Families Don’t Meet Rules on Foster Care

A new study of foster homes in Los Angeles has found that 99% of relatives caring for foster children failed to meet current health and safety standards in their homes.

The study of 200 randomly selected households by the county’s child welfare agency found problems ranging from crowded conditions--children in 79 homes were sleeping in the same beds or rooms with adults, on mattresses or sleeping bags on the floor, on couches or in kitchens, dining rooms or closets--to unsanitary or hazardous conditions. Among those were roach infestations, plumbing problems and homes and yards filled with garbage.

Weapons and ammunition were not secured in eight homes. Security bars in some homes lacked safety release devices. Some residences with pools lacked fences, self-latching gates or covers.

In 25 cases, relatives had not been checked for criminal records or against the child abuse registry--some were allowed to take the children by simply signing affidavits swearing that they had not been convicted of a crime.

The consequences of such widespread failure are twofold: They demonstrate that many foster children in Los Angeles may be living in unhealthy, even dangerous environments. They also bolster charges by the federal government that California for years failed to hold relatives of foster children to the same standards enforced against nonrelative foster parents.

That charge, which state officials deny, threatens to cost the state government as much as $300 million if federal authorities conclude that the state did not equalize the standards between relative and nonrelative foster parents as required two years ago. That amounts to 40% of all the money that California receives for the care and monitoring of foster children.

Some child advocates are furious that the state has put off raising the relative standards for so long.

“Our position is that children should not have to choose between living in a home with a relative who loves them and being in a home that is safe, hygienic and clean,” said Carole Shauffer, executive director of the San Francisco-based Youth Law Center. “There’s no evidence that [the government] has even attempted to help them meet these standards. We’re talking in some cases about a bed, basic plumbing, telephones--these are not high-level standards.”

But some say the overwhelming failure rate raises questions about the standards. Some social workers and child welfare officials argue that they allow too little leeway in assessing whether a home is appropriate.

“I’m not offended by someone sleeping on a mattress on the floor,” said Anita Bock, head of the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services. “This may be shocking to people, but this is not an unusual circumstance in many poor homes.”

The state’s position is that because it has required relative and nonrelative homes to be assessed for health and safety, it doesn’t matter that the individual standards under those categories may be different.

In October, the state passed emergency legislation that it said was intended to clarify that the standards are the same, although many acknowledge that it did bring up some safety standards for relatives.

Counties were required to comply with the new standards in January. Los Angeles, home to about 15,000 of the state’s 35,000 foster children who live with relatives, changed its rules last fall in anticipation of the new state requirements. Any relatives who became foster parents since then have been held to the new, higher standard, according to Bock.

The 200 homes in the study were assessed in December and January, but the county is still struggling to help them come into compliance.

11-Month-Old Baby Starved to Death

It will be a slow process to reassess all existing relative foster homes, Bock said, because her study shows that their needs dwarf the $1 million the state has set aside to aid all of the state’s relative foster parents. Behind the numbers, there is at least one life that the new rules could have saved.

In May 2000, five months after the federal government required equal standards for foster parents, Danzel Bailey was removed from his drug-addicted mother when he was a few days old and sent to live with his grandmother--under conditions that fell below those required by the current standards.

Danzel starved to death 11 months later as he slept on a foam pad on the floor of the one-bedroom apartment, a few feet from the bed shared by his grandmother, teenage aunt and toddler brother.

But social workers who investigate child abuse and neglect say there are many homes that, while crowded, are loving and generally safe.

They complain that the new rules remove almost all of the flexibility they used to have in overlooking such deficiencies and old or irrelevant criminal records in their overall assessment of a relative’s home. The result, they say, is a rise in the number of children taken to emergency shelters.

Frank Mecca, head of the County Welfare Directors Assn. of California, said that was a concern from the moment the new federal rules were handed down in January 2000.

“There was a lot of shock and confusion and there were those who could not believe that the federal government wanted us to license relatives to the same degree” as nonrelative foster parents, he said.

Andy Shaw, principal consultant with the Assembly Human Services Committee, says that the underlying issue is that California does not think it should hold relatives to the same standards as nonrelative foster parents.

“California did not want to reduce the standard for professional, nonrelative licensed foster parents,” he said. “But we did not want to require family members to go through the licensing process as long as they meet basic safety standards and didn’t have a criminal record.”

Rather than deal with the propriety issue directly, Sylvia Pizzini, deputy director of the state’s Children and Family Services Division, has continued to insist that the standards are substantially the same.

In response, the federal government said long-standing state rules allowing some requirements to be waived only for relatives in fact created a separate standard and has repeatedly told the state in writing that it should not be billing the federal government for those relative foster homes that do not meet federal standards.

State May Not Meet U.S. Guidelines

There is some question as to whether even the current state standards satisfy the federal government. In her most recent letter to the state in November, Sharon Fujii, head of the Pacific region of the Administration for Children and Families, said last year’s legislation seemed on target but raised concerns over rules that continue to allow some standards to be waived only for relatives.

Even if the new standards are satisfactory, Fujii wrote Pizzini, they are more than a year late. The federal government gave states nine months to comply, but said it would not pay to support foster children in relatives’ homes that did not meet its standards after that.

Federal reimbursement “cannot be claimed for foster care payments made for children placed in unlicensed relative foster family homes as of Sept. 28, 2000,” she wrote. “Given the large percentage of foster care children placed with relatives in California, we expect significantly reduced fiscal claims ... until the state fully implements the relative licensing provision required by regulation.”

California has not reduced its claims, and Pizzini said the federal government has so far continued to pay them.

One estimate that was circulated during last year’s emergency legislation to meet federal standards found that by January the delay would cost the state about $287million in payments to relative caretakers plus the costs of social workers and administration connected to those cases. The sum has only grown since then. Pizzini disputes this sum, but did not provide an alternative figure, saying simply that it is “a lot of money.”

She wrote a four-page letter to Fujii last month arguing that California ought to be able to keep the money and continue to receive federal funds for all relative foster parents, continuing to argue that the standards were always the same.

“We’re waiting to hear back from them,” she said.