The children’s legislative action committee advocacy priorities increase a broad range of family services. Maryland’s child welfare budget is disproportionately spent on keeping about 3,500 children in high-cost placements while many thousands of children and families do not have access to high-quality family services. The DHR Secretary seeks to change this dynamic with the innovative initiatives. Reinvesting savings from reducing inappropriate placements to fund the following:
- Family team decision-making and other techniques for involving parents and other family members in planning for safety and permanency.
- Intensive family preservation services, which can be cost-effective while protecting children from further abuse or neglect.
- Strengthening family support services in order to prevent child abuse and neglect.
- Increasing funding for and integration of mental health and substance abuse treatment services with child welfare programs.
- Finding ways to identify, locate, notify, and support tens of thousands of grandparents and other relatives who are caring for children so that these children do not require State care.
- Support for kinship care providers at the same level as foster parents.
The Secretary has proposed that certain reports of child abuse or neglect would not be investigated but rather alternative techniques of assessment and engagement would be used to assure children’s safety and promote family acceptance of assistance. We support this approach provided that adequate protections are in place and that substantial additional funds are budgeted to provide family services.
Rebuild Traditional Family Foster Care. Most children are better off in family care. Tens of millions of dollars are spent on group placements for children who need family placements at an excess cost of more than $4,000 per month per child. The number of foster families has risen perhaps 120 above a low of about 2,836, a loss of 35% since 2002. Rates in Prince George’s and Charles counties are even higher in order to compete with rates in the District of Columbia. DHR has developed a statewide Foster Parents’ Association and guaranteed full child care subsidy to all foster/kinship caregivers for children age 5 and under.
The foster care reimbursement rate should be tied to the USDA estimated cost to raise a child.
- DHR should continue to reform the process of recruiting, orienting, approving, training, and retaining foster parents.
Strengthen the Child Welfare Workforce, especially in Baltimore City.
- Some frontline caseworkers and supervisors manifest a need for drastically improved training and accountability.
- Where performance indicators show a need, existing supervisors should be required to undergo retraining.
- Each newly-hired caseworker should be assessed for education and prior experience. Those with an assessed need should receive offsite training at the Child Welfare Training Academy for several hundred hours before being assigned to a work site or receiving a caseload.
- Competency testing should include policy topics as well as casework practice.
Adopt laws, policies, and practices that protect children from abuse and neglect.
- The State should undertake a structured, inter-agency initiative on prevention of abuse and neglect.
- Policy-makers, judges, and law enforcement personnel need training on child development and child maltreatment.
- Workforce and accountability reforms should set the stage for more thorough investigations of abuse and neglect.
- Persons with a history of harming children should receive scrutiny and services from child protection agencies before children are abused or neglected.
- Planned child protection reforms (AKA “alternative response”) should enhance family services (see above) and not merely reduce investigation costs.
- Persons with authority over children in schools and other types of organizations should be subject to criminal sanction if they have sexual contact with those children.
