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Those findings were presented in a forum, Protecting Children, Promoting Permanent Families, held in Helena Thursday to bring awareness to how the community and the welfare system could better serve children.

Similar forums are being held in cities around the country.

In January 2005 the North American Council on Adoptable Children embarked on the Adoptive Family Engagement project by support through the Pew Charitable Trusts.

The results are recommendations made by the Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care.

First are the courts, which the commission suggests lacks the tools, information and accountability to ensure that children are moving expeditiously from foster care to safe, permanent homes. It also says the structure of the federal child welfare financing limits public official’s ability to tailor appropriate responses to families in crisis.

The commission recommends redirecting funds to preventative work with the intent of reducing prolonged stays in foster care. It suggests strengthening court oversight of children in foster care

The forum was hosted by the NACAC and the Montana Children’s Initiative Provider Association. A full spectrum of agencies were represented at the event including social workers, foster and adoptive parents, administrators, policy makers, and other community leaders and child advocates.

“The stories we’ve heard today demonstrate the difficulties that Montanans have to overcome every day in dealing with the child welfare system, as well as stories of hope and success,” Lt. Gov. John Bohlinger said. “We need the help of the federal government to assure that children in foster care can achieve permanency, that families can stay together or reunify safely, and that relative caregivers receive the support and services they need.”

There are currently a half million children in the U.S. who have been removed from their homes because of abuse or neglect and placed into foster care. In Montana, there are 2,129 in the foster care system.

In 2003, the average length of stay for a Montana foster child was 27.8 months and 650 were waiting to be adopted. Two-thirds of child welfare cases are related to substance abuse, primarily methamphetamines and alcohol.

American Indian children are high in numbers in the system. The state’s population is 6.2 percent American Indian, while 35 percent of the state’s foster children are native.

The commission recommends doing a better job of tracking the children to ensure that these changed indeed work.

“We think they are good strong recommendations that would support and improve the foster care system,” Ellen Bush, executive director of Court Appointed Special Advocates of Montana said.

Bush attended the forum and felt it was powerful because the speakers who those who were either in the system or were directly effected by the system.

One of the most amazing statistics she learned was that of the 19,000 children who age out of the foster care system (turn 18) annually, 60 percent of those young people will become homeless, die or be incarcerated.

NACAC was founded in 1974 and is dedicated to the mission that every child deserves a permanent family. Through education, support and capacity building, and advocacy, the NACAC promotes and supports permanence for children and youth in foster care in the United States and Canada.

To view the full report and an executive summary are available at www.pewfostercare.org. top of page

Time to reform foster care

By The Helena IR - 08/20/06

Prior to last week’s forum on welfare reform aimed at getting kids out of the soul-deadening rat race that is one foster-care placement after another, participants dropped by the IR’s Editorial Board.

Their story was convincing. Reforms to shorten the time children are in foster care and lessen the number of placements they must adjust to are long overdue.

William A. Thorne Jr., an appeals court judge in Salt Lake City and a member of the Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care recommending the changes, explained that the current structure of federal child welfare financing limits officials’ ability to either proactively prevent child abuse within a family or arrange for adoptions.

Instead of using the money up front, most of it is spent on foster care, where administrative costs dwarf payments actually made to foster parents. The idea is that by working to fix families or come up with permanent adoptive parents who can give a child a normal life, the foster care case load can be substantially decreased, saving a lot of money.

Thorne said the life of a child shuttled between foster placements is more desperate than many Americans understand.

Without control, always having to adjust to a new family and a new set of rules, knowing their future is out of their hands, foster kids lead stunted lives that can only be partly assuaged by their well-meaning but still temporary hosts.

One young man Thorne talked with told him the first thing he did every day after school was to check to see if his bags were packed.

And as for the people who “age” out of the system — they’re success stories, right? Not quite. Thorne said a life without family support leaves them handicapped in ways both psychological and practical. He said their rate of post traumatic stress syndrome is twice that of returning Vietnam veterans, and 60 percent of these young people end up dead, homeless or in jail.

Except for their foster families, these youngsters remain below most of our radar. Well, it’s time to adjust the radar. Right now it will show 2,129 foster kids in Montana — children and teenagers who are without a family, but who belong to us all. top of page