
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, September 25, 1993                   TAG: 9403100012
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A11   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

THE RISING COSTS OF FOSTER CARE

IN THE CITY of Roanoke, foster care for at-risk children now costs taxpayers about $2.5 million a year - nearly $1 million more than it cost four years ago. Count on the price to go higher still.

Indeed, the costs of the foster-care program would be rising even faster, in all likelihood, had the General Assembly in the late '80s not imposed a limit on the time that children can remain in foster homes.

Essentially, if an at-risk child can't be returned to his or her natural parents within 12 months, the natural parents must surrender custody so that the child can be permanently placed with other relatives or put up for adoption.

This change in state law has helped stabilize the number of city children in foster care at any given time. But if the numbers aren't rising dramatically, then why are the costs?

Blame the usual suspects: Children being born to unwed teen-age mothers. Children living below the poverty line; lacking proper medical care, nutrition, emotional nurturing. Children being physically or mentally abused in their own homes.

As a result, many more children placed in foster care these days require expensive remedial treatment. The city of Roanoke is now paying something like $100,000 a year for residential treatment of one five-year-old child. The child is so severely emotionally damaged by experiences with his "natural" parents that one of the residential facility's staffers must be assigned full-time to him, and nobody but him.

There are other reasons for rising costs. In many foster homes, as in other homes where there are two parents, both parents must work. That means the foster-care program often must pay for day care for foster children.

And not all the reasons for rising costs are the result of socioeconomic trends. Some are blatantly, and stupidly, political.

Because of state budget cuts, for instance, the city's social-services department is unable to hire more foster-care workers - the better to show that state politicians are controlling government's costs and growth. Yet the state says it's OK for the department to hire private agencies to help serve the foster-care caseload. Never mind that this has proved more expensive than when the services are provided by the department's own staff.

But this is to quibble. The point with foster care, as with much else in society today, is that the meter is running on the burgeoning costs of children in dysfunctional family situations. Still we dawdle, rather than make a greater effort to intervene in known at-risk families, to try to prevent calamity.

Making its way ever so slowly through Congress is legislation that would make available about $1 billion in grants to states over the next five years to enhance family-preservation services. The legislation's aim is to help families avoid the foster-care alternative whenever possible.

This grant money could be used to strengthen community resources, such as parenting training, developmental screening of children, and referral to health professionals and child-rearing counselors. Strengthening these resources might mean, at the least, a reduction in the number of children who enter foster care and can never be returned to their natural parents.

Let's be clear: Government cannot save family life in America. It can only fail if it tries. It can, however, help resist the frightening trend of disintegrating families - before the nation is overwhelmed by children who are wards of the state. The cost-savings from preventive intervention are one reason to make the effort; the chance to reduce children's suffering is another.

by CNB