Opinion: Marqueece Harris-Dawson unplugged: Fostering trouble in L.A. County

Marqueece: The county and state really have a two-tiered system that privileges privatized foster care, or what we call stranger care. So, you know, your niece or a nephew shows up at your house and says your sister got locked up. Will you to take the kids? You say yes, the county says great, you got it, we’re done; your niece is off our caseload. If you say no, then the county has to take her to a foster care home and say can you take this child? Do you have a bed? The foster care home says yes, the foster care home then gets $3,000 a month to take care of the child. In addition to health care, in addition to educational services, in addition to respite, in addition to transportation assistance. Tim: $3,000? Marqueece: Yeah, it can go up to $5,500 if the kids were drug-exposed or, you know, if you’ve got other problems that can be documented it can go up. It tends not to fall too far below $3,000, just for a straight-up taking a child. The family member on the other hand is in a bit of a bind because they have to qualify in the same way that a group home would. So, you know, you have to have a bed for the child, an individual bed for the child. If it’s a girl and a boy they have to have separate rooms. You get an inspection from the county that’s the same way the business would get an inspection, except the county doesn’t help you get up to par. And every study that’s ever been done on foster care, on the whole, and again, there are anecdotes on both sides of the terrible things that happen to children with family members and in privatized foster care, but on the whole every study that’s been done shows children who go into family care have much better outcomes, in terms of completing high school, staying out of prison, avoiding teenage pregnancy, all the things that are important when you’re dealing with somebody who’s really in child-to-teenage years. Tim: Can I just, uh... The county, uh. OK, my brother murders his wife. The county takes his kid. So the county goes to me and says, You wanna take this kid? And I say sure. Is that the end of the story, or does the county then come to my place to make sure I have a bed and all that stuff? Marqueece: If you say yes, the county says OK, let’s make sure you’re qualified. Tim: But then they don’t give me any money? Marqueece: No. Tim: Well then they should mind their own damn business. Robert Greene: But hasn’t that changed now? I mean there was this whole law that — [State Assembly member and Community Coalition founder] Karen Bass got a law... Marqueece: Karen got some legislation passed last year... Robert: ... and a huge federal waiver as well that was approved and, and... Marqueece: Now there are, there are a few things families can get. One is they can get a clothing allowance, which is about $150 per child when the school starts and school ends. You can qualify for that. You can also qualify for something called the Chafee Scholarship which used to be unavailable to kids who went with relatives. Chafee Scholarship is if you are in foster care and you get accepted to a state college or university, your tuition’s paid for by the state, your books, your room and board. And you get, you know, a stipend. That became available, as a result of Karen’s legislation, to kids who are in family care as well. Some healthcare benefits, limited healthcare benefits became available as well.

Robert: I thought the federal government had, um, a waiver in their policy, and the state signed onto it, to allow family to get the same benefits, well that... Marqueece: Well let me put it this way: It’s allowed; it’s not budgeted. So at one point it was illegal, the county couldn’t, say, treat a family the way it treated, somebody... Robert: It’s not budgeted for family? Marqueece: Right. It’s not budgeted. Robert: They can do it... Marqueece: Now it’s not illegal, it’s just not in the budget. So it’s sort of, sort of a step in the right direction but it’s not... Materially the issue is the same; in effect it’s about to get worse because the standards are, on relatives the standard is about to go up. As part of the Adam Walsh Act... Tim: Is the standard in foster care going to go up with that? Marqueece: The standard in foster care has already gone up, so that, they were staggered essentially. So now, so it used to be, you know, if you were not the person running the foster care home, you could have a felony ten years ago, if you just work there: if you cleaned up or, you know, if you did child care for an hour or something. If you were the person running it, you had to be clean. Now that same standard is going to apply to relatives, so, you know, there are a lot of relatives in South L.A., who — there’s one in particular who’s on my mind because I just talked to her yesterday: She had a... She wrote bad checks when she was 19, in the seventies. So you know, she raised her kid, and her kid died, so she has the grandkid now. So a year from now the new standards will kick in where each social worker’s going to look on your record to see if you have a felony. She’s very concerned that if they find the felony from twenty years ago, more than twenty years ago, that she’ll lose the child. Robert: This is a state standard or local? Marqueece: This is federal. This is a federal standard, the Adam Walsh Act. Tim: Let’s say that for whatever reason — and I don’t think that my own family situation right now would meet the