The bureaucrats love to badmouth foster care. Roxanne White, who is the director of the Denver Department of Human Services is quoted in today's Rocky Mountain News saying, "The government doesn't do a very good job of raising kids." Now isn't that clever? One problem, though: it is not the goverment who is raising kids in foster care. It is foster families. And, we do a damn good job!
White then goes on to say that foster children grow up "deeply scarred," because "their ties to birth parents, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, and teachers and ministers were permanently severed by the government." Hogwash! If there are scars, it is because of the abuse and neglect they suffered at the hands of those who were closest to them, before the system finally intervened to protect the child. And if there are more scars, it is because the system returned them to unsafe situations, to save foster care dollars and promote "family preservation," instead of child protection.
White wants to recruit foster families from neighborhoods where the children were living before they were removed from their homes. Nine months ago the program was initiated. Guess how many people in those neighborhoods have stepped forward ready to enter training? ZERO! And yet, Denver is considered to be in the forefront of a national movement to change the nation's foster care system. The key to the Denver program is to keep children in their neighborhoods. Have we forgotten the words of Martin Luther King, who asked us to "judge my children by the content of their character"? Character, not skin color, not neighborhood culture, is what matters most.
White is further quoted, "We always knew that if we took the children away, in the short term we could keep them safe, but in the long run, they were horribly unsafe!" Yes, because the system returned the children to unsafe situations and did no follow up! The system failed to follow the law and file for legal protection, asking courts to find children dependent and neglected. The system failed to make permanent plans for the children. The system failed to recruit adoptive families. The time these children spent in foster care was the time when they were safe!
What the article did not point out is that Colorado law specifies certain situations that require child protection agencies (Colorado's counties) to file for legal protection of children who meet the law's definition of dependence and neglect. The article did not say how many cases are being filed now, versus how many were filed before White took over as director. Is the Department ignoring the law? Who is letting them get by with this? Who is looking after the best interest of the child? Let's face it folks: foster families are convenient scapegoats for bureaucrats who want to hide the ugly truth of their failure to protect abused and neglected children.
1 comment:
Many babies are rescued from druggie moms by relatives and never end in foster care... (and as a doc, I know most of the abuse is from druggie mom or her latest boyfriend).
In the past, social workers would take kids and give them to the "best" families, often upper class whites, while they would ignore grandmom or aunt because they were "poor"...
Now they go too far the other way..refusing to let a child be adopted by foster parents if the parents are the "wrong race"....indeed, heterosexual Christian couples are labled as too rigid and denied children...
One way to get around this is to get outreaches in local churches....
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