Submitted by crinadmin on
Summary: Some 2,000 children live in in Santa Clara County foster care homes. All told, California has nearly 100,000 foster children. As wards of the state, they are our collective responsibility. Yet California has been failing these children for years. Despite expenditures of more than $400 million from the state's general fund, statistics show that 25 percent of foster children wind up homeless, 50 percent never finish high school and more than half are unemployed. Systemic changes are necessary to dramatically reduce these figures.
Two years ago, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Performance Review Board acknowledged the level of the crisis, calling for significant reforms. But nothing of substance has been done. The newly formed California Select Committee on Foster Care hopes to change that. The 12-member committee, consisting of 12 Assembly members, including Assemblywoman Rebecca Cohn, D-Campbell, should push forward with its efforts to help the state's courts and agencies work collaboratively, share information and make it easier for care providers to navigate the system. And it should adopt the major recommendations of the non-partisan Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care, which calls for reforms to help keep kids out of the foster-care system and make it easier for them to stay with relatives. Assemblywoman Karen Bass, D-Los Angeles, has made improving the system her No. 1 priority. One of her chief complaints is that too little is done to help children leaving the system when they turn 18, an age when most children are still receiving substantial support -- financial and emotional -- from their parents. She is pushing for legislation that would help free up more federal dollars for these young adults. The committee also wants to create a single data source for foster parents and advocates to make it simpler to obtain information about foster children. The average foster child attends nine different schools, according to Miriam Krinksy, executive director of the Children's Law Center. That presents challenges for social workers, who must currently go from agency to agency for court, school and health records, wasting precious time and making it difficult to ensure that the state is living up to its academic, medical and legal obligations to children. California has an obligation to care and provide for these vulnerable children, offer them hope and help them to become responsible, productive adults. The alternative -- pushing them toward a lifetime of dependency or, worse, criminality -- is not worthy of our collective role as their parents. We can choose to nurture them now and reap the benefits, or continue to ignore the level of the crisis and pay the price in the years to come. Areas of focus California Select Committee on Foster Care will focus on the following areas: * To better support relatives in caring for abused and neglected children, in an effort to keep more fragile families intact and promote greater well being for children in foster care. * To better address the needs of teens in foster care and youth who grow too old to be covered in the child welfare system and seek to adjust to independent living. * To craft more sensible funding structures that enable the needs of families and children at risk to be addressed without necessitating unnecessary removal of children from the home. * To enable courts and agencies across the state to collaborate more effectively, jointly share relevant data, and eliminate institutional hurdles that inhibit improved outcomes for children.