DEBATE
New Jersey Reports: DYFS still lacking
services for families, teens
New Jersey's child welfare agency rarely does all that
it should for the families it serves and has serious shortcomings in
preparing enough teens in foster care for adulthood, according to two
studies by the state child advocate.
The two reports released yesterday paint the same
picture as a slew of previous ones have: The Division of Youth and
Family Services sometimes fails to help New Jersey's abused, neglected
and otherwise vulnerable children - even amid an ambitious reform
effort. The Child Advocate's Office, an arm of the state government that
is independent of DYFS, reviewed a sampling of case files to produce
detailed looks at the ways DYFS handles specific sorts of cases.
To DYFS, the reports were old news. "For the most
part, a lot of these issues are things that we knew and we've been
working to address," said DYFS spokesman Andy Williams. Williams said
that the rapid hiring and training of new caseworkers - and retraining
of veteran caseworkers planned for this year - should address many of
the problems. Most of the children under DYFS' care remain with their
families rather than being moved to foster families or institutions.
DYFS offers parents drug-abuse treatment, parenting
classes and other forms of help. "Too many families in this study
appeared to be left to their own devices to solve their problems," said
Arburta Jones, the chief of staff for the Child Advocate's Office and
the lead author of the report on families. She said assessments of
families' needs are often "shallow," in part because caseloads remain
high and DYFS workers do not have enough time with each case. She cited
as an example the story of two toddlers removed from their mother's care
in February 2004 because she was homeless. The mother got a job and took
parenting classes as she looked for a home while the boys were moved
from foster home to foster home.
By the time the study ended in June 2005, the boys
were still living away from their mother. Jones said that DYFS' help to
find an appropriate home could have kept the family together and should
have had a higher priority than giving her parenting classes. While that
may have been an extreme case, Jones said families rarely received all
they needed from DYFS. The report found that in only 12 percent of the
cases reviewed did caseworkers offer families all the services they
needed.
In the other report, the Child Advocate's Office
praised DYFS for having some of the nation's best policies for preparing
foster children for independent lives. DYFS offers classes in which
those teens learn life basics such as grocery-shopping and budgeting,
for example. DYFS helps them pay college and trade school tuition and
arranges to have publicly funded health care for them until they turn
21, and has also been opening shelters where adolescents can stay as
they reach adulthood.
But the report, which looked at 15-year-olds who were
in the foster-care system as of May 2005, found that too few of the
teens were benefiting from those programs or others. In particular, the
Child Advocate's Office said it appeared that not enough of the teens
have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
In addition, the report found, black teens in foster
care are far less likely than whites and Hispanics to receive
mental-health treatment. DYFS' Williams said that may be inaccurate. He
said the study did not take into account children who may be receiving
counseling through other divisions of the state government or private
contractors and do not have that fact noted on their DYFS files.
Susan Lambiase, associate director of Children's
Rights Inc., the advocacy group that sued DYFS to force the changes and
is now asking a federal judge to intervene because the reforms are not
doing enough, said the reports underscored her agency's main complaints
about DYFS. "It emphasizes the importance of translating policy into
practice," she said.
Geoff Mulvihill
7 January 2005
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/local/13571078.htm
