How to stop throwing away kids: Start by following one KC police officer’s example
With its series “Throwaway Kids,” The Kansas City Star has raised the bar for journalism about child welfare all over America. The very fact that reporters Laura Bauer and Judy L. Thomas had to begin their search for answers in America’s prisons speaks volumes about how we destroy children in the name of “saving” them.
Fortunately, the person who knows best how to fix it is right in Kansas City. He is Sgt. A.J. Henry of the Kansas City Police Department.
As The Star reported in 2018, when Henry found a mother and her three small children sleeping in a stairwell with no place to go, he could have handled it the easy way: Call child protective services and have the children thrown into foster care. Had he done that, those children easily could have wound up years later just like the inmates profiled in “Throwaway Kids.”
In a system that routinely confuses poverty with neglect, such cases are far more typical than the horror stories that make headlines. Henry apparently knew that. So instead, he did it the hard way: mobilizing a network of community resources to give the family the concrete help they needed to stay together. He and other officers even chipped in some of their own money.
That illustrates the heart of the problem: When it comes to child welfare, throwing kids into foster care is easy, and everything else is hard. It needs to be the other way around.
As Bauer and Thomas document so well, part of the problem is that the federal government spends vastly more on foster care than on helping to keep children out of foster care in the first place. But the highly-touted Family First Act won’t change that much. Family First funds only an extremely limited array of services under extremely limited circumstances.
Of all the help mobilized by Henry, the amount that would be reimbursed by Family First is exactly zero.
So states will have to step up. The good news is that even with the state picking up the whole tab, curbing foster care saves taxpayers money. That’s partly because the most useful help — day care, rent subsidies and just plain cash — also is the cheapest.
But families need more. Instead of having to rely on the good luck of running across people like Henry, families need strong advocates in their corner from day one. That means teams of lawyers, social workers and parent advocates. No, that’s not to get “bad parents” off. It’s to craft alternatives to the cookie-cutter service plans churned out by child welfare agencies that usually provide no real help and sometimes make things worse.
The approach is widely used in New York City and a massive study found it dramatically reduced time in foster care with no compromise of child safety. It’s part of the reason New York City takes away children at less than one-third the rate of Missouri and less than one-fourth the rate of Kansas. And for this kind of legal assistance, in many cases, the federal government will pay half the cost.
Of course not every family is like the one saved by Sgt. A.J. Henry. Some children really must be taken from their parents. But Bauer and Thomas made a crucial connection. As they wrote:
“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.”
The Star has shown America how to end the foster-care-to-prison pipeline: Go to the beginning and shut off the spigot.
Richard Wexler is executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform at nccpr.org
This story was originally published December 22, 2019 at 5:00 AM with the headline "How to stop throwing away kids: Start by following one KC police officer’s example."