by Gongwer News Service
April 10, 2009

As if the state’s naysayers needed one more assurance of Michigan’s downward spiral, confirmation came from the Department of Human Services this week in the form of a task force report that far too many children are placed in foster care because of improper worker training, failure to provide early intervention and too little funding to cure what ails families in the first place.

DHS Director Ismael Ahmed charged the Child Welfare Task Force with reviewing the system a year ago. This week the 85-member group’s draft report went public, along with some added suggestions that haven’t yet made it into the report.

Among those added suggestions: in order to provide the higher funding necessary to overhaul the system, the state should increase its beer tax by 5 percent, which the task force estimated would raise about $111 million more annually for the department.

Mr. Ahmed sat on the board but didn’t vote on the proposal, which could be controversial, considering it would base the amount of funding for those whom many leaders refer to as the state’s “most vulnerable” on the frequency of frat parties, football Sundays and other beer saturated events.

Task Force Co-Chair and former DHS Director Pat Babcock acknowledged the proposal would be a tough sell at a media roundtable last week.

“We are not trying to create a problem within the administration,” he said. “We are 85 residents saying this is an investment worth making.”

The proposal would have the tax increase placed in a fund dedicated for child welfare programs. The department could only take money out of the fund if the legislature maintained general fund and federal support at current levels, Mr. Babcock said.

The money from the fund would be dedicated to prevention programs that would keep children in their homes. “The first value is prevention,” Mr. Babcock said. “We should invest in families and assist families to safely care for and nurture their children.”

Central to the report’s recommendations and top on its list is that DHS needs to shift from a funding structure that is heavily weighted toward out-of-home placement options and more toward early-intervention, family-preservation, post-placement and youth-transition services, including for older children and those who have been involved in the corrections system.

“It’s a fundamental shift in where the state should go,” Mr. Babcock said.

The report said the policy of the 1990s that was intended to shield children from abuse and neglect had the unintended consequence of unnecessarily removing some children when state services could have kept families together, leaving too many children lingering in the state’s system; meanwhile the state’s economy consistently demands more intervention for struggling families.

But Mr. Babcock said federal law changes would be needed to fully implement the program because federal funding currently focuses on foster care placement, not the earlier intervention services the report calls for. “We should not have a major entitlement program that only looks at one narrow part of the system,” he said.

While the state is already bound to spend money on reforms that address staffing, training and database shortfalls because of a lawsuit settlement with the New York-based advocacy group Children’s Rights, funding for some of the new recommendations in the 89-page draft proposal will likely be an issue, especially considering the ever-growing number of people flocking to DHS for its other services and cuts to the department’s budget.

In February there were 1.43 million people on assistance, compared to 1.26 million last year. The totals are in the family independence, food and disability assistance, childcare and emergency relief programs.

DHS spent $166.4 million in February 2008 on those programs, compared to $228.5 million this February.

In the latest version of its budget, DHS would see a general fund reduction of more than $195 million next year. But as the number of unemployed continues to rise, the department will dole out more money and will likely encounter more reports of abuse and neglect, which advocates say increase in hard times.

But task force Co-Chair Carol Goss, executive director of the non-profit Skillman Foundation, said funding issues don’t mean that all of the recommendations will suffer.

She said that while some of the recommendations cost money, others are simply changes in process that won’t add anything to the bottom line.

The biggest change, to keep more children in their homes instead of foster care, should save the state money that it can then put toward early intervention and other programs, she said.

A quick look at Michigan’s official website and anyone can see there have been hundreds of task forces, roundtables and committees before this latest, begging the question of whether the report will simply end up lining the bottom of a file cabinet at DHS headquarters.

With many of the task force members having served on some of the task force’s benign predecessors, the draft report acknowledged that there could be pessimism about its impact, but then quickly added a hopeful note about how it is a collective, one-of-a-kind, useful resource to DHS.

On its end, the department has followed through so far, with Mr. Ahmed saying last week that he plans to integrate the task force recommendations into policy that he says will result in “long-term reform and massively better outcomes.”

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