What Missouri’s vulnerable children need — and what they don’t

Darrell Missey, left, director of Children’s Division, speaks at an Aug. 13 hearing, alongside Todd Richardson, director of MO HealthNet (Clara Bates/Missouri Independent).

Two recent news stories aptly illustrate what Missouri children “at risk” of maltreatment need — and what they don’t.

What they need is concrete help for their families, so their family poverty is not confused with “neglect” and they are not torn from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of foster care.

To his great credit, Missouri Republican U.S. Rep. Jason Smith has partnered with Wisconsin Democratic U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore to introduce legislation to clarify that a small source of federal aid can be used to provide this kind of help.

And to his great credit, in supporting the bill, Children’s Division Director Darrell Missey said:

“We know that addiction and mental illness occur in affluent communities just like they do in poorer neighborhoods, but rates of removal among the poor are astronomically higher. If the deprivations of poverty are addressed, people can often address these other problems and keep their families intact. We must do everything we can to make sure that poorer families have that same opportunity.”

But the key word here is clarify .  The source of funds addressed by this legislation already can be used for the kind of help Missey describes.

Of course, there’s nothing to stop Missouri from also using state funds for this kind of help – except a great big industry built around the worst and most expensive form of “care” for children – institutionalizing them in various forms of “residential treatment.”

Though they already can get more than $150 per day per child – and sometimes much more, the industry says it’s not enough , and they bemoan a “shortage” of placements for youth who supposedly are too difficult to be cared for anywhere else.

Don’t believe it.

Just ask the survivors.

Of course, one can find the occasional success story.  But listen to what one survivor after another has to say about rampant cruelty and abuse, and read the report that the foster youth-led group Think of Us produced.  In another report, called “Warehouses of Neglect” a U.S. Senate subcommittee concluded that “Children suffer routine harm inside [residential treatment facilities]. The risk of harm to children in RTFs is endemic to the operating model.”

And it’s not just institutions run for profit that are horrendous.  Scandals have engulfed for-profit and non-profit institutions alike in Arizona , Kentucky , Tennessee , Indiana , Utah , Oklahoma , Washington state , Arkansas , Connecticut , Rhode Island and, of course, Missouri’s own “ reform school from hell .”

But even were there no scandals, even were there no physical or sexual abuse in these places, there would be no reason for them to exist – because residential treatment doesn’t work.

Study after study reaches the same conclusion: There is nothing residential treatment can do that can’t be done better and at less cost with community-based alternatives.

That should come as no surprise.

Imagine if we were starting from scratch and someone said: “I have a great idea!  Let’s take young people we think have the most serious problems, all of them strangers to each other, at the age when they are most susceptible to peer pressure and throw them together 24/7. Won’t that work well?”

But Missouri’s children will never get better alternatives as long as taxpayers keep subsidizing institutions to the tune of hundreds of dollars per day per child.

Oh, we know the party line: There’s a “shortage” of family foster homes.  And anyway, some children simply can’t be cared for in a family or, to use the industry’s own offensive term, they “blow out” of foster homes.  “And how can you say we’re an institution?” they cry. “We have such beautiful grounds! We let the kids decorate their own rooms!  We’re home-like!”

But the shortage is artificial.  Missouri tears apart families at a rate 60% percent above the national average.  Get the children who don’t need to be in foster care back into their own homes and there will be plenty of room in good, safe family foster homes for the children who really need them.

And if you provide birth parents and foster parents alike with the intensive “wraparound” help they need to care for children with serious behavior problems, they won’t “blow out” of homes and they won’t need to be institutionalized. If you doubt it, watch this short video in which Wraparound pioneer Karl Dennis describes returning safely to his own home a youth so difficult the county jail couldn’t handle him.

As for all those pretty grounds and cottages: Buildings don’t make a family, people make a family.  And children know the difference between “home-like” and home.

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