Social Problem Essay: Permanency

8
SOCIAL PROBLEM

















Social Problem Essay: Permanency
Jason Lester
University of Denver























What is the problem?
Grace, a 12-year-old African American female, has been in the legal custody of Denver Human Services for her entire life. Born with crack, alcohol and marijuana in her system, Grace has unexpectedly been able to demolish proposed stereotypes of children destined for academic failure. For the sixth year in a row, Grace will be honored for her scholastic achievement at an elementary school in Denver, Colorado. Again, she is on the honor roll and receiving accolades for perfect attendance. Grace has been declared gifted at her elementary school and is even reading at a 9th grade level. In the audience to celebrate Grace's achievements are the usual attendants, a dialectical behavioral therapist of the Aurora Mental Health Center, a social senior social caseworker of Denver Human Services, a guardian ad litem and a court appointed special advocate (CASA).
As Grace's name is called, the room is filled with a hasty, yet considerate applause from those in attendance. Smiling from ear to ear, Grace accepts her certificate and then does the "Dougie," dance as she walks off of the stage. Immediately, Grace's support system migrates to her as though she is a rock star to reinforce their feelings of acceptance and excitement.
Following the honor roll assembly, Grace suddenly becomes enraged when she finds out that none of the professionals in attendance fulfilled their promises of providing her with 20-ounce Vanilla Coca-Cola sodas and Hot Takis. She begins to swear at professionals and hold them accountable for neglecting their duties of providing the snacks they promised. Grace's therapist has to go into overload and provide intervention unexcitingly. After 15 minutes of intervention, Grace walks up to the professionals in attendance and apologizes to them. Her apologies are accepted from tearful professions.

Grace's mother suffers from severe schizophrenia and has been a prostitute in Denver. for years. Grace's father is incarcerated for life due to a series of armed robberies that he participated between 2001 and 2004. Both parents have had their parental rights terminated due to their noncompliance of successfully fulfilling the duties of their treatment plan. To make matters worse, all of Grace's relatives cannot qualify to pass a home study for Grace's placement because they too have a severe mental health and criminal history. Unfortunately, Grace will spend yet another holiday season at the therapeutic residential treatment facility that she has resided at for the last 5 years.
Like Grace, many children 9 and older throughout the United States of America have no place to call home. There are two primary reasons factors that could have contributed to Grace spending most of her life in foster care. Throughout the duration of the dependency and neglect child welfare case there has been a lack in concurrent planning and not enough child-centered diligent recruitment for child-specific foster and/or adoptive homes. According to Wigfall, Monck & Reynolds (2006), concurrent planning is the idea is that while social workers are working amiably to return a child back home; they are also searching for other placement options such as adoption through either family members or members of the community. If concurrent planning becomes a more familiar tool in the range of options available to social workers, it could become mainstreamed and more widely used and secure speedier permanence for older children.
The recruitment of foster and/or adoptive parents for children can be a difficult task. According to Colton, Roberts & Williams (1998), child welfare systems around the world are impeded in their attempts to recruit sufficient family and/or adoptive provider by factors such as: cost; difficulties with recruiting suitable candidates; ethnic minority candidates' distrust of systems looking to recruit them; or a lack of government interest in family foster-care. With these factors to consider, child welfare agencies like Denver Human Services struggle daily with having children like Grace in expensive placements such as therapeutic residential child care facilities that are designed for children that may have significant behavioral issues, axis-1 mental health diagnosis, and criminal justice involvement.
Why should we care?
When children do not achieve permanency with through either returning home to their biological parents, guardianship with relatives, or being adopted, they either become homeless, or even incarcerated. A secondary outcome that is most prevalent is that many foster children that struggle with education and sometimes end up being high school dropouts. With such serious outcomes, we should care that permanency for children is improved.
The scariest experience for me when I was an adolescent permanency caseworker at the Arapahoe County Department of Human Services was when it was court ordered for a foster care child to emancipate. More often than not, most of the children were not ready for emancipation and did not qualify for post-emancipation services. According to Sims (1988), when children leave foster care because of emancipation, they have a wide variety of needs. Some children are fortunate enough to have had foster parents that recognized their special needs and provided for them to succeed in adulthood. Though this may be true, the vast majorities of foster children have no options for housing accommodations and resort to living in homeless shelters or return back home to unsafe situations. According to Sims (1988), 50 percent of the emancipated foster care children she studied received inadequate preparation for adulthood.
Many of the former foster care children that I have worked with throughout my career have had dual involvement in both the child welfare system and the criminal justice system. According to MacCormick (1949), thousands of children, some of them as young as eight or nine years of age confined every year in county jails in the United States for periods of a few hours to several months. Though MacCormick's comments are from the 1940s, they still ring true today. A trend that I have witnessed is that when former foster care children are on their own without the protection of child welfare, the automatically resort to crime as a means to get by. I recall working with a young African American child that "wanted out," the foster care system. His dependency and neglect case was closed and within just two days her was incarcerated as an adult on drug charges due to his biological father coercing him to sell drugs.
According to Conger & Finkelstein (2003), disadvantaged backgrounds and troubled schools, combined with the trauma of being removed from home and the stigma of being in foster care, pose significant barriers to educational success for many foster children. Research indicates that, compared to the general student population, foster children have lower high school graduation rates, fewer years of schooling, lower levels of participation in college, and higher rates of participation n special education programs. In my profession career, I have noticed that many foster children give up education all together due to the stress ad workload associated with school.
Who are the stakeholders?
There are two main stakeholders in creating permanency for children involved in child welfare. The most applicable stakeholders are child welfare agencies (social caseworkers), biological families. Both stakeholders play an enormous role in children finding permanency. According to Sorin (1987), many child welfare agencies have been influenced by the "permanency planning" perspective. This perspective promotes the development of a substitute care system that brings social caseworkers to discharge from care quickly. Though this is a common practice that is used throughout many child welfare agencies throughout the United States, it is not the best practice. Often times just to expedite case closure and return children home, social caseworkers sometimes overlook safety risks and return children back home to injurious environments that warrant second removals.
According to Duncan & Argys (2007), child welfare agencies are commissioned with the responsibility of providing safe and stable housing for children. Ducan & Argys (2007) research shows that children experience several moves and even end up residing in group homes because child welfare agencies "low ball" foster parents with monthly reimbursement rates. Due to this, many foster parents that experience discouragement and request that their foster children be placed elsewhere. When children are removed from foster homes, they often times are placed at higher levels of care like group homes and residential treatment facilities. Currently, all twenty-two of the children waiting for adoptive placements in the legal custody of Denver Human Services all live in group homes or residential child care facilities.
Biological families are stakeholders in the According to Haight, Doner, & Black (2003), family reunification remains the priority goal for children in foster care. Though this is true, reunification sometimes does not happen because biological families fail to comply with their treatment plans that make reunification possible. Often time's biological families develop learned helplessness and fail to comply with participating in weekly child-family parenting time, substance abuse evaluations, and sobriety & drug tests. When these situations occur, reunification becomes less likely and children wither wind up being adopted or emancipating from foster care. Biological families are huge stakeholders because they control the destiny of their case and the possibilities of reunification.
What does this mean for social work?
Social workers pursue social change, particularly with and on behalf of vulnerable and oppressed individuals and groups of people (National Association of Social Workers, 1999). Children are removed from their homes only because of abuse and/or neglect. More often than not, parents do the abuse and/or neglect experienced by a child or other adults involved with the child. When a child is removed from their own home because of abuse and/or neglect, the child looses their sense of identity within their families. This situation creates vulnerability and trauma for the child. If children are not returned to their homes or find adoptive homes, they are liable to emancipate from child welfare's custody and experience homelessness and lack of education.
In regards to what is ideal, children suffer when they are removed from their home. The ideal situation would be that when children are removed because of abuse and/or neglect, the parents and/or individuals responsible for abuse and/or neglect are given services that eliminate child safety risks and promote stability within the family structure. The major gap between what is ideal and actual is that biological families experience intimidation from child welfare and often times give up when appropriate services are in place. When this happens, children also give up and begin to react to the disappointment of their parent's lack of follow thru. The situation creates trauma within the child and often time's leads to discontentment.
What advocacy steps (at micro, mezzo and macro levels) do you recommend for the social work profession to address this problem?



