HEARING
    BEFORE THE
    SELECT COMMITTEE ON
    CHILDREN, YOUTH AND FAMILIES
    HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
    ONE HUNDREDTH CONGRESS
    FIRST EDITION

    HEARING HELD IN WASHINGTON, DC, APRIL 22, 1987



    CONTINUING CRISIS IN FOSTER CARE: ISSUES
    AND PROBLEMS

    WEDNESDAY, APRIL 22, 1987



      HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,
      SELECT COMMITTEE ON CHILDREN, YOUTH AND FAMILIES
      Washington, DC


      The Select Committee met pursuant to call at 9:30 a.m., in room
      2261, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. George Miller [chair-
      man of the Select Committee] presiding.

      Members present: Representatives Miller, Boggs, Wheat, Evans,
      Skaggs, Coats, Durbin, Weiss, Hastert, Grandy, Johnson, and Pack-
      ard.

      Staff present: Ann Rosewater, staff director; Karabelle Pizzigati,
      professional staff; Ellen O'Connell, secretary; Spencer Hagen Kelly,
      minority research staff; and Joan Godley, committee clerk.

      Chairman MILLER.The Select Committee on Children, Youth,
      and Families will come to order. We are meeting today to continue
      the Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families' examina-
      tion of children placed out of their homes in the custody of the
      State.

      This hearing will focus specifically on the foster care system
      which is intended to provide temporary homes for children, most
      frequently victims of abuse or neglect, when their own families are
      incapable of providing suitable parental supervision. Foster care is
      a subject of deep personal importance to me.

      A dozen years ago, I initiated an intensive investigation of our
      nation's foster care program. That query began when an official of
      the Department of Health, Education and Welfare admitted to me
      that the government had no idea where many of the 500,000 foster
      children were living, what services they were receiving, or whether
      any serious attempt was being made to reunite them with their
      families.

      The role of the government was limited; we paid the bill, often
      for warehousing children in institutions and inappropriate settings,
      without services, without accountability, without any significant ef-
      forts to address whatever catastrophe had driven them into this
      Dickens-ian disaster of a system.

      We heard stories of children taken from their homes, shipped
      hundreds of miles away to other states where they were kept for
      months, or even years, in unlicensed and unsuitable places. And we
      responded.

      In 1980, Congress enacted P.L. 96-272, which established strict
      accountability mandates and legal safeguards for foster children
      and their parents. And this reform law, for the first time in our
      nation's history, used Federal funds to promote permanency and
      adoptions rather than to prolong indeterminate faster care.

      We knew when we wrote P.L. 96-272 that the reforms it mandat-
      ed would only work under two circumstances. First, that adequate
      services and review procedures were available to reduce the need
      for and the duration of placement. Second, that there be vigorous
      enforcement of the legal safeguards and oversight of the program
      by the Department of Health and Human Services.

      Today, nearly seven years after enactment of the reform law, we
      are revisiting the continuing crisis in foster care of which I warned
      a decade ago.

      Despite evidence of progress in the early eighties, according to
      hearings by this committee, the number of children in foster care
      has once again begun to grow. The committee's recent report,
      "Abused Children in America: Victims of Official Neglect," shows
      that reports of child abuse and neglect jumped nearly 55 percent
      between 1981 and 1985, creating additional pressures on the foster
      care system.

      In addition, homeless families are often forced to place their chil-
      dren in foster care because shelters are rarely set up to accommo-
      date them. And children born to drug dependent parents, too ill or
      unprepared to properly care for them, have begun to enter the
      foster care system.

      From New York to California, severe strains are subjecting chil-
      dren in the foster care system to abuses. Contrary to the intent of
      P.L. 96-272, to promote preventive services or adoption where serv-
      ices fail, too many abused and neglected children continue to be
      placed in foster homes indefinitely.

      A recent "New York Times" series detailed the abysmal condi-
      tion of the foster care program in New York City, a condition exac-
      erbated by the failure of government at all levels to respond to the
      severe crises confronting children: drugs, physical and sexual
      abuse, teen pregnancy, and poverty.

      As the "Times" notes, the foster care system, far from serving its
      intended purpose as a refuge from parental neglect, has become in
      far tao many instances a breeding ground for crime and homeless-
      ness.

      In California, we are finding overloading of the system with chil-
      dren never intended for foster care, for the single purpose of reduc-
      ing state costs by.qualifying otherwise ineligible children for Feder-
      al reimbursements.

      It is clear that no law can work well without vigorous enforce-
      ment by responsible administrators. The shortcomings in the New
      York and California systems may well be traced back to the ab-
      sence of that vigorous oversight.

      We are going to make this system work. Today we are continuing
      the process of uncovering the shortcomings and putting the system
      back together so that it will serve the families and the clildren
      who depend upon it.

      It will take vigorous oversight and accountability; it will take
      more adequate resources for services, for reviews, for decent pay-
      ments to foster families, and for well-trained staff. If anyone be-
      lieves that it is cheaper to deny those services, I suggest they
      review the current state of an underfunded foster-care program
      and contemplate the long-term costs to the children, the families,
      and to this society of permitting the current crisis to continue for
      another generation.

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