By Jim Spencer
SpencerSpeaks.com
November 19, 2007
Sister Michael Delores Allegri doesn’t serve as a foster parent for the money. That’s a good thing for two reasons. First, people who take in neglected or abused children must be about loving and nurturing them. Second, most states in the U.S. don’t come close to covering the costs of raising foster children.
“All the money I get for kids goes in ‘em or on ‘em,†said Allegri, who has raised foster children in Colorado since 1999.
Still, the nun from the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth has had to go to her own sources for tens of thousands of dollars to cover the basic needs of the children for whom she cares.
That’s because Colorado reimburses foster parents at obscenely low rates, according to a new national study.
The study of Foster Care Minimum Adequate Rates for Children – or MARC – found Colorado would have to raise its current reimbursements by an average of roughly 92 percent to reach the minimum costs of normal living expenses for foster children.
“Obviously, I agree with the study,†Allegri said. “It costs a lot more than it pays to raise a foster child.â€
The MARC study found that across the country foster-care reimbursements need to rise an average of 36 percent to cover minimum child-rearing expenses. Colorado’s foster-care reimbursement rates rank it among the nation’s worst, lower than traditionally poor states such as Mississippi. Colorado, with the eighth highest per capita income in the country, stands 44th in the percentage of child-rearing expenses it reimburses to foster parents.
Cheryl Duncan, a finance expert with the state Department of Human Services, said Colorado froze its base rate for foster-care reimbursement in 1997. The base rate is $14 a day. Individual counties may negotiate higher or lower rates with foster care providers, Duncan said. Few if any counties go lower. Some counties do go higher. But many counties, especially poor counties, cannot afford to add money to the state reimbursement rate. Counties sometimes farm out the job of finding foster parents to private placement agencies, said Duncan, because it costs less. But the cost savings that come from moving children wherever foster parents are available can leave children in homes far away from biological family and friends, making visitation difficult.
The reimbursement problem needs to be addressed, Duncan conceded. It needs to be taken care of “sooner than later,” she said. Human services officials are considering a statewide study that is more comprehensive than the MARC study, which didn’t include the costs of child care and transportation.
A state audit recently mentioned the foster-care reimbursement problem. The recent high-profile case of a child starved to death in foster care has raised concerns about the quality of investigations of abuse. Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter included millions more for better foster-care investigations in his current budget proposal.
It is all reactive.
“There’s no excuse to be abusive,†Allegri said. “But if we put the money upfront and work with biological parents who have a chance to change, maybe we’ll come to a place where we don’t need foster parents.â€
Those we do need can be paid enough so that taking on a foster child does not become a crushing, stressful financial burden, one that could leave the child as neglected or abused as he or she was before.
The MARC study drives home the point in dollars and cents. For a two-year-old foster child, the study reported, Colorado pays an average of $348 a month. According to the study, the actual costs for that child, exclusive of child care and transportation, are $659 per month. As the child ages, the disparity grows. At age nine, the report says Colorado pays just $392 of a monthly cost of $755. At age 16, the reimbursement is $423 for a child costing $828 a month.
Do the math. For a two-year-old, that’s $3,732 a year in un-reimbursed but necessary expenses. For a nine-year-old, it’s $4,356 a year. For a 16-year-old, it’s $4,860 a year.
It gets worse. Foster parents not only have to come out of their pockets for hundreds of bucks a month in un-reimbursed expenses, their reimbursed expenses are paid roughly a month after they are incurred. It could be longer Duncan admitted, if foster parents or case workers don’t file paperwork on time.
The upshot is an economic and bureaucratic nightmare that drives away prospective foster parents. Or a system that leaves foster children without basic necessities.
Inadequate reimbursement “plays a strong role in keeping people away,†said Allegri. “I hear people say, ‘I can’t afford to do it.’
“The middle class struggles today to make ends meet.â€
Those who take on foster kids, but can’t afford to pay out-of-pocket add insult to injury, Allegri said.
“The ones who suffer are the kids,†she said. “And they have already been through trauma.â€
Adding a neglected or abused child to your household is a public service that involves a tremendous investment of time and emotion, said Allegri.
It should not also require a personal investment of thousands of dollars a year.
Copyright 2007 by Jim Spencer. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
5 users commented in " Paltry foster parent reimbursements cost kids "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackThis was very informative. I had no idea foster parents were paid so little.
It is OUTRAGEOUS that a state that is 8th in income is at the bottom of the heap for paying for our precious children who have suffered so much.
Perhaps that is why social services fails to remove children from the home, they have no place to put them. But that is no excuse for not following up on reported cases, as in the deaths of two children recently in our city.
We must do better by our children.
“Suffer the little children to come unto me”..
God bless Sister Allegri.
Which raises a question that’s been nagging at me for a while: where the heck DOES our money go? It’s apparently not going to higher education, K-12 schools, mental health care, the developmentally disabled, and a dozen other essential services. Where does it go? Who gets the big slice and why?
Usersuz, as always you have great insight. Those are excellent questions. I wish I knew also…Who do we get these answers from?
Our state has never spent on mental health, developmentally disabled, social services.
In the 70’s there were two main institutions for the mentally retarded, Ridge and one in Grand Junction. I visited each of them. These kids/adults were housed in large wards drugged into oblivion.
You could see needle marks on their arms.
They were no more than zombies, you could see them draped across the tables after they ate, barely able to hold their heads up, some dozing, I almost suspect they may have got their “medicine” in their food also. I can’t even describe the hell they lived in but I can still see it in my mind.
Things eventually got better, and I’m sure it was because of federal mandates, not because our state saw the light. Now there are group homes and they’ve cleaned the institutions out and the state care is very good. They are treated with the dignity and respect they deserve and given a purposeful life.
In 1985 Social Services was crying about how many other cases they had so they couldn’t check on the well-being of a baby living with alcoholic parents, where glass and other objects regularly flew through the air and the child lived in terror. And they’re still doing it obviously, since we had two more children die in Denver recently who could have been saved if only social services had followed through. So they haven’t cleaned up their act at all.
What do they do with the money?Good question.
Ah, the dilema. Pay so much that taking in a foster child is good profit and what is the motivation to care and raise that child responsibly. Isn’t this where so many abused foster kids we hear about come from? These adults are in it for the $, not the self-satisfaction to contribut to society. Pay too little, and some families won’t consider fostering. Institutions can do it more cost-effective, but is this the environment these kids should have; institutions vs a small family environment?
Mean while most of the right and all of the religious right are executing bad adults and sending soldiers to war to die, but protecting the life of the stem cells and the unborn to heap more unwanted children on a society, that they don’t want to support with their taxes. Maybe it should be required if you’re pro-life, against gov’t supported health care, welfare, and services to support our indigent society - maybe you should be required to foster one of these kids? So you sow, so shall you reap.
The foster care rates quoted here are for children placed in state licensed homes. Most foster children in Colorado are place through private CPA’s (Child Placement Agencies.) These agencies license their own foster parents, and most of these agencies are paid upward of $2,000 per month from the state. Foster care in Colorado is big business. The state receives additional money from the Federal Government (Title IV-E) for each child placed in out of home placement. Colorado has one of the highest rates of out of home placement in the country. Again, foster care is big business in Colorado, and most, but not all of the foster parents do it for one thing, the money.
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