Foster Care ~ Destruction Of Families

Unnecessary, overburdened

Although officials in Reno County claim to be mystified at the obscenely high rate at which children are torn from their families in the county, there is a clue to why it's happening right in your excellent story "Review of SRS status is ongoing," Jan. 17. Tearing "ungovernable" children from their families and parking them in an institution with other "ungovernable" children for a couple of weeks may have been "cutting edge" in the 19th century.
Now, it's widely recognized as barbaric.

It doesn't matter how kind the staff may be or how pretty the building, it's still an institution and it's still inherently harmful. And the foolishness of placing a bunch of children with behavior problems together right at the age when they are most vulnerable to peer pressure should be obvious. There are far better answers in such cases, such as wraparound programs, in which intensive help is brought right into the home - 24/7 if necessary - and it still costs less than institutionalizing children. When a rate of removal is as sky high as Reno County's, odds are a lot of children are being torn from everyone they know and love when family poverty is confused with "neglect." In other cases, families may have real problems, but the right kinds of help could keep them safely together rather than subjecting the children to the enormous inherent trauma of foster care. One major study of 15,000 typical cases found that children left in their own homes fared better in later life even than comparably maltreated children placed in foster care. Other studies have found abuse in at least one in three foster homes. The record of group homes and institutions is worse. And it's not just the children wrongfully removed who suffer. The more that SRS caseworkers are overloaded with children who don't need to be in foster care, the less time they have to find children in real danger - so more such cases are missed.The problem is even worse than the official figures show. Unlike every other state, Kansas simply refuses to count a child as removed if he is sent home before the first court hearing. Add in those children and there is a good chance Kansas as a whole is the child-removal capital of America - and Reno County is, of course, far worse than the average for Kansas.

None of this means no child ever should be taken from her or his parents. But it does mean that foster care is an extremely toxic intervention that should be used sparingly and in small doses. Unfortunately, Kansas in general and Reno County in particular have been prescribing mega-doses of foster care, and the county's children are suffering enormously for it. Kansas needs to learn from places that have rebuilt their systems to improve child safety by emphasizing family preservation.

RICHARD WEXLER
Executive DirectorReformAlexandria, Va.