Cheating Children

FORUM COLUMN
By John Burton and Miriam Aroni Krinsky
In an 11th hour line-item budget veto earlier this summer, Gov. Schwarzenegger cut $80 million from the state's child welfare budget - a significant reduction in California's already dramatically under-funded commitment to our most vulnerable children. Ironically, this past week our state leaders have been grappling with reforms of our state's overcrowded and struggling prison system, at the exact time when the governor's unilateral cuts will put more at risk children on a path to the criminal justice system.
How do these issues connect?
The governor's cuts necessarily will lead to substantial reductions in social workers and support for abused and neglected children in a foster care system that is overburdened and understaffed. Here in Los Angeles, with nearly 20,000 foster children, these cuts will amount to a $17 million reduction in supportive services aimed at reunifying children with their parents, keeping struggling families intact and developing after-care support services for families to prevent re-entry of children into foster care.
Merely two years ago, the governor signed a package of reforms with supplemental - and long overdue - resources aimed at sensibly redoubling our commitment to struggling children and families. In a statement at that time, he aptly observed that "a society is judged by how it treats its most vulnerable" and vowed to "make the foster care system stronger for birth parents, foster parents, and especially our youth." Unfortunately that pledge now seems to have evaporated.
The governor's fiscal cuts to an already overtaxed system will put thousands of vulnerable children at risk at a time when economic pressures are resulting in an even greater need to create safety nets for families seeking to cope with adversity. These reductions will also turn back the clock on significant improvements in our state's foster care system over the last few years- the rates of reunification with birth families and adoption are up, children are moving more quickly to permanency and partnerships with community groups have enabled more children to remain safely in their homes and avoid the all-too-common cycle of foster care drift. These efforts are premised on every part of the system - attorneys, judges, lawyers and social workers - having the time, resources and support to do their jobs responsibly.
Yet recent reports make clear that social worker caseloads in Los Angeles County are considerably higher than surrounding areas and well in excess of recommended state and national standards (the L.A. county social worker caseload ratio was 22 children per worker for July 2009, compared with 15-to-1 in Orange, 12-to-1 in Ventura, 18-to-1 in Riverside and 17-to-1 in San Diego counties; state studies recommend an caseload of 15 children per caseworker). Similarly, the recent comprehensive report issued by the California Blue Ribbon Commission on Children in Foster Care (of which one of us is a member) underscored the overwhelming caseloads and crowded dockets facing our juvenile courts, with full-time dependency court judges carrying an average caseload of 1,000 attorneys representing an average of over 270 parents or children (with caseloads as high as over 500 children per attorney in some parts of the state), and hearings that often last no more than a matter of minutes. This is hardly a picture that can endure funding reductions!
An overworked system means underserved children. These cuts will leave more youth languishing in foster care until they eventually "age out" at 18, a path that has been empirically proven to lead to homelessness, unemployment and reliance on social services, a gateway into our hospitals and psychiatric institutions, and - in far too many cases - adult incarceration. Indeed, according to testimony provided at the California Select Committee on Foster Care, an astounding 70 percent of California prison inmates have spent time in the foster care system.
The Midwest Study of Adult Functioning of Former Foster Youth, a five-year study that tracked youth who "age out" of foster care, confirmed that the youth we fail in our foster care system today are at greater risk of adult incarceration tomorrow. Within 18 months after "aging out" of foster care, 54 percent of young men and 25 percent of young women had been incarcerated. No parent would stand for these outcomes; yet we allow this cycle of hopelessness to continue for the children we all collectively commit to parent when we bring them into our charge.
In California, this incarceration doesn't come cheap: The average price for a year in prison is $35,587. That figure doesn't even begin to account for the accompanying human toll and loss of potential we perpetuate when we irresponsibly attend to the needs of our foster youth.
These facts make clear that the governor's cuts to child welfare aren't simply morally wrong, they are also fiscally unsound. He has leveraged short-term savings by imposing long-term costs on California taxpayers. That these cuts are just a quick budget gimmick is bad enough; Their impact on California's abused and neglected children makes them inexcusable and irresponsible.
Critics may argue that the $80 million cut to child welfare is similar to the other cuts in the state budget, but they're wrong: Most other cuts, while difficult to see put in place, were debated over time, agreed to by the Legislature and had bipartisan support. The governor's $80 million child welfare cut was a unilateral action that had been rejected by the Legislature weeks before. Moreover, it deprives our state of $44 million in matching federal child welfare money, thereby resulting in a total cut to programs for foster children and other at-risk youth of $124 million per year.
The Legislature and governor must act quickly to restore this $80 million as it considers prison reforms this week and other budgetary issues during special legislative sessions likely to be convened in the coming months. No serious effort to address prison budgets and justice system challenges can exclude the needs of these at-risk children.
There is no secret formula or complicated "fix." An effective child welfare system will keep kids out of prison and keep prison costs down. Pay a little now, or pay a lot more later.
We must not mortgage the future of our collective children nor make them pay the price for our broken budget system. Our state's leaders should join together today to restore the $80 million in the governor's ill-advised child welfare cuts. Our collective failure to do so will cast a shadow not simply on how our societal fabric is "judged," but also on the health, safety and vibrancy of our community as a whole.
John Burton is the chair of the John Burton Foundation for Children Without Homes and chair of California State Democratic Party. Miriam Aroni Krinsky is a member of the California Blue Ribbon Commission on Foster Care and also serves as a lecturer at the UCLA School of Public Affairs and an adjunct professor at Loyola Law School.