Consider This from NPR - NPR Investigates: How States Charge Poor Parents For Their Own Kids' Foster Care

Episode Date: December 27, 2021

An NPR investigation digs into the practice of billing parents for their children's foster care — something that happens in every state in the country. It's a bill many cannot afford to pay, which in turn makes it even more difficult for parents to get their lives back on track and reunite with their children. On top of that, research shows government actually loses money when it tries to collect on foster care bills.NPR investigative correspondent Joseph Shapiro reports, in collaboration with Teresa Wiltz of POLITICO. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

After Daisy Homan separated from her husband, she moved from place to place, stayed with family, some friends. I moved in with a guy that had a few bedrooms open for rent. Ended up moving in with him. Fifteen days later, there was supposedly a raid at the house. It was a drug raid. Now, this was exactly four years ago in Minnesota. Homan was not the target. She wasn't even home when the police came, but her kids were.

Case records show Homan had a history of drug and alcohol use, and Child Protective Services had been called to check on her kids before. In this case, authorities said she had left her kids in an unsafe place. So, after the raid, her three kids were placed in foster care. Homan got them back 20 months later. She also got something that is surprisingly common in states across the country, a bill for her kids' foster care. It was for $19,530.07. The bill, it hovers over me all the time. Consider this, the best thing for most kids in foster care is to be reunited with their parents. But it is not uncommon for those same parents to get a bill that many of

them cannot afford to pay, which in turn makes it even harder to get their lives back on track. This is a special report from NPR's investigations team. I'm Mary Louise Kelly. It's Monday, December 27th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply.

It's Consider This from NPR. Child welfare agencies aren't just supposed to help children in their care. They're supposed to help the parents of those children, help them find stability and reunite with their kids. While that is happening, foster care costs money. And in every state in the country, parents can be sent bills for some of that cost. That is what happened to Daisy Homan, who you heard earlier. She spoke to NPR investigative correspondent Joseph Shapiro, who, working with Teresa Wiltz of Politico, looked at just how difficult those foster care bills can make things and why not all parents seem to get them. I first met Holman and her

family two years ago. Potatoes and tomatoes. Since her kids came home, Holman has worked steadily and kept her family together. More recently, she moved with her three teens to a new apartment, bigger than the one when I met them, with just two bedrooms. Dear God, bless this food to our body. Hope we have a good dinner. Watch and guard and protect us all and keep us all safe. Amen. But that $19,000 bill for the time her children were in foster care, it still causes problems for Daisy Homan and her kids. $19,000-something.

Yeah, we could go get a new car. I think I would use it for buying new clothes and stuff. An NPR analysis of state and federal data shows that every state charges some parents for the cost of foster care. Even though the NPR investigation found it's charged almost exclusively to the poorest parents. It keeps families in debt. It extends the time children spend in foster care. Government raises little money or even loses money when it tries to collect. Daisy Homan's bill, that $19,000, was just a little less than her entire salary in 2019 in her seasonal work for a landscaping company. The bill, it hovers over me all the time. That's my biggest concern is this bill.

The debt went on her credit score, which made it hard to find a better apartment or buy a dependable car to get to work. When Holman filed her income tax, she didn't get the tax rebate she expected. Government agencies garnish that money for the unpaid bill for foster care. But when a poor family gets a big bill for foster care, that debt can blow up everything. Economist Maria Canchon has studied this. One common condition for a mom to get her kids back is to establish adequate housing, so to rent an apartment. Canchon is at Georgetown University now, but she examined this while at the University of Wisconsin. And while it might not seem like that much to have to pay $50 or $100 or $200 a month in child support. If you

have a very low income, low earnings mom, that can be the difference in being able to save money for first last month's rent on a decent apartment or not. She found that when parents in Wisconsin were charged $100 a month, it added almost seven months to the amount of time a child spent in foster care. The bill keeps going up, and that extra time matters because the clock is ticking. A family has a set amount of time, usually 15 to 22 months, to demonstrate they should get their child back. Otherwise, action starts to end their parental rights and place the child for adoption. Trish Skophammer runs Child Support Collection in St. Paul, Minnesota. In most cases, children come back home.

A little more than half the time, kids in foster care and their parents, or sometimes another family member, are reunited. But the foster care debt follows those children home to their parents. And they are strapped with a $19,000 debt to the government, and they're low income. I told Scopehammer about Daisy Homan and her bill. I know for me, if I owe somebody $19,000, that's a lot of money and that's a lot of stress on me. The things that we do to try to collect on that can also add more stress. Things like income withholding, driver's license suspension if people don't pay, tax intercepts. Scopehammer researched who got charged in Minnesota.

