Wasted youth

In the backyard guest house of a South Central LA group home, a 17-year-old boy stands in the doorway. He wears a baseball cap, proudly adorned with the factory stickers.

The home’s tenant, Dwayne Martin, sits on his plush couch. Like the young Latino in his doorway, Martin spent a good part of his youth in foster care and remembers the importance of looking well-put-together.

The deprivations of life in foster care are to be kept at home, the 28-year-old explains. “You don’t want to be going to school with your clothes all ratty,” he says. “When you don’t have anything, it’s even more important to look like you do.”

C., the young Latino boy in the doorway, nods knowingly.
The slipping American economy will hit kids like C. — foster youth living in group homes — and his peers throughout the county and state especially hard. Gov. Arnold

Schwarzenegger’s call for an across-the-board budget cut of 10 percent will exacerbate the often dismal situation for children in group homes.

The LA County Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) is bracing for a 10 percent reduction to its $168 million allocation for group homes which will possibly be announced in September. Child welfare experts point to the dangers that continued cuts can make to an already weakened group home system. Crippled by a chronic lack of funding since reimbursement rates were established in 1990, the system will be even further undermined by a tax cut. Some group homes have already shut down and the pay they are now able to offer staff leaves little enticement for the best candidates. The result: the situation for the boys and girls at the bottom end of foster care’s disadvantages will get a little worse.
“These cuts will absolutely decrease their [group homes’] ability to provide quality services to the most needy children in the system,” says DCFS Director Trish Ploehn, whose department manages out-of-home care for 20,000 kids and a budget of $1.6 billion.

The potential cuts will gouge much deeper because the margin of error for DCFS is so shallow. Forget that gas is more expensive, the dollar buys less and that the number of children who enter the foster system increases at times of economic woe. Look at the stark facts: The amount that caregivers are paid for the children in their care has increased only 27 percent in the last 17 years. In the same period, the California Necessity Index (CNI), which the statewide DCFS rate is based on, has increased 59 percent.

“One dollar in 1990 spent on foster youth is now worth 78 cents,” says Doug Johnson, associate executive director of the California Alliance of Child and Family Services. The Sacramento-based Alliance represents 130 nonprofit organizations that provide care for foster youth, many of them group homes. “The cut brings that down to 69 cents.”
The pay scale for group home staff is even more preposterous, according to Johnson. When the current rate system was introduced, entry-level staff members were paid 40 percent above the minimum wage. Without the cuts, they are currently paid $8.22 an hour, a smidge above the minimum. With the expected cuts, pay would drop below minimum wage.
“I’m not sure what the state expects us to do,” Johnson says. “We can’t really cut food. It is only 4 percent of the cost.” What providers will have to do is withhold six-month pay hikes. Any wage slave with a brain will leave for a higher pay at, say, Subway or Jamba Juice.

In June of 2006, the alliance sued the California Department of Social Services (CDSS) over these very issues. The alliance claimed that to receive funding provided through the federal Child Welfare Act, the state had to keep pace with the necessity index. Last month, federal Judge Marilyn Hall Patel upheld the state’s petition for summary judgment. Despite the setback, Patel outlined that the state, as the de facto parent of 50,000 youth taken from their homes through no fault of their own, needs to seriously consider and fund the welfare of the children in its care.  

Patel called for the state to conduct an annual review of the disparity between actual costs for the care of these children and the amount paid to caregivers. “It behooves the CDSS to adhere to its mandate to protect and care for these children and to vigorously fight for the funds necessary to discharge the department’s responsibility,” she said.
In the meantime, those who need money for youth services are worried. John Hitchcock, executive director of the Pasadena-based Hillsides foster care center, says that he will have to push his board to raise more private funds.

“My plea to the government would be that these are the most vulnerable children,” says Hitchcock. Many of the established group homes, which are in a unique position to help children who are too troubled to live with their own [families] or foster families, will be forced to close. “We are not at that point,” he says.

Jill Duerr Berrick, co-director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Child and Youth Policy, points to recent group home closures across the state and the potential fallout. If the kids aren’t in group homes, they either end up in foster care or with their families, often without sufficient help from the state.

“Traditionally, when DCFS placed youth with kin they closed the door and walked away,” says Berrick, who adopted a child out of the foster system. “The historical legacy makes me very reluctant to trust that if you send a troubled kid to grandma, grandma will be able to handle that kid.”

LA County lost as many as 300 group home beds this year, according to Miriam Long, senior deputy to Supervisor Yvonne B. Burke. Long says the reduction is due to a combination of the economic slowdown, DCFS policy of diverting children away from group home care and group home directors failing to file the proper paperwork.
Elouise Dangerfield is the owner and founder of the group home where C. lives. She is also Martin’s aunt. She says that other group home directors are getting out of the business. “You don’t make any money running a group home,” she says. “And these budget cuts are gonna make it even worse.”

Because of the cuts, which she estimates will amount to about $200 per child, Dangerfield says that it will be the extra things that go — things other kids don’t have to think about, such as money for prom, gas money to visit families, tickets to a movie.

“You get $50 a month to spend on these kids’ clothes,” she says incredulously. “That is a joke. You got a child coming with nothing and you got to get them clothes. You’re never gonna to be able to do that with the way clothes priced these days.”

It looks like C. had better treasure that hat.