Critics say laws to slow Georgia’s influx of foster children ignore causes

“If money can solve the problem, foster care is not the solution,” said a child advocate and volunteer who works with a nonprofit to help stabilize families involved in the child welfare system and struggling with poverty. She asked not to be identified to protect her work.

“I think the solution is to keep as many kids out of the system as possible, that you nail the door to foster care, that it should be there for the kids that really need security,” she said. “That would lessen the burden that goes on the child’s welfare.”

She said policymakers are not providing Georgians with the support they need to keep their families intact and that more effort to tackle low wages and affordable housing would save children from the extreme trauma they often experience when they are placed in foster families.

The state is unable to provide the necessary resources to the child until the child is already in state care, which may result in the use of state and federal funds. According to Child Trends data, Georgia spends about $490 million on child protection services each year and also receives nearly $400 million in federal funding.

Foster parents are eligible for monthly payments ranging from $500 to $750 per child. In some cases, adoptive families also receive health insurance for the child until it reaches adulthood. Some say that if the same services were offered to the families of separated children, it could have a similar positive effect.

According to the children’s charity volunteer, it would be “much cheaper, much more effective and better for the children” if the government reallocated the funds to cover the children’s basic needs at home instead of putting them in foster care and a boarding house.

With the passage of the state’s Family First Prevention Services Act in 2018, states are allowed to spend federal Title IV-E funds on certain mental health services, drug treatment and parenting classes for families before a child is removed.

DFCS implemented a plan in 2021 to offer parent training, family therapy and therapy for troubled youth when a child is referred to child welfare or for pregnant youth who are already in foster care. But services for adult substance use disorders and adult mental health are not included, although the agency “recognizes that there is still a significant need” for such services.

“If our policymakers were actually addressing the social determinants that bring families into the focus of child welfare, you wouldn’t have the type of crisis that we see at DFCS. They are overwhelmed, they don’t have the resources to meet the needs and shouldn’t be the ones who have to do it,” the volunteer said.

She added: “I’ve seen so many families and single mothers who work and don’t have childcare for their child who has autism or a disability. Instead of helping this loving mother, the state takes her into foster care where they have the allocated funds. It’s a terrible, terrible system and it’s up to our policymakers to change it. And the people who work in that system are often very good, hard-working people working for very little money.”

Metro Atlanta communities face a severe shortage of affordable housing. The city leads the nation in the percentage of homes sold to investment firms, which have snapped up thousands of single-family homes to convert into overpriced rental properties. The tightening supply of housing is also an advantage for landlords, as people who cannot afford the rising housing prices are forced to rent instead. A recent study of the Constitution by the Atlanta Journal revealed that many investor-owned apartment complexes are unserviced and “uninhabitable,” with dangerous living conditions and rampant violent crime.

According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, Georgia lacks over 200,000 rental homes that are affordable and available to ultra-low-income renters.

While the median annual household income needed to afford a two-bedroom rental home is $43,618, many low-income Georgians don’t make as much as the minimum wage hasn’t increased from $7.25 since 2009 is.

An adult working full-time with just one child must earn at least $34.15 an hour to be able to afford food, childcare, medical expenses, housing, transportation and other living expenses for both of them, according to the Massachusetts Institute’s calculator of Technology for a living. Two full-time employed adults would each need to make at least $19.01 an hour to support themselves and just one child.

“Everyone agrees that separating a child from their parents is traumatic. The problem is we don’t have any other options,” said Melissa Carter, executive director of the Barton Child Law and Policy Center at Emory University School of Law in Atlanta. “We as a state should be committed to ensuring that we have the resources and services available to strengthen this family and ensure that parents can provide the care for their own child that they very much want but cannot. “

Carter works with policymakers, judges, and DCFS Commissioner Candice Broce to protect children’s legal rights and encourage improvements in child protection systems.

“It’s a matter of government responsibility and how we use the resources that we have, how we define the policy to make those services and interventions available in a way that doesn’t require the state to separate that family and taking custody of that child,” she said. “And right now we don’t have that.”

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