To the End of June : The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (9780547999531) (25 page)

Allyson thought this hurdle would be a good time for Dominique to learn to advocate for herself. The agency was recommending her removal, but a judge would decide Dominique's fate. Allyson believed if Dominique spoke to the judge herself, she would have a good shot at staying.

“I told her, ‘Your lawyer is getting paid to represent you. The court is getting paid to sit on that bench. But you have your life in your hands. These people won't know what's going on if you don't tell them,'” Allyson said. Even this early in the morning, Allyson was dressed up in a silky blouse and boots. “I would have been right there with you and together we could have let them know. But I can't do it on my own because it's not my life at hand, it's hers.”

I watched Dominique track Allyson's brisk moves around the kitchen, warming a bottle for the baby, stirring some fruit and cereal for herself, and wondered: Can a child whose whole life has been commandeered by a string of faceless lawyers and judges and social workers, a child who has been driven to strangers' homes in strangers' vans for unseen motives, have any faith in self-advocacy? At seventeen years old?

Dominique didn't show up at her court date, and the judge ordered her out of her agency and into the therapeutic home. Allyson drove her to the woman's house, in what was supposed to be a series of longer and longer visits, until Dominique felt acclimated enough to pack her Hefty bags and move in. But Dominique shut down. Normally alert and ready to fight with anyone, Dominique simply visited her new foster mom and refused to say a word.

Dominique did, however, talk to Allyson. She told her if she had to relocate, she would run away. This is the kind of self-advocacy she knew: like many foster kids who have little experience getting, or even imagining, what they really want, their only power lies in saying no.

“To hear her speak like that, I was like, wait a minute. I have a conscience. This is my daughter, and this is going to rest on me,” Allyson said, her rising voice echoing around the kitchen. “When I got into this, I got into this fully. I came in here fully committed. I thought, ‘Something has to happen.' And I told Dominique not to worry, something is going to work out.”

Allyson called ACS and asked if there was any way they could get the training to be a therapeutic home. They told her no. Their agency didn't offer the training, and they couldn't just switch agencies because all their other children were with Edwin Gould. Allyson said they would adopt Dominique.

“The woman on the phone said, ‘Are you sure?'” In the retelling, Allyson's eyes blazed. “I said, ‘Lemme tell you something. When I say something out of my mouth, I am sure. Because regardless of how this turns out, it ain't gonna be nobody's problem but mine.'”

On the eighteenth of that month, Allyson said, she, Bruce, and Dominique were scheduled to go to the agency and sign paperwork. “And that's it. They can't move her from here. This is Dominique's home.”

I asked Dominique, who hadn't stopped staring at Allyson throughout her entire speech, how she felt. She looked shyly down at the countertop. “I can't stop smiling because I feel loved. And it never happened before. They're so passionate about keeping me here and welcoming me. It's kinda weird. It's scary. I don't know.” Dominique trailed off, but then picked up again, louder than before. “Honestly, when I first came here, I was like, what kinda Cosby thing is this? I'd never been in a house with two parents before. I didn't ask them to adopt me—I had always asked for people to adopt me, but I never had no one volunteer. I'm about to be signed out of foster care, and someone's going to adopt me? It's really strange.”

To hear Dominique tell it, her path to assimilation at the Greens' was smoother, and speedier, than Bruce or Allyson claimed. Dominique had been with the Greens for only two days, in fact, when she did something that would cut her off from her past life and would, if only in her own mind, lock her securely into the house on DeKalb. She called her biological father.

“I was kind of getting comfortable here, so I called him,” Dominique said. At this point, she and I were the only ones in the kitchen, unusual for a late Saturday morning. “I said, ‘Why you put me in foster care? I know you! Most kids don't know their fathers. Most kids don't have the chance to go back. Why can't you get me out of this situation?'”

She was trying to see if she had options. If she didn't, she wanted to commit to where she was. In her entire life, Dominique had lived with her father for only one month; he had eleven other kids, with various women, and two other kids with her mom. Dominique ran away from her dad's place because she couldn't abide some of his behavior. She didn't want to discuss it.

“I asked him if he loved me and he said no,” Dominique said, describing the phone call, her eyes boring into the countertop. “He said he can't love me because I remind him of my mom too much. And he loves his stepkids more. So I cursed him out and told him I hope he goes to hell. And that I hope someone murders him. Then I hung up the phone, and I haven't called him since.”

After a moment, Dominique gave away her last little lie. “A week later, his phone got turned off.”

The notion that foster parents would pull through for Dominique in a way her own father hadn't was vital for Dominique's fragile and burgeoning trust. That they had stood up to the agency was even more radical; every important connection Dominique had ever made, she felt, had been destroyed by ACS.

First, ACS took her from her mother when she was five years old. This may have been reasonable; her mother was using cocaine, her older brother was violent with her, and Dominique was too young to remember much else. Dominique moved in with a woman who, Dominique said, would have adopted her if she could. She was loving and kind, and Dominique called her Grandmother. But Dominique's mom got better, and after living with Grandmother for five years, Dominique went back home. It lasted only three months. ACS decided the kids weren't safe and rolled them into a different agency—likely whichever one had space on its roster. Grandmother didn't know Dominique was back in care, and Dominique didn't know how to find her. Dominique's next placement wasn't as good; she missed Grandmother, she missed her mom, and, as adolescence hit, her bitterness became quick bursts of rebellion—the “devil's advocate” as Bruce would say later—against anyone who got too close. When she was told her mother died, Dominique felt entirely alone; she rarely talked to her brother, who was living in another borough, and ACS and its agencies had betrayed her. When she was fifteen, she looked up Grandmother on her own.

