State sees decline in foster children

11/20/2005

Focus on quick permanent placement cited

BY RACHEL E. STASSEN-BERGER
Pioneer Press

While the Rowes have been keeping busy taking in foster children, statewide there has been a steady decline in the number of foster child placements.

That’s in large part because the state has focused on moving children from temporary foster care to permanent placement more often and more quickly.

The number of Minnesota foster care placements has decreased by more than a fifth since 2000. Five years ago, there were about 18,400 children placed in foster care — last year there were about 14,400. According to national figures from the Department of Health and Human Services, the number of children entering foster care has dipped more in Minnesota than in all but three states.

“The focus on moving children to permanency in shorter periods of time has had an impact on the number of kids in placement,” said Erin Sullivan Sutton, director of Minnesota Human Services Department’s division of Child Safety and Permanency.

At the same time, the state has worked to offer families the help they may need to stay together when possible — rather than moving the children quickly to a new foster family.

Policies also have encouraged that children be placed more frequently with relatives, rather than foster families the children might never have met. In 2000, just over 14 percent of all children were placed with relatives. Four years later, more than 20 percent of the state’s wards made new homes with relatives.

Meanwhile, the Minnesota Supreme Court and the Human Services Department have begun working on a project called the Children’s Justice Initiative to improve children’s court experience.

The ultimate goal of all the changes in policy and attitude is to give children stable lives, said Sullivan Sutton.

Judy Howell, president of the Foster and Adoptive Care Association of Minnesota and a foster parent who has taken in 382 children over the past 25 years, endorses that goal. Still, she isn’t sure the dip in foster care numbers is good.

“It is always the most desirable outcome to have kids with their families,” said Howell, of Lake Elmo. But, she asked, “are we putting the kids in functional families or are we perpetuating the system?”

She said she doesn’t know the answer to that question but has observed that some of the foster children she has cared for recently are “tougher cases.”

“Foster care was beyond what they needed,” said Howell, who also adopted three of the children she has been a foster parent to. She worries that “the bar for entering foster care is higher,” in part because of budget pressure, and that means children in need of foster care do not get it soon enough.

Sullivan Sutton said that she doesn’t know whether the number of children placed in foster care now is the right size, but she said the state continually examines the systems in place to care for children.

“It is a delicate balance,” she said.