county’s standards... Marqueece: Right! Tim: ...but, uh, let’s just say for whatever reason it is — I don’t have a bed, whatever it is... I can’t take my brother’s kid, who’s uh. And, so now that kid would... I would have no recourse? That kid would just start going into the foster care system? Marqueece: Well you would have recourse. You could say I’m gonna have a room; I need this much time. And you could go about doing that. Provided you had the basis to actually do that. Tim: Then let’s say that I have a felony on record and I lose the kid on those grounds... Marqueece: Right now the... That would happen a year from now. That could happen... Tim: OK. That kid wouldn’t be, would immed— would start getting in-processed into the foster system? Marqueece: The social worker would come and remove that child, and put that child into the foster care system. Yeah, I mean it’s, it’s a tough, it’s a tough issue area. Part of the policy is driven by, and it’s really silly, it’s: We’ve gotta keep people from getting welfare. That’s really what a lot of this is driven by, right? So you know, it’s more based on people who are going to cheat than it’s based on what’s best for the child. And the social workers... Tim: Wait. Why would you... Sorry, I’m, I’m really, I’m really ignorant of the whole topic. If you’re taking somebody from a cousin or a brother in law, something like that, you are not getting money from the county, so then what’s the cheating? What cheating are they trying to prevent? Marqueece: Well, there are a few things: One, you can get a tax break. And eventually you can do things like get the Chafee Scholarship, or you can get the clothing allowance, if the child, there are some provisions where if the child was on federal public assistance — TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families] — and you took the child, and you qualified for, you are poor enough, you can get that. So it’s treated, what happens is if you go into that system, that’s treated just like welfare. And you know, the standards around welfare are what they are. In South L.A. the character of people who are taking these children are grandmothers. They’re mostly grandmothers. I would say a plurality of them are public sector retirees. So they have a retirement that, you know, it’s good: They have a retirement from when retirement meant something. They have health benefits for themselves. Most of them own their houses outright, so you know, they get enough to pay their taxes and to take care of themselves. You bring these two kids into it, you know, even if they qualify for the TANF which is $450 a month per child, even if they qualify for that, just the issue of health care alone, just the issue of health care and transportation alone, is enough to throw them into poverty. Which, again, compromises the outcomes for the child. And so, in organizing for that, in organizing around that, they’re mostly grandparents but it really is an amazing story because it’s beyond grandparents. I mean, it’s, we have a member who’s a brother. His mother was shot and he had — he’s 26, his mother was shot through the window in a drive-by shooting in East L.A., and so she had five other kids. He has five siblings. So he had to take in the five siblings in addition to the two kids with his wife. So he now is a 26-year-old with seven kids. And so, like there are all kinds of stories like that were you just don’t, you know, imagine that this kind of thing is going on, and how pervasive it is. Some of our schools in South L.A. — we don’t have exact numbers on this, but — in some of our schools in South L.A., a majority of students are in some kind of foster care. They’re either with a relative or they’re in formal foster care. At Dorsey High School, if you separate out the African-American students, which is about 56%, the majority of them are in foster care. Almost 60% are in foster care. So it’s pretty, it’s a pretty pervasive problem and it’s really shaping the character of what happens in the community. We also think that again — there are folks working on documenting this, it isn’t documented yet — but we think a big part of the explosion on Skid Row is directly related to kids emancipating out. So when kids get to be 18 when they’re in the private system, you’re not, you know, that check is not coming to that foster home, so you know, you’ve got to find it. Now some of the more conscientious, and probably on average, the good foster homes, there are services available for kids from the ages of 18 through 25 if they don’t get into college. But if no-one steps up and does that for you, you’re walking around with a few of your friends, around Skid Row. Eventually that’s where you’re going to end up. So you couple that with people coming out of prison and people being essentially set up to enter the prison system, we think it’s a really, really dangerous recipe for not only South L.A. but for the city and the region, if this problem doesn’t get dealt with. Our founder Karen is a legislator doing some really good legislation, but the big deal is always money. There’s not — as you all know we just went through this big budget fight; there’s not really money to do much of anything. Or anything you want to do with money is a big fight. Last year there was extra money so we got some things in there. Tim: What’s interesting to me in what you just said is that in, not only is there not money forthcoming for people who take in kids but there’s actually