Gov. Paul LePage says he wants to steer Maine away from a child welfare system that emphasizes keeping families together, even once they’ve become involved with the system. In the governor’s mind, this is a move toward reorienting Child Protective Services in Maine around “what is best for the child” over family preservation and reunification.
LePage isn’t only rowing in the opposite direction from what generally is best for children whose families have become involved in the child welfare system. He’s now also effectively calling for a child welfare system that removes more children from their families at a time when federal law is starting to emphasize just the opposite.
In February, Congress passed the Family First Prevention Services Act, a part of the Bipartisan Budget Act that kept the federal government’s doors open and raised funding levels for a variety of domestic programs.
The law makes extra funding available to states that want to provide “prevention” services aimed at keeping together families with children who are considered at risk of entering the foster care system. The extra funding would pay for in-home parent education programs as well as mental health and addiction treatment services for up to a year.
Once children have entered the world of foster care, the law also nudges states toward using family settings. One of the law’s major changes is to alter the federal government’s primary foster care funding stream so it less frequently pays for foster care stays in so-called congregate care settings that house high numbers of children. Under the law, states should have an incentive to use family foster homes instead.
The federal law’s steps in favor of keeping families together and placing foster children in family homes are small.
They don’t change the fundamentals governing the federal government’s funding for child welfare services. The prevention services funding will only flow to states that opt to follow specific federal requirements, and the funding for the services will last only a year. In Maine, the provisions emphasizing family foster home placements are unlikely to have a large impact because Maine places only 5 percent of foster children in non-family settings, compared with 14 percent nationally and a high of 35 percent in Colorado.
While the Family First Prevention Services Act’s impact will likely be limited — and states could struggle to recruit enough foster families to implement its key provisions — its underlying principle is that children are better off with their own families, and with foster families instead of institutions if they can’t live with their own families.
A range of research backs this up, even if it might appear on first blush that removing a child from a family reported to Child Protective Services is “what is best for the child.” Whenever possible, keeping children with their families spares them the trauma of being removed from their homes and offers them the chance of remaining with parents who can become nurturing — even role models for their children — with the proper support, be it financial assistance, education, or treatment for an addiction or mental health challenge.
The Family First Prevention Services Act falls short of fully reorienting the nation’s child welfare system toward family preservation. It doesn’t actually emphasize prevention of involvement with the child welfare system because its services appear to kick in only for families already known to Child Protective Services.
But the federal government’s step toward emphasizing family preservation and reunification, however small, at a time when LePage is calling for the opposite, shows just how out of step Maine’s governor is.
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