But it was too late. In Dominique's absence, Grandmother had fostered another little girl and adopted her. Still, she let Dominique move in. Dominique switched agencies yet again to do it, but once she got there, Dominique felt displaced. Dominique picked fights with the girl, who was about her age, and then in a particularly jealous fit, she threatened to kill her. Dominique was sent to a psychiatric hospital, and then later to the Greens.

Dr. Francine Cournos has written and spoken extensively about child welfare since she was a foster child herself in the late fifties, and she says that still, workers focus too much on rules and protocol rather than on kids' emotional attachments. I told her about Dominique, and she sighed; she'd heard it all before. Foster parents, like Dominique's “Grandmother” or even Bruce and Allyson Green, are often viewed as “interchangeable parts,” she said. She volleyed with a story of her own, about a foster mom whose child was sent back to his biological parents. When the parents were deemed unfit a number of months later, the foster mom wanted him back. Unfortunately, the agency said no: she had since fostered another child, and there wasn't enough bed space. “It's such a remarkable thing that people think about furniture and square feet instead of attachment—when there are children all over New York City who live in crowded places,” Francine said. “If the system was following the child's attachments, the child's continuity . . .” She trailed off. “The day somebody asks a foster child, ‘Where were you living before your biological mother's? How long were you there? How did that work out?'—that will be a very good day.”

It's partly because the system treats foster parents as “interchangeable parts” that they don't do the critical work of attaching to their children. Or they do it and then they stop. They're just like the foster kids: they get burned out on the system's entrenched disregard for their love.

This disregard, while deeply felt, isn't intentional. It's just that agency workers have so many rules to follow. To get their money from the state and the federal government, they have to make sure the kids are in secure placements with the proper square footage and so on—not that they're with someone who loves them. And this money, skeptics say, is the real reason agencies don't follow ASFA guidelines or work harder to reunite kids like Dominique with their biological families or with foster parents who might eventually adopt them. Money is the elephant in the room; money keeps the kids in limbo year after year after year, with family after family. And here's why: every day that a child is in care, the agency makes an income. When the child goes home, the cash flow goes with him. Foster care agencies—the private and independent businesses that contract with the state—need the foster kids to stay foster kids so they can stay in business.

All across the country, foster care payments are issued on a per diem basis: the federal government provides money to cover each day a child lives away from his parents. Take New York as an example, where there are more than thirty agencies contracting with ACS.
To get their funding, each agency has to track each child, garnering a different type of payment depending on his age, disability, special needs, and so on. The agency then tracks which type of “bed” he's in: a foster home yields one payment, a psychiatric foster home yields another, a group home gets another, and so on. And they have to do this every day, for every kid, if they want their money from ACS. And ACS has to check all this accounting and reenact a similar process themselves if they want their money from the government.

In one way, cumbersome as it is, this makes sense. This is public money, and there has to be accountability for the way it's spent. And matching each child with each dollar ensures, in theory, that there will always be enough. If more kids come into care, because of a drug epidemic or a media blitz, the laws are designed to flow more money in from the government to cover them. But it also means a lot of paperwork, and audits, and child welfare personnel pulling at their hair because they're spending more time on forms than on people.

Rudy Estrada, the lawyer who now works for Legal Aid but had been hired by ACS in 2007 as the first LGBTQ coordinator, likened the fee structure in child welfare to that in health care. “It's like an HMO, fee for service; everything is being contracted out. There are these elaborate formulas that are used to figure out how much each agency will get from the city each month based on how many kids and which kind of beds, so they're running all these numbers constantly,” Estrada said. “Half of what ACS is doing is counting those beans.”

Forty-nine states and the cities within them are counting those same beans, zapping away critical hours and manpower while kids languish in care. But one state recently challenged the model, with results that suggest it might show the way for a better system.

In 2006, the state of Florida struck a bargain: it would become the first state in the nation to drop the per diem pay structure in exchange for a flat sum from the feds of around $140 million a year
for five years. The risk they were taking was this: if there were to be a sudden surge in the foster care rolls, they wouldn't have the per diem/per child pay structure to weather it; they'd have to make do with their capped income. But the benefit would be all the extra time and energy their workers would have—freed from the burden of filing what were, essentially, overly complicated payment requests. They'd have the time to ask questions of a kid like Dominique and track down her past connections, rather than racing to assign her the next open bed. And more than that, the plan was to focus this energy on neighborhood-based preventive programs, so fewer kids would need foster care at all.

Alan Abramowitz was the state director for family safety for Florida's Department of Children and Families (he's now the executive director of Guardian Ad Litem). He's a big man, bald and plainspoken, with a hearty laugh. He's known in house as “the firefighter.” I met him at a conference in New York in early 2009 and spoke to him on the phone some months later; he said the wild risk they took was paying off.

“We're still removing the extreme cases,” Abramowitz said, claiming that they'd reduced removals by 29 percent in the last two years. Many people, including Abramowitz and other officials in Florida, did see the per diem pay structure as a perverse incentive to bring kids into care, and to keep them there as a way to meet their budgets. Without that incentive, Abramowitz said, “we're able to put millions of dollars into the front end, into home services, which is far less expensive so you end up serving far more children.”

While the idea of a flat sum, called a “waiver,” has been kicked around by child advocates for years, Abramowitz says the idea was especially embraced by the then head of the state's child welfare department, Bob Butterworth. The first thing Butterworth did when he took office, Abramowitz said, was interview kids who had aged out of foster care at eighteen. “These kids said they would have rather been abused at home with their parents than abused by the state. We realize now that the outcomes for children in foster care are going to be worse than if they had stayed in the home,” Abramowitz said. “
Even
if there was some neglect.”