STATEMENT OF JANE KNITZER, PROJECT CODIRECTOR,
CHILDREN'S DEFENSE FUND

Ms. KNITZER. Thank you Mr. Chairman.

My name is Jane Knitzer. I represent the Children's Defense
Fund which is a public interest organization that seeks to uncover
problems affecting children. We just released a report which we
shared with all members of this subcommittee on children who are
at risk, or are in placement and we are vitally concerned about the
legislation that you are considering today. Before I briefly summa-
rize our findings for you -- and I did testify before you almost 2
years ago, I would first like to take this opportunity on behalf of
CDF to thank you, Mr. Chairman, and all the other members of
this committee, for your leadership in the last session and your
beginning leadership in this session. We deeply appreciate and we
desperately need it.

Let me briefly highlight what we found in our study because I
think it really ties in very much with some of the issues that have
already been raised in testimony today and last week. We have
three major findings. The first is there is an antifamily bias that
pervades the policies and practices of the child welfare system. The
system works against families, not for them.

The second is that the children who are in these systems, in
child welfare systems are in double jeopardy because they are also
subject to neglect by public officials who have responsibility for
them.

And the third major finding, which is why I am here today, is
the Federal role exacerbates both the antifamily bias and the

public neglect of these children. Let me just for a moment speak in
some detail about these findings.

An antifamily bias is reflected at all points in the placement
process. Children are inappropriately removed from their families.
Let me share with you a case example. In the course of doing our
study we learned about many children. I will share briefly what
turns out to be a fairly typical kind of example of a mother who
was receiving welfare payments who had five children. The oldest
child was 8. She had a retarded 2-year-old and a set of 6-month-old
twins. Her sister was killed in a car accident and the mother
became severely depressed. She felt unable to cope with the heavy
demands of her family. She turned to the local child welfare
agency for assistance and as a result all of the children were placed
in foster care. The mother was never offered crisis counseling.

She was never offered a home maker to give her a respite from
her demanding family needs. Instead, at high cost to the taxpayers
the children were placed. This is what it means in the lives of
children. We were actually shocked to find the extent of the antifa-
mily bias once the children are placed. What we found was the
system sometimes actively discouraged parent-child contact. We did
a survey and found that in 140 counties only half even had written
policies requiring parent-child contact, so the case workers office
did not even attempt to arrange visits.

When visits did occur, it is typical for such visits to be in court-
rooms, Just think about visiting with your own child in a court-
room. We even found one county that allowed visiting only on
special occasions such as the childs or the parents birthday. That
latter one is extreme. The courtroom example is not extreme.

We also found that parents did not know when the children were
moved from place to place. They did not know where the children
were.

The antifamily bias continues at a point when a decision should
be made about the child too often there is no one to make a
decision. Again let me share the case of a child. At the time we
learned about him he was 7. At the age of 4 he was removed from
his foster home because he was appropriate for adoption. The State
then placed him in a child care institution -- removed him from a
foster home and placed him in an institution so he should not
establish too strong ties with foster parents who did not in that
instance want to adopt him.

He was placed in this child care facility as a precursor to his
being adopted. However, the system broke down. The child's case
was never reviewed and at the time we visited the State 3 years
later he was still in the child care facility and had no adoptive case
worker, and there was no tracking mechanism so somebody would
know this child was still sitting there.

This is what it means in the lives of these children. I could go on.

That is an example of the antifamily bias. It is also an example
of public neglect, where there was no case worker for this child and
there he was in an institution. The public neglect of children we
found takes many forms. The first is that case workers -- you have
heard this -- are overburdened and they don't get to know the kids
or facility they are in. As a result, many children are inappropri-
ately placed. This ties into the fiscal problems that we are all

dealing with in terms of the cost of this system. They are also
placed at great distance from their family. We found 10,000 kids
are placed out of State.

And in our report we have a map that looks like airline maps of
kids crisscrossing the country because there is no consideration in
their placement, to placing them in the least restrictive setting and
also the closest possible setting to their home and community
consistent with their special needs.

Our findings tie in with what Senator Pisani said, they are
placed where there are spaces.

We also found that for many of these children there are either
no reviews or the reviews are pro forma. This speaks to the issue
that came up before around the administrative case review, 6
month administrative case review and the 18-month judicial
review.

In our study we found that reviews are simply very often paper
reviews. We even found one instance in Massachusetts where we
were simply told by the case workers -- I might say Massachusetts
has good regulations about review requirements -- that they only
did the case reviews, the administrative reviews, of the child, when
they had a new case worker to train. Otherwise there were no
reviews of the cases.

