supply and demand.  White infants are very rare in foster care systems, especially large urban systems – and caseworkers know that this is the one time when families will be lining up to adopt.

I’m not suggesting that DCFS is engaged in “baby-selling” or other similar allegations one sometimes hears.   I’m not even suggesting that DCFS is doing it for the bounty the agency will receive from the federal government, somewhere between $4,000 and $12,000, if the adoption exceeds a baseline number set by a federal formula.  (Funny, Garrett Therolf never writes about that financial incentive). Rather, I’m suggesting that human nature is at play, the common, albeit illegal “comparison shopping” that occurs when middle-class professionals have power over poor people -  as in workers thinking “This baby is so cute.  He’d be so much better off with this nice couple who are desperate for a child.”

BIAS AGAINST EXTENDED FAMILIES

What also may be at play is the way the bias against birth parents often extends to their extended families. I say that because there is another middle-class professional couple that stands ready to adopt Eamon: Mary O’Connor’s own parents.  But they’ve been turned down.  Nobody knows why (DCFS can get away with keeping all that secret).  In addition to bias against birth parents’ families another possibility is simply the fact that the grandparents live in Illinois, and interstate placements are a huge hassle.

As Celeste Fremon writes in discussing the case on WitnessLA today:

while is no doubt true that the UCLA grads can give Eamon far more in the way of opportunities than Mary O’Connor likely ever can, let us hope we are not yet parceling out other people’s children on that basis.

And now, as Pasadena Weekly explains, the same fate may befall Eamon’s sister.  That’s partly because, as O’Connor acknowledges, she “panicked.”  When parents panic the system may punish their children forever.  When caseworkers panic and rush to tear apart families, the workers suffer no consequences at all.  (Contrary to what workers claim, they are not “damned if they do and damned if they don’t.”  When it comes to taking away children, they’re only damned if they don’t.)

What is happening to Mary O’Connor and her children could have happened in any child welfare system at any time.  But it was more likely to happen in Los Angeles County in August, 2009.  No wonder the Los Angeles Times is ignoring the story.  Actually, that’s just as well – were the Times news side to get interested, it would probably be only to trash Mary O’Connor for every mistake she’s ever made and rejoice over the loss of her children.

WEDNESDAY: A post to the website of The Washington Post illustrates the perils of paying foster parents too much.