Special Reports
As U.S. spends billions on foster care, families are pulled apart and forgotten
More from the series
Throwaway Kids - Part Two of Six
Star investigation reveals stark outcomes for America’s foster care children.
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‘We are sending more foster kids to prison than college’
Frequent moves don’t just harm foster kids’ emotions — they hurt their brains
Graduation rate of 35 percent? Many foster children ‘robbed of a good education’
Aging out: Thousands of foster youth graduate to the streets every year
‘The state that neglected me as a kid is the same state that wants to kill me’
For more than a century, the federal government has laid out how states should deal with struggling families.
In 1980, Congress passed a law strengthening that commitment, mandating that child welfare agencies make “reasonable efforts” to keep families together whenever possible.
Many states have lost sight of that edict.
The Star reviewed child welfare funding reports and found that, from Maryland to New Mexico, they spend far less on keeping foster kids in their homes than on moving them into new ones.
In Fiscal Year 2016, Arizona spent just 1 percent of its state and local dollars on in-home prevention and 79 percent on out-of-home placements. For Wisconsin, it was 2 percent versus 58 percent, according to Child Trends, a national research organization.
And Kansas spent 3 percent on in-home prevention compared to 60 percent on out-of-home placements. But the disparity didn’t stop there.
“Over the last five years, Kansas increased foster care spending 100 times more than prevention spending — $28 million versus $264,000,” Linda Bass, president of a nonprofit child welfare agency, told legislators in 2018. “We must do both with a balanced approach.”
When state budgets get tight, funding that would be used on preventive services also gets cut.
The result of all this, The Star found, is a system that can, in effect, punish families for being poor or dysfunctional, particularly along racial lines. Black children enter foster care at a significantly higher rate than white children.
“Often, vulnerable poor families don’t have the money or the power to push back against government intervention,” said Ira Lustbader, an attorney who has spent the past two decades representing children nationwide in class action lawsuits. “Families are ripped apart for poverty and not abuse.
“There are deep biases at play in government intervention. And judgments made that are based on perceptions of poverty and race play out horrifically for too many families.”
Collectively, in child welfare budgets across America, more money is spent on investigating families than on trying to keep them together — 17 percent for child protective services versus 15 percent for in-home preventive services.
The Star, in a yearlong investigation of the long-term outcomes for children who age out of foster care, surveyed nearly 6,000 inmates in a dozen states. Michelle Voorhees was one of them. She believes many former foster kids end up in worse condition than if they had been allowed to stay in their homes.
“Just because their family doesn’t have the means to take care of them doesn’t mean that you should just sever that bond,” said Voorhees, 28, who had two stints in foster care. “So many of these problems truly do stem from poverty.”
Sitting inside the Topeka Correctional Facility in her prison-issued navy blue shirt and olive pants, Voorhees said the state could have done more to keep her with her mother.
“There’s all this money to pay to foster homes and all this money for adoptions and what-not,” she said. “I don’t understand how there is so much funding to rip us away, but no funding to keep us there.”
To be sure, some children need to be removed from their homes and placed in foster care for their own safety and well-being. Some inmates who responded to The Star’s survey conceded that.
“I had good foster care parents, and my mother did a good job when she got us back,” wrote one inmate from Connecticut. “I chose to be with the wrong crowd and make the wrong decisions later in life.”
In recent years, as the number of kids in foster care increased, the dollars used to prevent them from entering foster care were significantly reduced.
From 2006 to 2016, Title IV-B funding — much of which goes toward in-home preventive programs — decreased nationwide by 29 percent, according to the Child Trends survey. Nebraska cut its expenditure by 71 percent, joining Hawaii (49 percent) and Georgia (43 percent).
Congress tried again to step in and send states a message. A new federal law went into effect in 2018 that, for the first time, allows states to use money on in-home prevention that was previously earmarked for foster care.
“Early intervention and family support are two primary areas where having better policies and resources in place would go a long way toward improving outcomes for adults who were in the foster care system,” said U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo.
But the majority of states didn’t sign on for the first year. Instead, many delayed implementation of the Family First Prevention Services Act, which requires states to provide matching funds.
The cost of neglecting in-home preventive services is a clogged and crowded system.
Kids who could have stayed in their homes take up beds in good foster homes that are needed for severely abused and neglected children whose safety is in jeopardy. Because of that, kids from Oregon to Florida and states in between are forced to sleep in child welfare offices or homeless shelters.
Tim Gay, founder of YouThrive, which helps Kansas foster kids transition into adulthood, said he’s worked with many older teens who “would have experienced less trauma if they would have stayed at home.”
