The foster care system is failing Alaska children; So are those trying to fix it

Last August, the Beacon published a story under the headline “Is Alaska’s foster care system failing children? A federal trial underway now could decide.”

My answer is: Yes, Alaska’s foster care system is failing children – horrendously. But the current lawsuit won’t fix it.

Last month, frustrated lawmakers bemoaned the failure of the Office of Children’s Services to implement reforms.

The failure to implement reform and the inevitable failure of the lawsuit have the same fundamental cause. Neither the lawsuit nor the reforms comes to grips with the problem at the root of all the others: states tearing apart families needlessly, often when family poverty is confused with “neglect.” Alaska is among the worst offenders. The problem is compounded by racial bias, as can be seen by the astounding number of Alaska Native children torn from their homes.

Let’s start with the lawsuit: The failure of this type of litigation becomes obvious as soon as one looks around the country. Nearly identical lawsuits have been brought against state agencies for 50 years now. Almost always, the lawsuits drag on for years, there are small improvements in process but little or no improvement in the lives of children. In Tennessee, for example, the first such lawsuit, brought in 2000, ultimately failed so badly that 25 years later the same organization went back and brought another – nearly identical; in some cases, almost word-for-word. Michigan’s leading family advocate says the settlement there is holding back real reform.

Alaska lawmakers made the same mistake. The February hearing focused on solving the problem of high caseloads by hiring more workers. That never works. It is especially doomed to fail in Alaska, which tears apart families at the fifth-highest rate in America, a rate nearly triple the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. It’s been that way in Alaska for decades. The only way to ease the caseworker shortage is to stop taking children needlessly.

Yet when OCS Director Kim Guay listed all the things her agency needs to do the job right, she listed only things that would make the system bigger. She never acknowledged Alaska’s status as an extreme outlier in tearing apart families or suggested any need to curb it.

The damage to children is enormous.

Needless removal of children from families causes horrific emotional trauma, trauma from which some children may never recover. Remember the anguished cries of children separated at the Mexican border? Caseworkers may have different motivations than Immigrations and Customs Enforcement personnel, but the end result of separation is the same. So it’s no wonder multiple studies find that, in typical cases, children left in their own homes typically fare better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.

It doesn’t stop with emotional harm. Study after study finds abuse in one-quarter to one-third of family foster homes, and the rate in group homes and institutions is even worse. A rush-to-remove risks taking children from homes that are safe or could be made safe, only for them to be abused in foster care.

Proof of the need to focus on wrongful removal can be seen in a lawsuit often pointed to as a success story: New Jersey. New Jersey’s lawsuit settlement was the only one of this type I know of that demanded action to curb needless removal. In addition, the settlement led to the appointment of an outstanding leader of the child welfare agency who had the same focus.

Today, New Jersey takes away children at the lowest rate in America — so officials there have been able to vastly improve the system. A child in Alaska is more than seven times more likely to be torn from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of foster care than a child in New Jersey.

What’s needed, either through a lawsuit settlement or because the legislature demands it, is a system that is laser-focused on safely reducing the number of children taken from their parents. For starters, that means providing concrete help — cash assistance, rent subsidies, childcare aid — to ameliorate the worst harms of poverty. The research is clear: That will lead to fewer hotline calls, fewer investigations and fewer removals. And that will ease the crushing workloads of caseworkers. It also costs less than foster care.

What’s also needed is high-quality defense counsel for families — not to get “bad parents” off, but to craft alternatives to the cookie-cutter service plans often churned out by those overloaded caseworkers. This approach has been proven to reduce the number of children in foster care, with no compromise of safety.

Alaska’s vulnerable children desperately need a better system. Litigation can help bring that about. But it’s going to take a better lawsuit and a better response from lawmakers.

Richard Wexler is Executive Director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, based in Alexandria, VA.