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August 07, 2005
More Minorities Are In Foster Care: Michigan Asks Why
Meetings over the past year have been trying to come up with ways to reduce the numbers.
By Amy F. Bailey / Associated Press
LANSING -- It took Barbara Trickey nearly a year of fighting and thousands of dollars in attorney fees to get her young grandsons out of foster care.
Malek and Malcolm Evans spent 10 months in two foster homes 3 1/2 years ago after their mother left the youngest, Malcolm, in the car overnight in the middle of winter when he was 5. The boys have lived with their grandmother since October 2002.
"I had to get an attorney to get my grandchildren out," Trickey, an elementary school art teacher, told a state task force.
The 40-member panel is trying to find out why black children such as Malek and Malcolm Evans account for only 17.5 percent of Michigan's 2.6 million children overall but make up 51.9 percent of children in the state's foster care system.
According to a report by the state Department of Human Services, nearly 10,300 of the 19,800 children in foster care in May were black. Black children enter the foster care system at a higher rate, stay in the system longer and are reunited with their families less often than others, the report said.
Last week's hearing at Lansing Community College was one of several held across the state in the last year to help the task force come up with ways to reduce the number of minority children in the system.
Donna Budnick, a specialist on American Indian affairs for the state Department of Civil Rights, said caseworkers are more likely to remove children from the home of a minority family than offer services or direct them to programs to help them get back on their feet.
"This system punishes you if you are a minority," Budnick told the task force, which met jointly with the Michigan Civil Rights Commission.
The racial disparity in Michigan's foster care is not unique.
Two-thirds of the children in foster care across the country are black or Hispanic, according to a report released in June by Florida researcher Lance Carroll II.
Foster children in large cities also are usually minorities, in part because those cities have large minority populations. Ninety-five percent of children in Chicago's child welfare system are minorities while 90 percent in New York's system in 1997 were minorities, Carroll's research showed.
Bill Long, an attorney and the former head of the Lansing-based Michigan Federation for Children and Families, said the high number of minorities in the foster care system is caused by higher rates of poverty, school expulsions, inadequate housing and limited options for child care in those communities.
He encouraged the task force to require counties with a big gap between minority and white foster children to reach out to minority communities and to use the policies that have been successful in counties where the number of white and minority foster children are more closely balanced.
Posted by lois at August 7, 2005 09:55 PM