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FAMILY • Oct. 12, 2005
Foster Care: A 'Natural Disaster' for Children

Forum Column
By Miriam Aroni Krinsky

        As we view the destruction left in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, our hearts cannot help but go out to the residents of the Gulf Coast. "More than 500,000 evacuees from Hurricane Katrina are on the move," USA Today noted recently. "It is a storm surge of the dispossessed, an exodus on a historic scale" for the United States.
        Natural disasters like these reinforce how quickly and how tragically life can change. They remind us that everything we count on can be lost in an instant and that, too often, life's cruel twists and turns are completely beyond our control. To be uprooted suddenly from all that had seemed solid and familiar in life - one's home, one's treasured possessions, one's neighborhood and one's entire way of life - is to be truly drifting aimlessly on an unwelcoming sea.
        Ironically, the staggering figure of half a million people displaced by Hurricane Katrina mirrors almost identically the half a million-plus abused and neglected children adrift in our nation's foster care system. Our community's compassion and collective resolve must go out to them as well.
        Foster children, too, find themselves separated without warning from all that is familiar in their lives. To make matters worse, youth living in our foster care system far too often experience this devastation again and again - and at a time when emotional and chronological development and maturity least enable them to cope.
        In addition to the havoc they wreaked, however, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita also brought forth the best and noblest outpouring of our nation's sense of community and impressive spirit of humanitarianism. People from all corners of our country came together on behalf of those less fortunate and jointly assumed responsibility for their welfare.
        These two complementary themes apply with equal force on a daily basis as related to our foster care system - the instantaneous loss of every anchor in one's life and the critical need and responsibility of our entire community to step up and help. Just as a nation we face enormous challenges in attending to the displaced residents evacuated as a result of the recent hurricanes, we similarly face daunting challenges in attending to the ongoing needs of the displaced youth in our child welfare system.
        When we remove children from their families because they cannot safely remain there, our nation's courts stand in the shoes of the parent. They do this on behalf of all the community. In this role, courts have the responsibility for ensuring that abused and neglected children find a refuge that promotes and protects both their immediate safety and well being and their long-term prospects for permanence.
        A number of challenges make it difficult for our courts to achieve the lofty goals we have set for their oversight of our most vulnerable children. "The greatest obstacle to meaningful reform is an unwillingness on the part of both state and local leaders to take responsibility for reforming the foster care system," observed Michael E. Alpert, chairman of the California's bipartisan, independent Little Hoover Commission, in 2003. "When the state intervenes to protect the lives of children it takes on a tremendous obligation. It is time for us to live up to that obligation."
        In their 2004 report, the nonpartisan Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care identified several critical reforms that could improve the supervision of child welfare cases in thousands of courts throughout the nation. Among their recommendations were sensible changes in the court and legal process that attends to the needs of dependent children, including: better information and tracking systems, improved training for attorneys and court personnel, enhanced collaboration among organizations that serve foster youth, an effective and adequately supported legal voice in court for children and parents, and strong judicial leadership.
        Momentum is now building as leaders in our governmental and judicial community responds to these calls for action with an outpouring of interest in better meeting the crucial needs of the foster care system.
        Last month, a first-ever convening of teams under the leadership of chief justices from around the country gathered together to craft new approaches and encourage enhanced collaboration by judicial, child welfare and advocacy leaders in attending to the needs of children in foster care. The four-day "Changing Lives by Changing Systems: National Judicial Leadership Summit on the Protection from Children," held in late September in Bloomington, Minn. and co-sponsored by the National Center for State Courts, the Conference of Chief Justices, the Conference of State Court Administrators, and the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, challenged each state's leadership to create an individualized action plan to improve its child protection procedures and programs.
        California's team was led by California State Supreme Court Associate Justice Carlos Moreno and Court Administrative Director William Vickrey, and included Department of Social Services Director Dennis Boyle as well as other judicial, child welfare and advocacy leaders from around our state. Those leaders have committed, in the coming months, to work together to develop concrete plans for improving our court and child welfare system.
        Calls for reform of our court and legal process also are mounting among our legislative leaders. Two bills recently introduced in Congress propose significant and long overdue reforms in the way our courts deal with foster youth. These initiatives seek to implement specific recommendations of the Pew Commission aimed at enhancing the functioning of our dependency judicial system.
        The We Care Act: Working to Enhance Courts for At-risk and Endangered Kids Act of 2005 was introduced by Sens. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, and Jay Rockefeller, D-West Va. The We Care Act aims to strengthen the courts that make life-altering decisions regarding foster youth.
        The We Care Act's provisions include:
• Ten million dollars for grants for training of judges and court personnel, of which a significant portion must be used for joint training between courts and child welfare agencies.
• Ten million dollars for grants to the highest state court for the development and implementation of outcome measures related to safety, permanency, due process and timeliness of court proceedings.
• Mandates to states to develop standards of practice for attorneys appearing in child abuse and neglect proceedings.
• Loan forgiveness for attorneys who practice in family, domestic and juvenile courts, and for social workers who work within the child welfare system.
• Increased funding for the expansion of the Court Appointed Special Advocate program.
• A provision that would ease the placement of children in foster care from one state to another, for the purposes of speeding adoptions out of the foster care system.
        The Fostering our Future Act (HR3758) was introduced by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Pasadena. This bill underscores Congress' commitment to legal representation of children and parents, thereby ensuring that all parties have a voice in these decisive court proceedings.
        The Fostering our Future Act includes provisions that:
• Promote and fund measurements and record keeping so that courts can better analyze caseloads and track results for youth in each state.
• Support joint training programs for court personnel, attorneys and child welfare advocates.
• Provide loan forgiveness for both new and practicing dependency attorneys to encourage the highest quality representation for children.
• Call for a federal Government Accountability Office study to compare state procedures and promote and establish best practices in regard to legal representation of children, child welfare and court collaborations, and participation of children in their own proceedings.
        As DeWine stated on the floor of the Senate, "When Congress passed the Adoption and Safe Families Act, I believed it was a good start. Congress, however, would have to do more to make sure that every child has the opportunity to live in a safe, stable, loving and permanent home. One of the essential ingredients is an efficiently operating court system - a system that puts the principles embodied in the law into practice."
        It is the American way to rally around victims of disaster with whatever resources we can offer. We have come together as a nation to rebuild the homes and lives of the 500,000 evacuees tragically uprooted by Hurricane Katrina. We owe no less to the 500,000 vulnerable children who are too often equally adrift in our foster care system.

Miriam Aroni Krinsky is executive director of the Children's Law Center of Los Angeles, a nonprofit organization that represents abused and neglected children in the Los Angeles dependency court system.