The business of rehabilitating foster children

The business of rehabilitating foster children
By: Heidi Zhou

(Part 3)-- Imagine leaving your home, your school, your friends and even your family. Now, imagine starting over alone with nothing but a suitcase.
That’s a reality for 27,000 Texas children in foster care, and it happens all too often. Some get moved five, 10 or even 20 times. The results yield young people continually re-traumatized by the system that's supposed to rescue them.

Options for becoming a foster parent:
1) Complete an "interest form" for your Texas area and receive an informational packet from DFPS staff in your area.

2) Attend a free foster/adopt information meeting. View the schedule of information meetings in your area, local contacts, events and statistics.

3) Work with a Private Adoption Agency who works in partnership with DFPS.

For 19-year-old Jarod Smith, he just learned to detach himself.
He learned that from living in 35 different foster homes since the age of 10.

"I've been detaching myself from everybody and anybody," Smith said. "I stay most of the time in my room. I don't know why. It’s just me and my emotions. They’re just overrating right now."

Smith will be the first to tell you he's not easy to handle.

CPS rates children according to their rehabilitative need, and Smith bounced between the top two, of the four, service levels.

"Going to a new place is scary because my personality is, I don't want to get to know nobody," Smith said. "They're just going to hurt me, and I’m going to hurt them. My foster dad and my foster mom, I just didn't want to click. I didn't want to have that experience with them like I had with my real mom."

So whenever things got rough, Smith's foster parents would request he be moved. That's a common pattern in foster care, former district judge and child welfare expert Scott McCown said.

"You have such need to have children placed in foster care, that if that child is the least bit of trouble to me, I want to toss him out. I don't have to worry that I lose any money because you have so many other kids, you'll place another one with me," he said.

McCown is talking about the state's foster care reimbursement system which consists of four service levels. Each level comes with a distinct pay rate.
• Basic = $22.15 per day
• Moderate = $38.77 per day
• Specialized = $49.85 per day
• Intense = $88 per day

"The fee for service system doesn't incentivize, I hate that word, but incentivize good behavior. In fact, it doesn't favor helping the child or helping the family," McCown said.

It also makes it hard for foster families to keep a child once his service level drops.

"I don't do basic care children because at $18 a day, you look at the overhead. You can't do it," foster parent Joyce Johnson said.

Johnson runs a group foster home in Orange. She's seen around 600 teenage boys come and go in the 15 years as a foster parent.

"What helps these kids is the supervision we give them," Johnson said.

Learn more:
• Read and watch more about Jarod Smith's story.

• Click here to view our interactive timeline of the changes of CPS and foster care. Also you can see videos of those who've made it through the system and see their take on it all.

Johnson has rehabilitated many boys to a "basic" level. The boys have wanted to stay longer, but she's had to tell them no, because she couldn't afford to keep them.
"When you’ve got a $600 light bill and a $300 water bill, $2300 in mortgage, I've got teenage boys that eat. Then, you can't do it," Johnson said.

The Legislature recognized the problem in 2009, but didn't do anything about it. A bill that would have looked at changing the reimbursement policy died when lawmakers ran out of time.

Now, it's up to a group of public and private partners to reexamine the problem. The group is drafting a plan to redesign foster care. Lutheran Social Services President Betsy Guthrie is a member.

"We are penalized financially for doing well with the child," she said.

Lutheran Social Services is the largest of the agencies. They’re contracted to manage the state's 10,000 foster homes. Jarod Smith knows those homes all too well.

CPS Assistant Commissioner Audrey Deckinga said Smith's experience was unacceptable.

"It sounds like we have failed him in not finding a place, a provider and the department together, working together to keep him in one place," she said.

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