The number of children in Washington's foster care system dropped by almost half in the past six years, reflecting a shift in approach that prioritizes keeping families together.
That's news to celebrate, said the Department of Children, Youth and Families and some family advocates who have long criticized the system for harms created by separating children from their parents. It's the scariest thing many can imagine, said Tara Urs, special counsel for civil policy and practice at the King County Department of Public Defense. And it's happened disproportionately to people who are poor and Black and Native American families.
"It's wonderful to see a state agency working harder at keeping families together," said Shrounda Selivanoff, who manages social service contracts for families with the state Office of Public Defense and who leads a coalition called Keeping Families Together.
The decline in foster care numbers, from 9,171 in 2018 to 4,971 in early August, also gives DCYF a positive trend to report as it faces steep criticism for its crowded juvenile justice facilities and transfer last month of 43 young men to an adult prison. A judge ordered them to be sent back.
DCYF had been waiting for the number of foster care children to drop below 5,000 to make an announcement, said agency spokesperson Nancy Gutierrez.
Yet, some raise concerns about whether DCYF's approach is leaving children in unsafe situations and their families without the help they need.
DCYF Secretary Ross Hunter has long said he wants to dramatically cut the number of children in foster care. While acknowledging cases of "horrific physical and sexual abuse," he said in a 2021 interview with The Seattle Times that the majority of cases allege neglect.
That's a squishier concept that many have pointed out is often linked to a lack of access to decent housing, child care, mental health counseling and drug treatment.
The department has been using services to address those and other parenting issues to either avoid removing children or to reunite families sooner after doing so, Gutierrez said. DCYF might, for example, connect parents to substance use or mental health treatment programs or bring a social worker into the home to problem solve. The agency also can offer practical items, like diapers, car seats and beds.
A law that took effect in July 2023 accelerated the agency's push in this direction. It raised the judicial standard for ordering a child removed from "serious threat of substantial harm" to "imminent physical harm." The number of children placed in foster care fell by 14% in the year after House Bill 1227 passed.
Gutierrez said the agency develops safety plans for some families left intact, which could include unannounced home visits or identifying relatives and friends whom children can stay with in a crisis.
Still, Shannon Anderson, a veteran Snohomish foster parent, said: "I have huge concerns."
She said she and other foster parents are finding children who now come into their care are in worse shape than they used to be, with more serious mental health conditions or greater exposure to lethal drugs like fentanyl. She contends they've been left too long in unsafe conditions because of the heightened legal standard.
Anderson, who organized a rally of a couple of dozen people in Olympia last fall to push for changes to the law, also said children put into foster care are being returned too quickly to their parents.
She pointed to an increasing number of deaths and near deaths of children whose families were involved with the child welfare system in the preceding year, as reported by the Office of the Family and Children's Ombuds. The number climbed from 77 in 2019 to 149 last year.
Those numbers include both children in foster care and those living with their parents when the incidents happened.
Ombuds Patrick Dowd said it was too soon to tell whether the push for keeping families together, including the heightened standard for removal, was driving the figures up. But he suspected it had more to do with the overall fentanyl epidemic than policy or legal changes.
Lawmakers, in effect, tweaked the heightened standard this spring. They passed Senate Bill 6109, which requires courts to give "great weight" to the presence of opioids in the home.
Some advocates who passionately argue in favor of moving away from separating families say the system still needs work. A problem, said Taila Ayay and Adam Ballout, lawyers with an Everett family defense practice, is inadequate support for families that don't meet the removal standard.
When DCYF decides to "walk away," Ballout said, "that doesn't mean that family doesn't still need help." Sometimes, he said, DCYF withdraws things it offered — such as housing and child care vouchers — while investigating a case. Parents who made themselves vulnerable by admitting they needed help feel stranded in those situations, Ballout added.
Situations like that "delay the inevitable," he said, because unsupported families may eventually meet the removal threshold.
Ideally, Ballout and Ayay added, DCYF would hand over the job of helping families to outside organizations that are not reporting back to an agency with the power to take their children away.
DCYF maintains it is doing that already.
"Once a case is closed, DCYF's involvement would end, but we would make sure that families were connected with all of the proper resources (housing vouchers etc.) before we close the case," Gutierrez said in an email.
Yet, DCYF acknowledged, in a July PowerPoint presentation, that a lack of substance use "treatment services and other community-based supports for families places children at further risk."
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