Micro- social caseworker must view the child as their client and in this provide families with better services that improves the life of the child.The most imprtiant thing that a social worker can do for children assigned to their caseloads is (service- getting them correct, practice principles that develop partnerships) proactive instead of reactionary

Mezzo- increase team decision making meetings, when I first came to Denver case consultations only happened when children moved from placements. There was not a regular conversation about permanency. Through the implementation of (Concurent planning, diligent search, parent mentors,

(Macro)According to Duncan & Argys (2007), the best solution to assist children in foster care would be to increase the monthly reimbursement of foster providers. Reunification, Family finders, reinstatement of parental rights. There should be more federal funding that is made available to foster parents. There should also be a shift that encourages foster parents to be agents of reunification Policy… higher adoption substidies that go to the age of 26








































References
Putting Programme into Practice: The Introduction of Concurrent Planning into Mainstream Adoption and Fostering Services

Valerie Wigfall, Elizabeth Monck and Jill Reynolds
The British Journal of Social Work, Vol. 36, No. 1 (2006), pp. 41-55


The Recruitment and Retention of Family Foster-Carers: An International and Cross-Cultural Analysis

Matthew Colton, Susan Roberts and Margaret Williams
The British Journal of Social Work, Vol. 38, No. 5 (July 2008), pp. 865-884
Published by: Oxford University Press

Foster Care and School Mobility
Author(s): Dylan Conger and Marni J. Finkelstein
Source: The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 72, No. 1, Student Mobility: How Some Children Get Left Behind (Winter, 2003), pp. 97-103
Independent Living Services for Youths in Foster Care
Author(s): Anne R. Sims
Source: Social Work, Vol. 33, No. 6 (November–December 1988), pp. 539-542
Children in Our Jails
Author(s): Austin H. MacCormick
Source: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 261, Juvenile Delinquency (Jan., 1949), pp. 150-157
though, as was stated above, thproblems of children in jail must probably be on the state level and from there to the local and county levels, there is need of a carefully planned and patiently executed cam-

Delivering Services under Permanency Planning
Author(s): Michael R. Sosin
Source: Social Service Review, Vol. 61, No. 2 (Jun., 1987), pp. 272-290

Economic Incentives and Foster Care Placement
Author(s): Brian Duncan and Laura Argys
Source: Southern Economic Journal, Vol. 74, No. 1 (Jul., 2007), pp. 114-142
Understanding and Supporting Parent—Child Relationships during Foster Care Visits: Attachment Theory and Research
Author(s): Wendy L. Haight, Jill Doner Kagle and James E. Black
Source: Social Work, Vol. 48, No. 2 (April 2003), pp. 195-207
National Association of Social Workers. (1999). Code of ethics of the National Association of Social Workers. Washington, DC. NASW Press.







1
Running head: SOCIAL PROBLEM