NEW JERSEY

Children in foster care are bouncing from home to home at a higher rate.

NJ children safer, but it's hard to keep foster families

Despite a massive recruiting drive to get more foster families, New Jersey has about the same number of them as it did two years ago, according to a new report. The study, released Wednesday by the Association for Children of New Jersey, also found that since reforms to the Division of Youth and Family Services were launched in 2003, children under the state's care are safer. But getting and keeping foster parents remains a problem. In 2004, there were 3,913; this year, there were 4,005. Even as hundreds of new families volunteer, others leave the system. "The question is: How do you develop homes that stay?" said Cecilia Zalkind, executive director of the association.

Mary Jane Awrachow, executive director of Foster and Adoptive Family Services, a nonprofit support and advocacy group that contracts with the state, said some families adopt children and stop taking in more foster children, some are frightened off by more onerous licensing requirements and some find the job too difficult without enough support. "These families are volunteers for the state. They really are doing this as volunteers," she said. "When it's too much, it's too much and they close their homes."

Human Services Commissioner Kevin Ryan said the state was smart a few years ago to train some Division of Youth and Family Services staff to work exclusively with foster parents. Given a more powerful role, he said, those workers might be able to give foster families enough support to keep taking children.

The report also found that children in foster care in New Jersey are bouncing from home to home at a higher rate than they were before the state began the massive reform effort. In 2002, about 54 percent of children in foster care had been in two or more homes; last year, that figure was 60 percent, according to the association's analysis. Ryan said those numbers might be faulty because they could count some children as having moved who were in the same relative's home all along. Still, Human Services spokeswoman Mary Helen Cervantes said the state wants to have children move from family to family less often.

The report _ one of the first independent studies on the impact of child-welfare reforms in New Jersey _ found that on several other fronts the system has improved over the last three years. The state Division of Youth and Family Services' intense focus on dealing with child-abuse has helped reduce the number of children who are abused repeatedly, the report found. Zalkind said some of the gains have been very small, but substantial enough to show the state that it needs to keep putting money into a child-welfare system that until a few years ago rarely got big boosts in state money. "This speaks strongly to the need to stay on course and continue the investment for reform," Zalkind said.

Gov. Jon S. Corzine has proposed creating a new Cabinet-level department dedicated solely to child welfare. But in budget discussions the last few months, some lawmakers have questioned increasing child-welfare spending. Ryan said he and the governor are encouraged by the improvements noted, but recognize that more needs to be done. "The governor's proposed budget, along with the creation of a new department focused solely on kids and families, will help accelerate our progress to protect and ensure a brighter future for New Jersey's most vulnerable children," Ryan said. Three years ago, the state settled a lawsuit filed by a children's advocacy group and made a pledge to fix a broken agency that was in the midst of a string of tragedies in which children under the state's watch were harmed or even killed.

Since then, New Jersey has added hundreds of caseworkers and changed many of its procedures. Experts following the reforms have said they're moving too slowly and are not purposeful enough. New Jersey and Children's Rights Inc., the New York advocacy group that sued to force child-welfare reform, have been negotiating how to fix reform efforts. A deadline for an agreement, previously set for Monday, was moved to June 23.

Geoff Mukvihill
14 June 2006

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newjersey/ny-bc-nj--dyfsreform0614jun14,0,3584072.story?coll=ny-region-apnewjersey

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