We believe it is important that there be a provision for an
administrative review built into any bill try to guard against this
sort of problem.

Most States, two-thirds of the States, do not require in addition
to these administrative reviews that there is any independent peri-
odic reviews of the children. New York is one of the 20 that does.
Two-thirds of the States do not require any independent review by
somebody who is not responsible directly for the child and not
within the agency responsible for the child.

You have already heard today how the Federal fiscal dollar is
implicated in sustaining these problems and I am not going to go
into that in detail. Suffice to say it provides incentives in all the
wrong directions.

Let me now turn briefly to some of the specific proposals before
you. We are pleased to see that many of the issues that you ad-
dressed so carefully and with such great detail last year in 7200
are again in the bills before you. We believe it is absolutely crucial
that the address to this issue be comprehensive, that it deal in one
bill with preventive service, with quality of the foster care that the
child receives and with adoption subsidies.

There will be no substitute in terms of reforming the system for
putting those all together in one bill.

Let me just make a few specific comments in terms of some of
the bills that are before you. We believe strongly there must be a
conversion of title IVB program to entitlement program. This is
fundamental. There must be a strong maintenance of effort clause
and there must be a prohibition on the use of any new moneys for
maintenance cost of children in foster care. We also believe the
phase-in approach reflected in the administration bill may in fact
be a realistic way of trying to insure that States are able to comply
with the requirements.

We support wholeheartedly some of the modifications in the
AFDC foster care program proposed in the various bills particular-
ly including voluntarily placed children in the program and second
reimbursing for public agencies for small facilities. We think that
is important. We heard over and over again in our visits to States
there is a desperate need for the development of these kinds of
smaller public facilities particularly for adolescents.

Let me say a word about the voluntary placements of children
that came up briefly before. We believe that an adequate protec-
tion would be the use of the written voluntary placement agree-
ment in which the parental rights and obligations and the State
rights and obligations are made explicit. We are very concerned
about the present system by which children are in fact funneled
through the court.

It is not at all clear to us that the required judicial determina-
tion now serves as a protection for children. In fact, it serves to
guarantee Federal funding and the children in many cases are
simply being run through the court and rubberstamped to become
eligible for AFDC foster care program. We believe it is a better
protection for the children to have those children who should be
placed as a result of court order so placed and voluntarily placed
children should be covered under a different kind of mechanism.

In other words, we are concerned again about the pro forma use
of the court as a trigger for the fiscal dollar.

We are fundamentally opposed to placing a ceiling on the AFDC
foster care program. We too are concerned as Ms. Martinez testi-
fied -- about the inappropriate foster care placements. We do not
believe a cap is the appropriate way to address this problem.

Let me give you three reasons we believe this. First there is
absolutely no substitute in terms of turning around a system for
increased targeted funds for preventive and reunification service
and strong protections including periodic reviews and dispositional
hearings. The administration's bill would impose a cap regardless
of whether the States have such services and protections in place.

We have grave reservations about what the consequences of this
will be in terms of the lives of the children coming into care. There
will be no guarantees that those children who need the care will
get it or that the children in care will be able to be moved through
the system. You can assure with a cap some people will be kept out
of care but how do you insure that the right children are kept out
of care?

Second, we are opposed to a cap because it does not take into
account the realities of increased case loads, of inflation or of new
demands on the child welfare system. For example, in our study -- I
know you have heard this in testimony before -- there are increasin-
gin numbers of adolescents, so-called status offenders who are
being moved into the child welfare system and who need care and
placements. A cap also does not allow for the States that will be
effected by a recent Supreme Court decision which permits the
reimbursement to relatives under the AFDC foster care program if
children are formally placed with them, nor would it be responsive
to the intent of Congressman Downey and Rangel's bill to extend
coverage to voluntarily placed children.

These are all legitimate kinds of demands on the system and a
cap is not responsive to them.

Third, we believe that even after the States have set up the
kinds of service and protections envisioned in this legislation before
you a ceiling would be dysfunctional because presumably then only
the children who truly need foster care will be coming into the
system.

Finally we think it is outrageous that the administration bill
includes adoption subsidies under the ceiling. To put a ceiling on
the numbers of children who can be assured permanence is beyond
foolish public policy. It is inconceivable.

