An amazing thing has happened at the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. The relentless growth in the number of abused and neglected children washing into the system has abruptly stopped.
That doesn’t mean fewer kids are being abused and neglected. But it means fewer of them are going into the DCFS bureaucracy. And by all indications, they’re none the worse for it.
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Through the 1990s, the number of kids coming into foster care has been growing by an astonishing 20 percent a year. As a result, caseworkers and the courts have been overwhelmed, emergency shelters have been packed and foster homes have been in short supply. The yearly budget for DCFS has soared past $1.3 billion and the number of kids in its care has reached 50,000.
But a few years ago, folks at DCFS got wind of something that was going on. The big growth was in cases where mom and dad had taken off, but the kids still had family–usually an aunt or a grandmother willing to care for them. Often, the kids had been living with their relatives for months or years before they were reported to DCFS. But that didn’t matter. When those kids were reported to DCFS, they were deemed to be abandoned children and off they went into the system.
A caseworker had to check on them, the kids had to go to Juvenile Court, and the aunt or uncle was paid to be a foster parent.
A year ago, Gov. Jim Edgar and DCFS Director Jess McDonald decided to change that. If the kids were in good hands with an aunt or grandmother, the state would stay out of their way.
If the family was poor, it could get Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which amounts to a lot less than foster parents are paid. If the family was in a jam, DCFS would help them get a bed or some clothes, but then it would step back. The children would not become part of the bureaucracy. They would have no lawyer, no caseworker, no trips to court.
If DCFS asked relatives to take in a child who wasn’t living in their home, they would be paid as foster parents only if they went through a rigorous licensing process. If they didn’t go for the license, they’d get about $100 a month less.
When Edgar and McDonald revealed these changes, many of the do-gooders in child welfare immediately cried in anguish. They predicted that when the aunts and uncles learned their checks would be reduced, they would dump the kids, who would have to go live with strangers.
“We’re talking about 5,000 Baby Richards . . .” one lawyer for the Legal Assistance Foundation said.
This assumption that relatives would kick out their own flesh and blood because the kid no longer had a $100 bill attached to his diaper didn’t show a lot of faith in human nature. And maybe there was reason to think that way: If the mom and dad didn’t want the kid, why would the aunt or uncle?
Ah, but it didn’t happen. The relatives are keeping the kids. And that has created a dramatic breakthrough for DCFS.
Suddenly, the flood is a trickle. In the last year, the number of kids found to be victims of abuse and neglect has dropped by 26 percent. The number of kids going into foster care has declined dramatically. The number of calls to the child abuse hotline is down. For the first time in years, the Juvenile Court is closing more cases than it is opening. There are other things in play, but the single greatest reason is the change in relative care.
There is no evidence that relatives are dumping the kids because they aren’t getting as much money. If they were dumping them, or abusing them, those kids would be showing up at the emergency shelters or going to other foster homes. That’s not happening.
Lo and behold, families are doing what families do. When there is a crisis, they rally. They’re taking care of their own. And DCFS isn’t running their lives.
This isn’t just a case of DCFS coming to its senses. It seems clear now that, in some cases, the agency was being gamed. It was being gamed by some well-meaning people, but gamed nonetheless.
It was being used as an alternative to welfare. Some attorneys and social workers told relatives who were caring for kids that if they just reported the kids to DCFS, they could get more money than AFDC paid them. That was putting a little extra cash in some families’ pockets, but it was devastating DCFS and the juvenile courts, which had to deal with the kids.
For the first time since the decade-long explosion in reports of child abuse and neglect, there is reason to think that DCFS might have a fighting chance at handling it.
You don’t hear the child welfare advocates boasting about this great turn of events, probably because they fought the changes in relative care. The Legal Assistance Foundation filed suit and stalled the reduction in payments to some relatives who weren’t licensed as foster parents. As a result, the state will save $25 million to $30 million less this year than it had expected.
The sobering part of all this is that the decline in numbers doesn’t mean fewer children are actually being abused or neglected. Nobody’s figured out a way to fix that. And thousands of children in Illinois are still living in poverty. Nobody’s figured out a way to fix that, either.
But it does mean that the folks at DCFS and the courts can catch their breath, and spend their time and money on the kids who really have been hurt, who really don’t have a family.
Edgar and McDonald took some heat for pushing these changes, but they made the right move. And to those people who predicted a Baby Richard Apocalypse . . . smile. Be glad it didn’t happen.
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