Foster care oversight bill’s funding slashed

SACRAMENTO — Facing opposition from budget hawks, a Bay Area lawmaker on Wednesday deeply cut his bill to bolster monitoring of California’s 63,000 foster children, who critics say are too often prescribed powerful psychiatric drugs with little followup or coordinated care.

SB 319 would have expanded duties of foster care public health nurses to include monitoring and oversight of children who are prescribed psychotropic medication and would have funded 38 more nurses so counties have at least one nurse for every 200 patients.

But the state Finance Department earlier this month came out against the bill because it would have required up to $5 million this budget year and up to $10 million in each following year. “Additional program costs of this magnitude would place pressure on the state’s budget, which remains precariously balanced,” the department’s memo said. California’s current general fund budget is about $115.4 billion.

So as the bill came up Wednesday in the Assembly Appropriations Committee, state Sen. Jim Beall said he saw little choice but to cut out all the spending, essentially leaving nurse oversight of medications for foster kids as an “opt-in” for counties who would be forced to foot the bill.

“Appropriations committees are usually the highest hurdle you have to jump over … second perhaps only to the governor’s signature,” Beall, D-San Jose, said later Wednesday. “We’re going to get the bill on the governor’s desk.”

Beall’s SB 319 is one of four pending bills inspired by the Bay Area News Group’s investigative series “Drugging Our Kids,” which revealed that nearly 1 in 4 foster care teens take psychiatric drugs.

The drugs are often used to control behavior, not to treat mental illnesses. Most of those on the drugs are prescribed antipsychotics, a powerful class of medication that have the most harmful side effects.

The bill still would give public health nurses the authority to get foster youths’ medical records from social workers and prescribing doctors, Beall said, even though it won’t be required. Almost all of the state’s largest counties will do so, he predicted, and he can use his seats on the Senate Budget and Appropriations committees to revisit funding for more nurses and perhaps a statewide mandate in next year’s budget talks.

Still, foster-youth advocates were disappointed.

The Oakland-based National Center for Youth Law sponsored SB 319, and center policy analyst Anna Johnson testified on its behalf Wednesday. Afterward, she said the state’s refusal to spend any money on this is especially disappointing because the federal government would pay 75 percent of the bill.

“If you want monitoring to happen, you have to mandate it” as many other states have, she said. Refusing to do so means “we’re happy with passing that cost on to foster children’s bodies” by “taking a big risk that children will continue to not be monitored on these medications, whether they’re medically necessary or not.”

Rochelle Trochtenberg, 32, a former Los Angeles foster youth who now lives in Eureka, testified briefly but passionately Wednesday, saying a nurse’s supervision could’ve made all the difference for her as she went through 20 foster placements in six years, mostly in group homes. Instead, her complaints of adverse side effects went unheeded.

“I urge you to remember our voices,” she told lawmakers.

All four of the pending bills dealing with medication of foster youth already have passed the Senate, and the Assembly Appropriations Committee sent them Wednesday to its “suspense file” — a sort of limbo for bills costing $50,000 from the general fund or $150,000 from any source, which the committee can revisit and vote to advance to floor votes before the Legislature’s session ends Sept. 11.