Foster Kids’ Straitjacket

For Los Angeles County foster children, the odds have been lousy for a long time. Children whom social workers have taken from neglectful or drug-addicted parents have often bounced through a series of foster homes. Too many have reached young adulthood not reunited with cleaned-up parents or in loving adoptive families. They are instead homeless, unemployed or pregnant.

Almost a year ago, California officials -- hoping to offer better odds of success -- first asked federal officials to loosen straitjacket rules governing how the state and counties can spend the $1.2 billion Washington sends the state every year to care for these foster children. California still awaits an answer.

More funding flexibility was among the top suggestions in last year’s prestigious Pew Commission report assessing how well state and local governments are caring for society’s most vulnerable and troubled children. Just loosening spending rules would, the panel concluded, vastly improve the odds that abused or neglected children will become healthy, productive adults.

Generally speaking, counties can use federal money only to care for children in foster homes. Certainly children living with violent or depraved parents are safer away from them. But the federal rules have created a perverse incentive for social workers to destroy salvageable families.

Say a teacher reports that 8-year-old Jenny has been coming to school in obvious need of a bath and in a mud-caked dress, and that she always seems hungry. The social worker looking into the case will quickly learn that Jenny’s mother is overwhelmed by caring for five children on little money, and now her husband has walked out. If the social worker sends Jenny to foster parents -- joining 22,000 other county children -- federal funds will pay for her meals and new clothes, the eyeglasses she needs and even tutoring to help her catch up in math. That helps Jenny, but not her siblings or her falling-apart mother.

The social worker might instead decide that all the children would ultimately be happiest with their mother. But under the current rules, federal funds can’t cover the counseling or housekeeping help that Jenny’s mom needs. And if Jenny stays at home, the county may not even be able to use that money to pay for her glasses or math tutor.

These rules are neither cost-effective nor in the best interests of families. That’s why state officials have asked that Los Angeles and eight other counties be allowed to spend the money, when appropriate, to keep families together. Since California sent its application last May, Washington has given Minnesota and Wisconsin a green light for similar flexibility. California officials have gotten only more questions from the Department of Health and Human Services. It’s time they got an answer.