A bipartisan group of lawmakers has formed what they’re calling the Foster Care Caucus to focus on passing laws and funding the costs to reform Virginia’s overwhelmed system of caring for some of the state’s most vulnerable children.
A report released in December by the state legislature’s oversight body found that the Department of Social Services, the agency responsible for overseeing the foster care system, fails to recruit enough foster parents, falls behind the national averages for placing children with relatives and finding permanent homes, overwhelms caseworkers and lacks oversight.
“A lot of us who work cases with regard to foster care in our districts know that something wasn’t working right,” Sen. Bryce Reeves, R-Spotsylvania, a member of the caucus and chair of the Senate Rehabilitation and Social Services Committee, said at a news conference Tuesday. “We need to address the issues that are critical to the care, custody and control of our foster care children to have a direct impact on day one and to allow us some oversight.”
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Del. Emily Brewer, R-Suffolk, and Sen. Monty Mason, D-Williamsburg, the chairs of the caucus, heard presentations from DSS Director of Family Services Carl Ayers and Voices for Virginia’s Children policy analyst Allison Gilbreath at the first caucus meeting Tuesday morning.
Ayers said Virginia is one of the first states working to implement preventive services aimed at keeping children with their families. The state is using federal funding that was recently allocated when the Family First Prevention Services Act passed in the U.S. Congress last year.
“We are talking monumental legislation,” Ayers said. “It’s an opportunity for us, as a system, to do better in a way we haven’t been able to.”
The funding will be provided only to programs approved by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — which, so far, are 12 evidence-based programs, including Trauma Focused-Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Parent-Child Interaction Therapy, according to the Child Welfare League of America — and for residential programs that meet federal criteria.
Mason said 31 of Virginia’s 141 group or institutional homes are accredited, one of the requirements to meet federal standards. One of his legislative priorities is to identify the programs that are close to qualifying and provide them the resources they need to meet the threshold.
Gilbreath reported to the caucus on the state of kinship care, when a child is placed with a relative instead of foster parents. Evidence shows that placing a child with family increases the likelihood the child will find a permanent home and more stable life, she said.
In Virginia, 6 percent of children in foster care are placed with a relative, compared with 32 percent nationwide.
Voices for Virginia’s Children conducted a listening tour, visiting cities across the state to ask what challenges relative caregivers face, and found that a lack of financial help and support with navigating the legal, health care and social services systems have created barriers to kinship care.
Del. Jennifer Carroll Foy, D-Prince William, a member of the caucus and a foster mother, has introduced a bill that would require DSS to inform family members when a child enters the foster care system.
“When a child is placed with family, that lessens the amount of trauma and instability that that child has to encounter,” Carroll Foy said. “These are our children. These are our responsibilities.”
Members of the caucus have introduced several other bills, including one for the creation of a children’s ombudsman to oversee child-serving agencies, one that would protect the credit and identity of teens in the foster care system, and one that would promote discussion about communication between children and their families while in foster care.
Sen. Janet Howell, D-Fairfax, said she plans to push about $3 million through the Senate Finance Committee to address some of the recommendations from the DSS oversight report.
“When you take children from the families that God put them in, you have a huge moral responsibility to them,” Howell said. “We have been failing.”
The oversight report made 34 recommendations to the General Assembly and DSS that could improve foster care operations, including directing DSS to review all serious and safety-related cases in 2017 and 2018 and resolve them by Nov. 1, require a strategic plan to recruit and retain foster families, and direct DSS to conduct a review of all cases where a child is placed in a group or institutional home, identify those who don’t need the additional care and make efforts to find family-based placements for those children.