Last December, U.S. District Judge Janis Jack ruled that the Texas foster care system was inadequate to the point of being unconstitutional. Most everyone is in agreement on what the major issues are: poorly trained foster parents, overwhelming case loads, high staff turnover, low pay. Whether or not the political wherewithal exists to fix the problem is another matter.
“Texas’s foster care system is broken, and it has been that way for decades,” Judge Jack’s opinion reads. On this episode of Into the Fold, F. Scott McCown, clinical professor at The University of Texas School of Law, director of the Children’s Rights Clinic and an expert on child welfare, tells us how the system came to be so broken and what needs to be done to fix it.
For McCown, it’s basically a matter of lawmakers and taxpayers alike putting their money where their mouths are:
“We’re going to have to increase caseworker salaries up to some realistic professional level, like we pay teachers. We’re going to have to pay 100 percent of foster care. And it’s gonna be a big bill. And people are going to have to say, what’s their priority?
Clearly, we are asking a lot of foster parents. We are asking a lot of caseworkers. Outrage at abused and neglected children is justified but also easy. In McCown’s telling, true change will hinge upon our willingness to come to grips with the gap between what we expect and what we’ve thus far committed to the task of caring for children.
[For more of this story by Ike Evans go to http://mhdaily.org/fold-episode-27/]
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