obstruction coming from government. Marqueece: Right. Exactly. Tim: Which end of that are you fighting? I mean, it seems like, I can understand the obstruction if you’re going to be getting public funds, but if you’re just... Shouldn’t there be a presumption of innocence for a family member taking in another family member? That, that, I think the bar should be high for the state before it, you know... Marqueece: Right. Well the children are considered... Once they take you away from your parent, they take a child away from the parent, the state has entered the responsibility chain. Even if they give you to you and you say, I don’t need the money, it’s all good, they’re still responsible for giving the child to you because if something happens people are going to say, well, the state should have checked you out. They should have known that you were going to be a problem... So they’re in the chain of responsibility no matter how it’s cut, whether there’s money or not. So I think that, that’s the case. So in terms of... That’s an interesting question about the presumption of innocence. I wouldn’t say it’s a presumption of guilt but I’m not sure how I’d articulate it, but: Everybody’s going to get scrutiny. Which, we don’t fight the scrutiny so much if the scrutiny is consistent with the protection of the child. Like, we actually think looking to see if a person has a felony is probably a good thing. Having an across-the-board rule that everybody with a felony can’t have a child is not a good rule. Obviously, you know, there are cases where the kids are with the grandparents and the grandparents are actively involved in the life and so...obviously the social worker should be able to look at that, make the call and document why they made the call. But what they’re doing is: There are very broad strokes around... Everybody in this category gets treated as if, you know, they’re going to be involved. And so that, again, if that’s consistent of the protection of the child, that’s good. If it’s not and it’s just oppressive and there’s no help... We don’t think it makes sense if you’re fighting... Don’t take a child out of a house just because they don’t have their own bedroom. Just give the person money to get the kid a bedroom. It doesn’t, it doesn’t make, it doesn’t even make financial sense for the county, if that’s the only problem that you have with someone, then, you know, it just doesn’t make financial sense to say, OK, this child’s going to be in foster care forever. We’re going to pay in cash this amount. And whatever problems result, whatever negative outcomes result from that, we’re going to pay for that too. So that’s the sort of, the main sort of thrust of our fight, is to do what’s best for the kids. And focusing on the relatives, and the condition of the relatives, not only what they want but what they have to endure as an individual. They’re already dealing with the trauma of losing their son or their sister or whoever it is that they’ve lost, and you add this additional burden that they can’t meet — for sometimes very benign reasons. This topic’s always very shocking because it’s an unknown... Most people don’t even know this category exists, this category of folks... The big issues that we’re working on are: One is foster care which we just discussed. Karen’s doing some work around extending — again, Karen’s in a difficult position because she’s at the state so we’ve sort of broken off the foster-care piece, and she’s working on getting the age of emancipation extended so we can get social services beyond 18. Which is kind of an easy sell in the legislature because a lot of, a lot of Republicans have teenagers, so that’s a big one that there’s some movement on... Lisa Richardson: Do you see California doing that? Do you see California extending the age of emancipation? Marqueece: I think California is open to doing something. Some states have raised it to as much as 25, which is, you know: Insurance companies and a lot of the private sectors are moving to that age as the real age of adulthood rather than 18 or 21. The state of New Jersey just moved, required their health insurers to insure children until they’re 25. Because the reality is that’s kind of what it is, for the big-ticket items. I don’t know what California will be doing on it. Again, this year’s hard because there’s not money, so anything you talk about, you talk about expanding the budget. There’s also movement around taking advantage of the IV-E Waiver that the federal government gave to provide support to relatives. Now, the County of L.A. is saying the money that would have been spent this year is taken up by the caseload. But in future years that doesn’t have to be the case, and there can be funding for, there can be funding at least on a need basis for relatives who take kids in. So we’ve been in conversation with [L.A. County Department of Children and Family Services director] Trish Ploehn for about a year. It’s difficult to find somebody who says, ‘I disagree with you on this.’ What you get is: ‘My hands are tied; I can’t deal with this now.’ You don’t get a bunch of disagreement, even on the right. For example in L.A. County the best person on foster care is [Supervisor] Mike Antonovich, far and away. He’s interested in this issue, he studies it. And he’s the person who’s the furthest to the right. So again, if there can just be some movement of resources, if something happens to make resources available, we feel that it’s ripe for change.