“We have this Utopian view that we’re going to remove them from an unhealthy environment and we’re going to put them with this wonderful family that lives out in the suburbs. And they’re going to love them and care for them for the rest of their life,” Gay said.
“That’s the view — and that’s not what happens.”
Removed for neglect, not abuse
The merits of removing kids from troubled homes versus trying to maintain families have been debated since 1909, when President Theodore Roosevelt convened the first White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children.
“Surely nothing ought to interest our people more than the care of the children who are destitute and neglected but not delinquent,” Roosevelt said at the time. “The widowed or deserted mother, if a good woman, willing to work and to do her best, should ordinarily be helped in such fashion as will enable her to bring up her children herself in their natural home.
“... Surely poverty alone should not disrupt the home.”
But often, it has.
Neglect — not physical or sexual abuse — was given as a reason for removal in 62 percent of the cases nationwide.
“If you lock a child in a closet and starve him, that’s neglect,” said Richard Wexler, of the Virginia-based National Coalition for Child Protection Reform. “If your food stamps run out at the end of the month, that’s neglect. Which do you think happens more often? … There is hardly a poor child in America that couldn’t, at some point, be labeled neglected.
“The biggest single problem in American child welfare is the confusion of poverty with neglect, compounded by the racial bias.”
That confusion can play out when a caseworker makes a visit to a “dirty home,” Wexler said.
“She can see the mess and the chaos — she can’t see the love,” he said. “So you see what’s in front of you and the gut reaction is, ‘I just have to rescue this kid.’ You’re not thinking, what’s going to happen 10, 15, 20 years down the line?”
Government statistics show that black children are overrepresented in foster care compared to other races. According to an annual report published this year, black children account for 23 percent of the children in foster care across the country. Fourteen percent of children in the U.S. are black.
Many prison inmates who completed The Star’s survey said they believed they were removed from their homes because of poverty. They said their families would have been stronger with a little support.
“This country has a hesitation for providing anything that looks like welfare to families,” said Clark Peters, a professor of social work at the University of Missouri. “So it is really the animus against poor families that drives this.
“We can all get behind saving the innocent kid with tears streaming down their cheeks. But when that kid becomes a 19-year-old who has a cigarette in his hand, a few tattoos that are far less appealing to many people but just as needy and deserving of love, it’s a harder sell.”
One inmate in the Upper Midwest said he went into foster care after being molested by a babysitter when he was 10.
“They did not have to take me out of my home,” he wrote on the survey. “We were poor and couldn’t afford a lawyer.”
An inmate from Hawaii said when she was moved into foster care, she felt like she lost her identity.
“I felt abandoned not just by my parents but by the same system that was created to protect,” she wrote. “The whole foster care system needs to be broken down, reconstructed on the principle of Children first Family is Everything.”
Lori Ross, a longtime advocate for children in Missouri, said foster care works well for some kids and “they end up in a good place.”
“But for way too many, it fails. I’ve said for decades, ‘If we can’t do better than the situation they are currently in, then why are we taking them away?’”
The pain of separation
All Michelle Voorhees ever wanted was to be home. Her home.
But the state decided in the mid-1990s that her 21-year-old single mother, with three children and another on the way, wasn’t emotionally or mentally fit to care for them. The young mom was struggling. Eventually, all three daughters were put in foster care.
“And I just remember crying, crying for my mom and wondering where she was,” Voorhees said. “I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. I needed my mom.”
Being taken away from her home at age 5 had a lifetime effect on her, Voorhees says now. She believes it shaped who she became — a woman behind bars who struggles with relationships and attachments — and fueled her distrust of people.
Even at such a young age, Voorhees realized she couldn’t share her real feelings or fears.
“My foster mom wanted me to call her mom,” she said. “I couldn’t talk about my other family, I couldn’t talk about how my mom was. I just felt that I did not belong there at all. Because I knew in my heart that I had a real family and that this is not where I’m supposed to be.”
Voorhees soon became withdrawn. She started playing by herself, not wanting anyone to see her with her dolls or her stuffed animals.
“I remember having this whole kind of like secret inner self,” she said, looking back now. “And I think that as I got older, that became a dangerous trait to have, because it affected my communication, it affected how I dealt with my emotions, how I expressed my concerns, my interpersonal relationships, my working relationships, all of that — it profoundly affected that.”
Voorhees remained in foster care for 11 months the first time. She was released to her mother when she was 6. The state then sent her to live with her father, whom she had never met.
But when she was 14, while living again with her mom for a short time, Voorhees went back into the system.
