I am finally listening to a book my colleague Dr. Don Mathews has been recommending to me for a couple years—Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey. The book is very long, and according to my Kindle, I am only 17% into it.
In an early chapter, McCloskey argues that ethics matter more than institutions in making a country or community successful. The most obvious example she gives is of a legal system. Laws and institutions of justice only work if societal norms value adherence to those laws.
This discussion from McCloskey reminds me of one of the least efficient systems I have ever been part of—Georgia’s child welfare system. I have been a licensed foster parent for over three years. I have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of this system. First, let me say, there really is a lot of good. I have worked with caseworkers, lawyers, judges, and other advocates who have extraordinary hearts for children and who work hard every day to achieve happy, healthy, and safe permanency for our kids.
Unfortunately, there also is a lot about the system that should be improved.
I have often thought about lobbying legislators in Atlanta for better laws to protect Georgia’s children. But, the more I observe, the more I realize that in many cases, the inefficiencies are not due to poorly-designed laws or policies. Most of the inefficiencies I have witnessed are due to a lack of knowledge of the rules or, alarmingly often, needless foot-dragging accompanied by excuses not to follow the rules.
In my experience, it’s the foot-dragging that causes the most harm, both human harm and economic harm.
According to Georgia law, if a child has been in foster care for 15 months and their biological parents have not made significant progress toward establishing a safe environment for the child to return to, then DFCS should begin the process of terminating parental rights (TPR) so that the child can be adopted into a stable and permanent family—often either another biological relative of the child or the foster family with whom the child has been placed for much or all of their time in foster care.
Even with this law in place, Georgia DFCS’s own annual progress report for 2021 states that TPR was filed with appropriate timeliness in only 27% of applicable cases, and they cite departmental failures as the most frequent cause of delay.
These delays are concerning because of the trauma they cause to children and families, but they are also concerning because of the tremendous financial cost to the state of keeping a child in foster care. In 2018, DFCS reported having spent an average of over $16,500 for each child in foster care. Children in care also receive other benefits from the state such as Medicaid, the WIC food program, and state-funded daycare services.
It gets worse! If a child is in foster care for over two years, they qualify for what the state calls adoption assistance. Adoption assistance comes with state-paid adoption fees. And, until the child turns 18 years old, they are eligible for both Medicaid and a monthly stipend of at least $400, regardless of the adoptive family’s income. As of July 1 of this year, these same children also will receive a free college education from any public college or university in Georgia.
From a moral standpoint, I have no problem with granting these privileges to our kids who have experienced the trauma of foster care. In fact, I sometimes argue for expanding some of these services to include all former foster children, not just the ones who have been in care longest.
But, under current law, this is unnecessary government spending. My son’s story is his to tell, not mine, but I will tell you this much—he was in foster care WAY longer than he should have been. He and I both experienced significant trauma because DFCS ignored the 15-month law. Through this trauma, he earned the adoption assistance he now receives. But, if the state had not failed him, he could have been spared the trauma, and taxpayers could have been spared the expense.
We owe it to our children and ourselves to recreate a child welfare system that embodies a cultural ethic for following established laws and policies. Then, we can work on making those policies better.
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Dr. Melissa Trussell is a professor in the School of Business and Public Management at College of Coastal Georgia who works with the college’s Reg Murphy Center for Economic and Policy Studies. Contact her at mtrussell@ccga.edu.
Reg Murphy Center