‘No place like home,’ says former Ariz. foster child

Frank Smith wonders if his teenage years might have turned out differently had his mother gotten help with a drug addiction.

Maybe he wouldn’t have been shuttled through three homes over three years.

During Smith’s sophomore year at Camelback High School, his mom, who was struggling with drugs and overwhelmed by the responsibility of taking care of her son, sent him packing.

“My mom told me she could no longer take care of me,” he said recently. “So I got on the bus and went to my stepdad’s.”

His younger sister was already living with his stepdad. But their living arrangement it didn’t last long.

And looking back, Smith alsowonders if someone would have tried to help his stepdad get sober, maybe he and his sister would have been spared their next move: into an abusive foster placement.

“There’s no place like home,” said Smith, now 21 and a senior at Arizona State University. “I felt connected to my mom. She loved me, she raised me.”

Today, he says he doesn’t know if his mom — who is still struggling — would have been open to drug treatment. But it would have been worth a try, he said, and if it worked he would have been spared life in a foster home that he said turned exploitative and punitive.

“My foster parents would make my sister and I go out and make us sell tubs of candy,” he told a legislative panel last month. “And they’d pat me down to my underwear and take every last dime that we earned.”

Part of his message to lawmakers: a need for preventive services and intervention to help keep struggling families together.

Such efforts have become the standard, a national child-welfare researcher told policy makers two years ago, as they studied new models for what would become the Department of Child Safety.

Increasingly, agencies are emphasizing efforts to keep families intact by providing counseling and focusing less on pushing kids through the child-welfare system, Bryan Samuels told the panel. Samuels is executive director of Chapin Hall, a research center at the University of Chicago focused on child welfare.

That way, “children don’t have to be removed and those services can be delivered within the family home,” Samuels said. He pointed to efforts in Florida and California, where the number of children in state care dropped dramatically.

Arizona lawmakers made prevention a key function of DCS, directing the agency to provide “prevention, intervention and treatment services” as long as they do not compromise a child’s safety.

In the 2014 special session where the agency was created, lawmakers also increased funding for preventive services, including an extra $4 million a year for three years to try to reverse a trend of more Arizona children being removed from their homes.

But the number of children being removed has climbed, not dropped. And prevention dollars have become scarce in a multimillion-dollar agency that in- creasingly funnels money to foster care to deal with the additional children entering the system.

And in the last budget year, DCS transferred $12 million — 83 percent of its budget for in-home services — to foster care. That left $2 million for services intended to keep families together.

Critics say it’s like trying to bail out a flood but not plugging the hole in the dam that caused the problem.

“It’s tiny!” Dana Wolfe Naimark said of preventive-service dollars. She’s president and CEO of the Children’s Action Alliance, which has argued for more money to keep families together. Inhome services are the core of what DCS does — or should be, she said.

In the last budget year, DCS transferred $12 million — 83 percent of its budget for in-home services — to foster care. That left $2 million for services intended to keep families together. Gov. Doug Ducey continues that cut in his proposed budget for next year.

For the coming budget year, DCS Director Greg McKay requested the extra $4 million lawmakers intended when they created the agency, but Gov. Doug Ducey did not include it in his proposal. Instead, his office is putting its faith in more-efficient agency operations to reduce the number of children coming into state care.

Those methods include a new screening process for calls to the state’s childabuse hotline that is intended to be more objective.

The agency is behind a bill that seeks to exempt certain reports from investigation. House Bill 2522 would not require an investigation if alleged child neglect or abuse occurred more than three years ago and if there have not been subsequent reports of maltreatment.

The bill won approval in its first committee hearing and is awaiting a vote in the full House of Representatives.

In addition, there appears to be a philosophical difference in what “prevention” means.

McKay and Ducey’s office have noted several times that the DCS only gets involved with a family after an allegation has been made.

That suggests prevention falls to the Department of Economic Security, which provides many of the state’s safety-net programs.

One of those programs — Temporary Assistance for Needy Families — is being cut to a one-year lifetime limit for low-income families. The cut takes effect July 1, and critics warn it could trigger the kind of neglect — inadequate housing, an unsafe home environment — that comprises 73 percent of calls to the child-abuse hotline.

The DES also oversees the state’s child-care assistance program, which provides subsidies to foster families. It relies on federal dollars. But there is no general-fund money for child-care aid to low-income families.

Beth Rosenberg of the Children’s Action Alliance says it makes little sense to not also help a low-income parent trying to avoid DCS involvement.

“Foster parents get the attention that struggling families don’t,” said Rosenberg, the group’s director of child-welfare and juvenile-justice policy.