Onslaught of Problems Threatens Nation’s Foster Care Programs : Children: Uncaring bureaucracies, troubled adolescents and burnout take toll on homes of last resort for the abused and neglected.

After five years and nine children, after struggling to reach damaged youngsters and then bidding them hard goodbys, after the emotional and financial costs of opening their home to young strangers, Al and Tammy Basten won’t be taking in any more foster children.

“There’s a gazillion reasons, but mostly I am burned out,” Tammy Basten said. “Dealing with a new kid with all his problems, the parents, the social workers, the psychologists--it’s exhausting just to think about it.”

Foster care was meant as a temporary lifeboat for abused and neglected children, a place where they could wait while their families were fixed or adoptive parents found.

A rickety craft at best, foster care is dangerously close to sinking under its own weight.

The reasons are many, including increasingly troubled children who require more care than two working parents can provide and frustrations with a bureaucracy seemingly insensitive to the children’s needs.

These problems threaten a basic element of the child welfare system, a last resort for children for whom there are no fast solutions.

While the number of foster children doubled over the last 10 years, from 250,000 to estimates of more than half a million today, the number of available foster homes has declined.

In 1984, there were 135,000 registered homes; today, there are about 100,000.

It is more of a challenge than ever to find any homes at all; an estimated 15% of foster children are crack cocaine babies, and the numbers with fetal alcohol syndrome continue to grow, as do those with HIV and AIDS.

Instead of locating a permanent home for children within the 18 months prescribed by federal and state regulations, social agencies and the courts often warehouse them in foster care for years. Young children grow into hard-to-manage teens, mistrustful of the succession of strangers they have been sent to live with.

“Because there are so many kids, they’re only taking the biggest crises,” said Tammy Basten, who still shares her Madison, Wis., home with a 19-year-old taken in as a foster child. “You can see signs it’s getting harder. Sexual abuse and drug use are getting to be bigger and bigger issues.”

Mark Hardin, director of foster care and family preservation at the American Bar Assn.’s Center of Children and the Law, says foster care systems are so overwhelmed that critically needed services, from counseling to health care, are harder to come by, leaving foster parents greater responsibilities with fewer resources.

Still, despite the demands, foster parents account for 60% of foster child adoptions.

But that pool is shrinking. A 1990 federally funded survey found a third of licensed homes no longer had foster children, and foster parents said they were more wary about whom they would accept. Forty-four percent said they would not take teens; more than a third would turn away a child damaged by alcohol or drugs.

“The highest number of foster parents who leave, leave after the first placement because it’s such an eye-opener,” said Lorraine Witaszek, a foster mother in Charlotte, N.C., and former president of the state foster parents association.

“We have people who say, ‘I’ll be a foster parent,’ and expect that within a few days someone will drop off a beautiful, healthy, white child on their doorstep,” she said. “That just doesn’t happen.”

The difficulty in finding foster parents has led to charges that social agencies are lowering standards and placing children in risky settings.

A Department of Health and Human Services audit of six states last year found foster homes that were crowded and unsafe. A companion study discovered foster parents who had criminal records, including sexual offenses and drug use, that should have disqualified them.

Examples of foster parents harming their wards are all too common:

* A Sacramento, Calif., man was charged last December with raping and murdering one of his three foster children, a 16-year-old girl. He was arrested after holding the other two children at gunpoint during a standoff with police.

* The Cook County public guardian’s office recently sued a Chicago private social agency for placing an 11-year-old girl in the home of a convicted rapist who allegedly raped the child.

* In a separate case, Chicago police say 2-year-old Corese Goldman was killed in February by a foster mother who held him under a faucet to toilet-train him. The woman, a distant relative, was not required to go through training, background checks and a home inspection before taking the child.

Cora White, president of the National Foster Parents Assn., said many cases of foster care abuse involve such “kinship families,” relatives who take in children under the foster care system.

While such arrangements provide higher monthly payments than under welfare, kinship homes often escape the more rigorous scrutiny given other foster households.

“In most states, the standards are much lower for kinship care,” White said. “We are finding people who go into foster care because they can get money. The agencies aren’t weeding them out because, with the high numbers of children coming into care, they have to find homes to put them in.”

But even when greater scrutiny is applied, White said, little is done to prepare foster parents.

“In nearly half the states, the training consists of five to 15 hours of listening to other people talk about their experiences,” she said. “In some states, if you’re interested in being a foster parent, you can just take in a child without any real training.”

Foster parents complain that social agencies do little to help them with their new wards. Children are dropped at their doors in the middle of the night with few possessions and fewer explanations. Medical histories are spotty or nonexistent; school records are rare. In many jurisdictions, foster parents are not allowed to see their children’s case histories.

“They drop these kids, and half the time, you don’t hear from a worker,” said Tisha Komar, a Milwaukee-area foster mother who is adopting three of her four wards.

After six years and 16 children, Komar said she won’t be accepting any more foster placements.

“I realize workers’ caseloads are astronomical,” she said, “but I don’t like the way the system treats foster parents. It’s like the little peons.”

Marilyn Ramos, president of the Florida Foster Parents Assn., says veteran foster parents should be consulted when it comes to decisions about the children. Instead, they often are ignored.

“Caseworkers don’t want to be told what to do,” she said. “If a foster parent pushes too hard, the caseworker removes the child.”

This is more than an idle threat for many foster parents, who fall in love with their children.

Foster parents can lose their children with little warning. In one case earlier this year, a south Florida woman temporarily disappeared with a child she had reared for two years after a judge decided to give the girl to her cousins. The foster parents said they had been promised they could adopt the child.

Ramos went through the painful process of adopting two foster care children, waiting through years of delays before she finally knew they would be hers.

“Our intention was not to adopt,” she said, “but when a child stays with you for a long period of time, a lot of people can’t say, ‘Find a home for these children.’ They become your own.”