After a couple of weeks in a foster home during her freshman year in high school, she bolted.
“And after that, there was just a series of me running away, me being placed in a different placement, running away, different placement,” she said. “And I really just kind of fell through the cracks.”
When she ran away, Voorhees would often find herself homeless.
“I really was just on the streets and was at the mercy of whatever weirdo decided that he wanted to pick up a 14-year-old girl walking down the street,” she said.
She quickly discovered that when a foster teen runs away, no one comes looking for them.
Eventually, when living on the run got to be too much, she would go back into state care.
“I was placed in 11 different state placements by the time I was 17,” she said. “I had two children during this time, developed a drug addiction, and sex trafficked. I spent a lot of my time in custody as a runaway. I did not graduate high school. I dropped out at 16 and got my GED. I am not sure if I aged out in the traditional sense.
“The state just stopped dealing with me at some point.”
One state’s deep cuts
Families can be helped by programs that provide money for child care or other expenses. But when that pile of funds is reduced, for families it can be the difference between children staying in the home or being removed.
In Kansas, under former Gov. Sam Brownback, the state drastically cut the number of children served by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which helps with food costs, housing and other bills.
In 2010, more than 25,000 children received help from TANF. Seven years later, that number had plunged to 7,500, a 70 percent drop, according to a study conducted by Kansas Appleseed, a justice nonprofit that represents vulnerable Kansans.
Critics of that massive reduction cite research from the University of Kansas that found a connection between those cuts and an increase in the numbers of children in care. In 2010, Kansas had 5,979 children in care. By 2017, it had 7,753 — a 30 percent increase.
Quinn Ried, policy research analyst for Kansas Appleseed, said you could track the number of families getting aid and see the impact of the cuts.
“For families who were living right on the edge, this assistance was enough to allow them to keep their families together,” Ried said. “When that support got taken away from them, poverty prevented them from keeping their families together at that point. This was the tipping point.”
Gov. Laura Kelly, who was a state senator during the TANF reductions, saw the impact.
“I was on the front lines watching those funds get cut,” Kelly told The Star. “We saw the numbers in foster care just skyrocket.”
Now, she said, the state is taking a different approach.
Kansas was one of the first states to implement the Family First initiative. And it’s now using Team Decision Making in a few counties and plans to roll it out statewide.
Social workers join relatives and others in a child’s life to assess whether state services would help a family stay together.
The model began early last month and so far in Johnson and Wyandotte counties, there have been 17 team meetings regarding 36 children. Of those, the team was able to keep 22 children with their families and not involve foster care, a Department for Children and Families spokesman said.
“We hope to reduce the amount of money that we’re spending on foster care just by keeping kids out of the system,” the governor said. “The biological family is our first priority. Helping them stay intact is what we want to do.”
Officials and advocates know that TANF money and social safety nets had helped with that in the past. But since the cuts, there’s been little movement to restore them.
Several bills were introduced in the last legislative session that attempted to address “the shredded safety net programs,” but they went nowhere, according to a Kansas Appleseed report released earlier this month.
“More Kansans experiencing poverty or hardship will fall through the cracks,” the report said, “and children will continue to be removed from their homes at dramatically heightened rates.”
Keeping families together costs less
In 2016, nearly half the $30 billion in federal, state and local funds spent by child welfare agencies went toward out-of-home placements, according to the report by Child Trends, which conducts biennial national surveys of agency expenditures.
A relatively small number of states focus their prevention spending on substance abuse and mental health services, the report found.
“This finding is important given the need for these services among families involved in the child welfare system, as well as the ongoing opioid crisis that is straining many child welfare systems,” the report said. In fiscal 2016, it noted, more than a third of child removals were associated with substance abuse.
Not only is in-home prevention preferred in some cases, it’s cost effective.
The total estimated cost for foster care per year is roughly $25,000 per child, according to the National Council for Adoption. For three siblings, that would be $75,000.
The cost for services to preserve a family could run between $5,000 and $10,000 on average per year.
Bass, president of KVC Kansas, the nonprofit child welfare agency, told a legislative task force last year that by increasing funding for in-home prevention, “we can help additional families who are experiencing challenges.”
“This would help reduce child welfare costs overall by preventing mental/behavioral health, substance use, or conduct situations from escalating to child removal and foster care.”
She said efforts to keep families intact are almost always effective when they are willing participants.
“When they enter family preservation services,” Bass said, “we are really successful at keeping them at home — about nine out of every 10 children.”
