The two stories you wrote this past week about child welfare illustrate the challenge as well as it can be done. Taken together they put the continuing challenge of child welfare in perspective.

As I told you, I suspected that someone who disagreed with our willingness to spend money on those and other types of support (things like paying for children to enroll in enrichment classes and Y memberships) wanted you to write a story about how children services was wasting money.

The goal of those who fed it to you was to get a negative story and thereby undermine my efforts to provide more emphasis on family preservation. Our return on investment on those types of things speaks for itself—-taxpayers, children, and families come out ahead if we can keep the children safe at home. Sometimes we can allow a child to stay in its home safely and sometimes it doesn’t or won’t work. Each decision is about managing risk of harm to the child.

The other side of that argument is the flawed assumption that placing a child in foster care means that the child is somehow automatically safe from harm. Today’s story underscores that point. Today’s story also underscores why I am so committed to keeping children with their parents whenever possible, even if it means spending money on unusual things to get the job done.

The assumption underlining today’s story is one of two things: despite our best efforts to monitor and screen foster parents, children still get hurt in foster care, or we aren’t doing a good job screening foster parents, evidenced by this child being harmed. The research is even more explicit and it is the foundation of the changes I am trying, with much difficulty, to make in the culture and practice patterns of this organization.

The goal of the person who gave you today’s story was quite simple and understandable: her children had been removed and she wants them back. Understandable, and I am looking into the facts surrounding the initial decision to see if it made sense. As I mentioned to you, apparently our agency had some previous history with the family.

Most who opt to place children in foster care as a “safe” alternative believe that removing them from whatever threat they discover in the assessment is the end goal. I am trying to get our caseworkers to calculate the “risk of harm” in a broader context that takes into account that the assumption that foster care placement keeps the child safe and is best for the child is not supported by the research as a general principle. Each case is unique.

Here’s the sobering part. The research concludes that about one third of the children who have been in the foster system are abused or maltreated. A Casey Foundation study conducted in partnership with Harvard Medical School and released in April of 2005 found that “One-third (32.8%) of the sample reported some form of maltreatment by a foster parent or other adult in the foster home during their foster care experience, as recorded in their case files. The maltreatment rate includes reported and substantiated reports of abuse and/or neglect.”

This study was done using a study sample of adults who spent time in foster placement as children. Despite the fact that one in three former foster children reported experiencing actual abuse or maltreatment incidents while they were children in foster placement, the number of incidents actually identified and recorded by child welfare agencies as having occurred was incredibly low. The type of abuse experienced while in foster placement was sexual abuse, physical abuse, neglect, and other forms of maltreatment.

Even though nearly 33% of former foster children reported that they were abused while in foster care, the Casey study reported that, “substantiated child maltreatment rates were 0.7% for foster care nationally. Nevertheless, it appears that child safety was not ensured at a high level.”

What explains the big disconnect between what the agencies reported and what former foster children reported? No one knows, but it haunts all of us in child welfare because it indicates that when children are moved out of their homes there is still a high abuse rate, and that is the dilemma of child welfare. Where is the higher risk of harm to the child: leaving them with their parents or putting them in foster placement?

A more recent study (March 2007) conducted by Dr. Joseph Doyle Jr., of MIT measured the outcomes of former foster children in terms of their involvement in crime and other life failures. He found that nearly 20% of inmates spent time in foster care during their youth. His and other studies paint a sobering picture about the relationship between being in the foster system and life success.

Hence, the question: what is actually better for the child? Virtually all of the research concludes that children of similar background and demographics consistently do better when they are kept with their families. The challenge is to balance the risks, and in doing so child welfare workers spend many sleepless nights worrying that they have made the “right” decision about removing or not removing a child from their biological parent.

I cast my lot with doing everything possible to keep children with their biological parents and build a safety net around them with services and support. I also have initiated systems to try to do a better job screening out prospective foster parents, people around children who may present a risk, and building systematic monitoring of children who come under our jurisdiction.

Hey…that’s it for now…I’m going to a Reds game…