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Hot on the heels of the lawsuit against Michigan foster care, Children’s Rights has filed a lawsuit against Oklahoma foster care.
The circumstances sited in the Oklahoma lawsuit are similar to those in Michigan.
• A ten month old girl who went through sixteen placements and had her skull fractured in one of the placements.
• A five year old boy who had nine placements in under twelve months, and was spread across four different counties.
• A thirteen year old girl who had already been sexually abused and was further abused in one of her foster care placements, plus the lack of treatment for the trauma she had already suffered, and continued to suffer while in foster care.
These stories are so similar to the Michigan lawsuit it is unthinkable.
The Oklahoma suit goes on to detail why the kids are being moved, abused and maltreated while in care. The reasons are not surprising to many of us who have dealt with foster care for a number of years.
Children placed in overcrowded and understaffed homes – You bet! With a shortage of foster homes everywhere you turn, kids end of being moved to homes that cannot adequately care for all the kids that are placed with them. I’m not faulting foster parents here. The kids have to go somewhere, and there are only so many foster homes to go around. The other alternative is to put kids into residential treatment centers and psychiatric facilities, but guess what? They’re overcrowded too, and they are not proper placements for the great majority of the kids.
Kids are moved from one “unstable” home to another – Unstable is the terminology that the lawsuit uses. I don’t know the exact details of the homes that they are citing, but I’m sure that they are certainly stressed out homes. By the time that Sammy had reached our home, he had twelve documented moves, and that doesn’t count the time that he spent bouncing between his birth parents in the first three years of his life, and then between a pre-adoptive placement and his biological grandparents before coming to our home. His story is not unusual. Even now as an older child who has control over his behaviors, he has been through several placements. Every move harms our kids, but sometimes kids really have to be moved.
Overworked social workers – Case workers are carrying more kids on their case loads than they should be. The statistics cited in the lawsuit are beyond scary. The national average is that a worker should have twelve to fifteen children but in actuality, the numbers are more like fifty to one hundred. How can a worker possibly monitor that many children? The simple is answer is that they can’t. It’s just not possible. If each worker is supposed to spend at least one hour in the home of each child per month, then you add in drive time, you are very quickly running out of hours. That does not include staff meetings, pre-placement visits and transportation, and the other responsibilities that they have.
Insufficient recruiting of foster parents – This is a tough one. You can’t make someone be a foster parent. Yes, paying parents more would be helpful, but some people don’t want to take the kids no matter how much you pay them. Some of these kids are really tough, plain and simple. Had I known the wild ride that we would be in for when we took Sammy, we might not have done it. The kids’ issues are getting harder to handle.
I have a feeling we’re going to see more and more of these lawsuits coming up, and I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. It might bring some awareness to the need for foster parents, as well as the needs of the kids. How can that be bad?
There should be one in Pennsylvania for Medicaid refusing to provide healthcare for foster children if they’re moved across county lines. Mmhmm. Ridiculous!
That is beyond ridiculous. Contact Children’s Rights. They’ll get on it.
In MI I had a similar issue with Medicaid. We live in one county and were licensed in another. I tried to take my adopted children (adopted from foster care) to a psychiatrist in my county and was told he was listed under the other county for mental health services. I ended up paying what my primary ins. wasn’t paying just to keep him with the same doctor. I couldn’t change because I couldn’t find a doctor in the county he was listed under who was taking Medicaid patients – so screwed up. Keep us posted on these situations – I’d love to find out what the remedy is for MI especially!
Kelly – We were foster parents in a major county in Tulsa for many years. And it is indeed a sad situation. The turn over rate on the social workers was incredible. We went through worker after worker after worker.