Let me turn now to addressing what we believe is one of the core
elements of this legislation and that is the protections that the bill
affords to children and families. One of the tragedies of the current
system is parents and children have so few protections against its
capricious functioning. We believe that there are a number of
protections that are absolutely essential that must be built into
any kind of legislation and we believe that these protections must
be afforded as a right to each child in foster care and they must be
clearly made a condition of funding under both AFDC foster care
program and the IV-B program.

These protections include preventive and reunification service,
written voluntary placement agreements, case plans, placement in
the least restrictive setting in reasonable proximity to the child's
home community appropriate to the child's needs. Six months peri-
odic case reviews and dispositional hearings. We also believe that
any legislation should specify the due process safeguards to be
afforded to parents and children at various points in the placement
process.

And we believe that it is very important that in this legislation
there be some kind of clear mechanism for fair hearing. Having
said that let me make some comment on what we think are neces-
sary within each of these specific protections to maximize the
likelihood of success.

There is some degree of unanimity in the bills before us as to
these protections. There are however some subtle differences that
may be loopholes or that may be will weaken the effectiveness of
these protections so I would quickly like to run through them.

First, we believe that preventative and reunification service re-
quirements should only be waived in nonemergency situations if a
parent refuses services. Otherwise it can become a loophole for
getting the State off the hook and not offering preventative service.

Second, we believe that the least restrictive close proximity
standard appropriate to the child's needs should apply both under
the AFDC FC program and under Title IVB.

Third, and this we think is very important -- the 18 month dispo-
sitional review mechanism must have some kinds of built-in follow-
up to insure reporting back to the body doing the reviews to make
sure that there is compliance. There must be some continued check
on the bureaucracy to make sure that there is not simply a disposi-
tional order saying free this child for adoption and no further
followup because we can predict that the child may not be freed for
adoption.

So in thinking through the components in the dispositional
review some followup mechanism is absolutely crucial.

We believe that any bill should spell out due process protection
such as the right to notice, the right to participate and the right to
have representation when critical decisions are made about the
children.

Finally on fair hearing mechanism it is not enough to have a fair
hearing mechanism only for the denial of benefits. Parents, foster
parents, children in this system need to have some mechanism
where they can raise questions about the adequacy of service or the
failure to receive the benefits or the service and the protections to
which they are entitled.

We believe -- and others have said -- that these protections will be
cost effective; requiring placement in the least restrictive setting,
would be likely to cost less than overinstitutionalizing children.
Preventative service as Senator Pisani eloquently said, cost less
than foster care.

Finally, I would like to just briefly mention our hope that the
bill will include strong accountability provisions and to reinforce
what Senator Pisani said about the need to build in some of these
mechanisms into the legislation. We believe that accountability
mechanisms ought to be established so there can be increased
public participation both in the planning process for the child
welfare system and in the information available to the public so
they can know what is going on with these children. We also
believe that there must be provisions for adequate periodic onsite
reviews, onsite case reviews as well as reports.

Thirdly, there must be public and periodic data available on
these children and the bill should require this.

Let me make a few specific comments to expand on what I said.
One thing that we believe would be very important would be at the
point that a State becomes eligible for full funding under title IV-B
we believe it is crucial there be a careful determination as to
whether or not the State is really in compliance with the protec-
tion and service requirements of the bill.

We believe this should be an onsite case review kind of mecha-
nism to make sure that in fact individual children are being pro-
tected in the ways envisioned by the bill.

In terms of the need for aggregate data we appreciate the fact
that the administration bill requires an inventory of children. We
are concerned this be more than a one-time inventory. This must
be a periodic kind of inventory. It must be available on a State-by-
State basis and it must be available to the public.

Let me not comment any further on the bills but respond to any
of your questions and just take a minute to make some comments
about title XX.

CDF would like to submit for the record some detailed written
comments. Let me briefly say once again we are appreciative of
your leadership, this subcommittee's leadership and trying to
insure that social services are protected for the people who need
them and we hope to continue to work with you to achieve an
increase in the permanent ceiling to $3.1 billion in 1980 with 70
percent cost of living increase subsequently, retention of the child

care earmarked and the 100 percent nature of that earmarked
under Public Law 94 -- 401, improvement in training efforts.

We are opposed to the administration's proposed 3-percent ceil-
ing. I believe that would be destructive. We would like to submit
for the record more detailed comments.

Let me say I really appreciative the opportunity to testify before
you and again we will be happy to work with you in any way we
can to get these bills passed. Thank you.

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