Swing of the pendulum
Deciding whether to remove a child from a home is not easy, especially as overwhelmed and understaffed child welfare systems must ensure children’s safety is not compromised.
Judgment calls are made, sometimes based on the philosophy of current agency leaders or the subjective perception of how bad the living conditions are in the home. Decisions can even be driven by headlines and public outcry over a tragedy.
In two instances, a decade apart, Missouri’s foster care kids felt the impact of a mighty — but invisible — pendulum swing.
Often, when a child known to the system is critically injured or dies at home, more kids are taken. Then, when a child dies in foster care, and missteps in the system are revealed, the tendency is to keep more kids at home.
Ross, the longtime child advocate in Missouri, calls it a game. All involved are “pawns in a system that is way bigger than them. … And it screws the whole system up.”
In August 2002, 2-year-old Dominic James’ foster father violently shook him inside the family’s Greene County home. Dominic died in a local hospital.
Calls for change were loud after the public learned a state worker had decided to put him back in the foster home after a previous trip to the hospital.
Then-Gov. Bob Holden pushed to overhaul Missouri’s system. More money and new legislation soon followed.
And immediately, fewer kids were taken into care. From FY 2002 to FY 2006, 19 percent fewer Missouri kids entered state custody, dropping from 7,568 to 6,130. And the next year, the number dropped further.
A decade after Dominic’s death, a 10-year-old girl in Kansas City was rescued from a closet, weighing just 32 pounds. Her mom, who had been investigated for neglect by the state before, had taken her out of school five years before and then kept her hidden.
After that incident, the number of kids coming into state care went up again. From FY 2012 to FY 2016, the number of kids entering foster care increased by nearly 20 percent, from 6,273 to 7,505.
“The general public has no idea when a pendulum has swung,” Ross said. “They have no idea.”
Trauma of being removed
Voorhees uses an analogy to describe what it’s like when a child is removed from her home.
Imagine, she says, that you’re at work one day. The morning starts out normal enough. You feed the dog, drink your coffee and tell your kids goodbye before you leave home.
Then, while at work, everything changes.
“The police show up at your job and they say, ‘OK, we’re moving you to a totally different city,’” she says. “And you don’t know anybody, and you can’t call your family and you can’t call any of your friends and you need to leave your phone here and you can’t take any of your stuff with you. We’ll figure that out later.”
The police then take you to a different location.
“And then tell you to ‘Just wait in this room for a little while, because we’re gonna figure things out,’” she says. “... And then they send you to these really well meaning people but you have no idea who they are.’”
Everything there is different. All you want, Voorhees says, is to contact the people you have a bond with — but you can’t.
“It’s a very disrupting experience,” she says. “And in a lot of ways, it’s a traumatic experience, because all of these things are unexpected. And suddenly, everything in your world that you felt was safe and secure and concrete is not.”
And, she says, “It starts to make you question, well, what can you believe? Who can you trust? You begin to stop valuing certain things. You stop valuing relationships, because they’re not concrete, and they’re not going to be there forever. And you stop investing yourself in certain things.
“And all of a sudden, stability isn’t really important to you. Having goals isn’t important to you. Doing a simple thing like taking a shower in a stranger’s home is a very disconcerting experience. So the more that you get moved around, the more trauma that you endure.”
Eventually, Voorhees stopped trusting people. That disconnection increased as she grew older.
“I had some really antisocial behavior,” she said. “I also had a deep dislike for government agencies — for the police, for social workers. I did not believe that they were on my team.”
In 2014, when she was just 22, she was convicted of aggravated arson, aggravated burglary and second-degree murder in the death of a southeast Kansas woman whose remains were found in the rubble of a burned-out home.
Prosecutors said Voorhees and a 26-year-old man went to the house to retrieve property that had been stolen from Voorhees, and the man put a pipe bomb on a mattress and lit the fuse. The pipe bomb did not explode, but set the house on fire. Voorhees and the man said they thought the house was empty at the time.
Voorhees was sentenced to nearly 24 years in prison. The earliest she could be released is 2033. The man received a life sentence with a possibility of parole after 20 years.
Through it all, Voorhees and her mom have stayed connected.
She often thinks of how life could have been different if she were able to stay with her mother for all of her childhood. To know that she was always safe and loved.
“Had my mom just had a little bit of help, had she had enough money to buy her own vehicle, had she had enough money to relocate herself from an abusive situation, had she not had to have been dependent on men in the first place for any kind of financial stability, I don’t believe that she would have made some of the decisions that she made,” Voorhees says. “I don’t believe that she would have struggled as a mother, because my mom is a good mom.”
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