February 29, 2008
A decade ago, Congress and the Clinton administration lit a fire under the child welfare establishment with the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, which attempted to shorten the amount of time children spent in foster care. In New York, a great deal has changed since then. The number of foster children declined steeply after 1999. But ASFA was not the jolt that caused the sudden drop. Rather, major changes in policy and practice—in child protective investigations, in services designed to help families before they tumble into disaster, in new child care subsidies—as well as a dramatic fall in once-staggering rates of crack cocaine addiction among city residents, combined to reduce the pace of new foster care placements. Nor is it ASFA’s doing that, since early 2006, more New York City kids are once again spending longer periods in foster care and more families are in court facing charges of child abuse or neglect. These changes, too, are driven by local policy and circumstance, namely, the after-effects of the much-publicized Nixzmary Brown murder two years ago this month. The substantial growth in the number of abuse and neglect reports that began in January 2006 has abated only slightly. And the Bloomberg administration sharply increased the number of city child protection investigators and attorneys in 2007, contributing to the higher flow of cases to Family Court.
Posted by Gary Holden at February 29, 2008 12:13 PM