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Foster Care Population: Minority Kids In Majority
By CHARLES PROCTOR
Courant Staff Writer
August 13, 2007
When child advocates in Connecticut look at
the faces of children in foster care, they can't help but notice
that most of them are black or Hispanic.
Statewide, African American children make up
nearly 36 percent of those in foster care, even though they make
up only 11 percent of the state's overall child population, according
to the Department of Children and Families.
It is similar for Hispanics: They make up about
a quarter of the foster care population, but only 13 percent of
the general population.
And DCF statistics show that the trend permeates
nearly every stage of the child welfare system. A disproportionate
number of families of color are referred to state officials, investigated
for abuse or unstable homes, and have their cases substantiated
by investigators.
And, ultimately, the percentage of minority
children who enter foster care is higher than the percentage of
minority children in society.
"As you go deeper down the spectrum," said Hector
Glynn, executive director of the Connecticut Juvenile Justice Alliance,
"it actually gets darker."
Connecticut's numbers mirror those across the
country. A federal report released late in July scrutinized why
African Americans enter foster care at a more disproportionate rate
than any other ethnicity. The report found that although African
Americans make up 15 percent of the child population nationwide,
African American children make up 34 percent of the national foster
care population.
DCF officials said they have long been aware
of the situation, and in July they completed a pilot program in
Waterbury that officials hope can be emulated statewide to decrease
the number of African Americans and Hispanics under their care.
During the two-year program, officials met with
children, parents and community group leaders to discuss how and
why African Americans and Hispanics end up in foster care, and they
hammered out strategies to try to rein in the trend.
DCF officials said some of those strategies
- such as new training that encourages caseworkers to help children
learn more about their racial identity - have been or will be implemented
across the state.
Leaders of state child welfare groups and watchdog
agencies praised DCF's program as a good first step toward addressing
an age-old problem.
But they also said the state needs to follow
up with serious action or risk the momentum withering on the vine.
And state officials and watchdog groups alike say tangible solutions
are hard to come by because the root causes of the problem are broad.
Minority parents tend to live in impoverished
communities more often than whites do and have limited access to
resources, like drug or mental health counseling, that help keep
families together.
They also tend to interact more often with
child care workers, which can create the perception among parents
that the child welfare system is out to seize their children.
Augmenting the problem is the fact that caseworkers,
even those of minority descent, are not always properly trained
in how to interact with families of color.
"A lot of time, certain caseworkers might perceive
African Americans as more assertive or not as compliant as people
of other cultures are," said Cindy Ayers, assistant director of
the Government Accountability Office, which authored the federal
study.
"And they might not deal with that appropriately
or know how to deal with that appropriately."
Glynn, of the Connecticut Juvenile Justice Alliance,
said many foster care workers do not appreciate that everything
they do - from how they interview a parent to what details they
choose to note on home inspections - can reflect their own economic
or racial biases.
"Whether we recognize it or not, [caseworkers]
are gatekeepers to the system," he said. "You can look at the numbers
and see the problem exists. We are the ones doing it."
DCF officials pushed the Waterbury pilot program,
in part, to address some of those issues. Officials chose Waterbury
as the site because it was a large urban center with demographics
similar to those found statewide, said Siobhan Trotman, a DCF program
director who oversaw the program in conjunction with the Annie E.
Casey Foundation.
Based on meetings and discussions with parents,
teachers and children in Waterbury, DCF officials introduced several
measures there that they hope to replicate at other sites.
Among those measures are introducing more outreach
and early intervention programs at schools with high numbers of
minority students, and contracting out positions to make sure family
members who might not speak English can still access DCF resources.
Both measures are geared toward breaking down barriers between DCF
caseworkers and minority communities that might distrust them. If
that can be done, DCF officials believe children in those communities
might have a better chance of avoiding foster care altogether. Other
measures take a more circuitous route to addressing the high minority
populations in foster care.
For instance, many foster children said in interviews
that they wished they knew more about their ethnic heritage. One
girl of Hispanic descent told program officials that she wanted
to learn Spanish and how to cook ethnic food, Trotman said.
So program officials drew up new training for
caseworkers that encourages them to talk to foster children about
their heritage and enlist their natural and foster parents to do
the same.
Now, a caseworker might urge the white foster
parents of an African American child to have the child's natural
parents come to the home once a week to do the child's hair, or
teach the foster parents about skin care, Trotman said. Though Trotman
acknowledged that such a change in training might not seem to correlate
with the number of minority children entering foster care, she said
just getting caseworkers and foster parents to think more about
race is a good step.
"If people are paying more attention to race
and ethnicity," Trotman said, "it's going to impact the disproportional
population eventually."
The program's recommendations are sound, child
advocates and watchdogs said. But they also said the state could
do more.
For example, DCF staff in Waterbury began distributing
questionnaires to troubled families, asking about their relatives,
with the goal of finding out whether extended family might be willing
to care for a child in lieu of foster care, Trotman said.
But in Washington, D.C., some caseworkers go
door to door in neighborhoods to map out which households would
be willing to help struggling families by babysitting children or
taking custody of them, Glynn said.
"They might not be the resources DCF is used
to," he said. "But they're the resources the family relies on the
most, like neighbors and extended family, and so forth."
State leaders could also increase access to
subsidized legal guardianship, critics said. According to the federal
study, other relatives besides parents are often willing to take
custody of African American children in danger of entering foster
care.
But often they ultimately do not because they
cannot afford to, Ayers of the GAO said.
Connecticut does provide subsidized guardianships,
but the children have to enter DCF custody for at least six months
before the guardianship takes effect.
This waiting period can sometimes deter families
from applying for the subsidy, which in turn means that more children
end up in foster care.
"If a family is in trouble and wants the grandmother
to take care of the kids right away, the grandmother might not have
any resources to do that," said Martha Stone, executive director
of the Center for Children's Advocacy at the University of Connecticut
School of Law.
State lawmakers, Stone added, could rectify
the problem by shortening the six-month waiting period.
Although Trotman said she was confident that
the Waterbury program led to some progress, she cautioned that it
could be years before there are significant changes in the numbers.
"That's the frustration with this issue," she
said. "It's not like I can implement a program and say the numbers
immediately went down because of that program."
Glynn agreed that the challenges facing state
child welfare officials are daunting.
"DCF can't solve racism, and they can't solve
a lot of the issues that come up because of it," he said.
"But if they don't address it upfront, it will
always be a catalyst for problems and one of the reasons that things
don't get solved."
Contact Charles Proctor at cwproctor@courant.com.
Copyright Hartford Courant
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