NPR looked at her research and a few other studies. We collected data from the U.S. government and the states. This is a kind of child support that targets mothers. A disproportionate number are people of color. Many are homeless. Many have mental health or substance abuse issues. And almost all are poor, really poor. Here's Scopehammer. 80% of the families that showed up in my data had incomes less than $10,000 annually. $10,000. I mean, try living off

$10,000 a year. You're in deep poverty if you're living off of that kind of money. States used to pay for foster care by themselves. Then in the 1960s and 70s, the federal government chipped in, but only for children whose parents got welfare. In 1984, Congress told states to start billing parents for the cost of that foster care. At the time, there was a push to make people who received welfare share the responsibility of getting assistance from the government. Many states then added their own laws to charge parents with higher income. Since then, the thinking has changed about what's best for families and children. In 2018, Congress reformed the funding for child welfare and made that shift clear. The new law said government needs to

focus on doing what it takes to reunite kids in foster care with their parents. But the requirement to charge parents for the cost of foster care stayed the same. The original thought was that these were malefactors. Stephen Eldred, until he retired in March, ran child support services for Orange County, California. They were people who had done something bad. They had mistreated their children, so we should make them pay for their program. Abuse is suspected in only about one out of five cases when kids go to foster care. Mostly, the issue is the parent's neglect. Maybe there's no food in the refrigerator,

or the parent is homeless or addicted. These are often issues of poverty. These people were not bad people. They were people in need of help. And the overwhelming majority of the people in the child welfare program, a significant contributor to the reason they're in that situation is poverty. So this just makes it worse. It's fuel on the fire. Child support offices, like the ones run by Eldred and Scopehammer have changed in recent years, even changed their names from

child support enforcement to child support services to show their intent on helping families. Now in many states, these offices send more of the money they collect directly to mothers and kids, to pay for clothes, food, and rent. But there's a leftover exception, the money that's collected from parents for the time their kids were in foster care. That money doesn't go to the kids. It doesn't even go to foster parents. It goes into state and federal treasuries. And there's one more thing about that money, a surprise that came up in Scopehammer's groundbreaking research. It turns out government loses money when it tries to collect. We're spending more to try to get this reimbursement than we're actually collecting in reimbursements. Scopehammer presented her research at a national conference of child support service directors.

That's where Stephen Eldred first met her. When she said 25 cents collected for every dollar I spend as an administrator, that just jumped off the screen. And I said, wow, if that's true, if I can validate that in my jurisdiction, I think that is something that I can move. Eldred went home and told a team of researchers to look at the bills for foster care for almost 63,000 people across California. He got the same result. Child support offices in California spent a dollar for every 27 cents they collected. One year may be an exception. 2020, states collected 60% more. The reason? That's when parents got stimulus checks, money that was supposed to be

a lifeline to families struggling during the pandemic. But those checks were easy for states to take when they garnished money for things like foster care bills. Here's the key thing NPR found when we looked at federal and state data. What's collected is just a fraction, probably just single digits, of what was billed and still owed by parents. So if it costs taxpayers to chase down what's owed, why do governments keep trying to collect it? It's a perverse incentive. The reason has to do with the complexity of welfare funding and government bureaucracies. So we send the money, we kind of send it off through our computer system, and we don't always know exactly how it's being distributed once it leaves us. Child support offices spend more money than they collect going after these parents. But the little bit that they

do collect goes to other state and federal agencies. So this is all gravy for them. There's some leeway in the federal law. It says parents should be charged when it's, quote, appropriate. Some jurisdictions use that as an out not to charge poor parents. Many, though, keep collecting in every state and the District of Columbia. We wanted to ask officials at the responsible federal agency, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, why they don't make the rules clearer and tell state and county child welfare agencies to stop sending bills to impoverished parents. They declined our request for an interview, but some members of Congress want answers.

This should be a system designed to help the child. It should not be a system simply to collect payments for state bureaucracies. Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, plans to reintroduce a bill with other lawmakers that would end the practice of charging parents for the cost of foster care. It makes no sense to me that when you've got a family that is now ready to take back their child, struggling every day to make ends meet, that you would saddle them with a huge bill at the same time. That just puts an anchor around the family's neck at a time when you want to do everything you can to support them and their kids.

Parents who end up in the child welfare system, they're fragile to begin with. The whole philosophy behind the system is to help those parents get stronger. But when the poorest families are expected to reimburse government for an expensive program like foster care, those parents and their children struggle to become the families they want to be. That's Joseph Shapiro with NPR's investigations team. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly.