For too many New York City youth, however, foster care stretches on and on, depriving children of the "forever family" that child welfare professionals say is their birthright. From parents to caseworkers to Family Court judges, participants in the system all may propose different explanations for why the median amount of time that NYC children spend under the government's care is two years, according to the state Office of Children and Family Services, or why 4.7 years is the median time spent awaiting adoption specifically. Now a study by the legal and advocacy group Children's Rights aims to provide a data-based description of "obstacles to permanency": A definitive explanation of why the "foster child" designation often lasts too long.
"It's going to give data valuable to understanding child welfare citywide," says Children's Rights Policy Director Julie Farber, who is leading the study. "We'll be producing hard data on what people think are the issues" – commonly expressed frustrations such as overloaded caseworkers or time-wasting Family Court adjournments.
"This is a complex issue. There's not going to be one answer," Farber said. The study "will give some hard data on all of these problems, which will enable the advocacy community to focus attention" on the problems identified. When the results come out this fall, "I think it will be really informative and powerful," she said.
The study is analyzing the cases of 153 foster children around the five boroughs who have had an unmet goal of reunifying with their own families, or of being adopted, for two years or more. The city's Administration for Children's Services (ACS) and 28 of its 33 contracting private child welfare agencies that administer services to children and families are fully cooperating, thus providing the access to ongoing cases among the city’s total foster care population of 16,400 children (nearly a record low). While the sample isn't large enough to be statistically significant by borough, Farber said, "the problems are significant enough citywide that this was an appropriate approach." Those being analyzed were selected randomly from 3,883 cases that met the criteria at the 28 agencies.
Both Farber and ACS Commissioner John Mattingly find the collaboration itself noteworthy. Children's Rights, after all, is well known in the child welfare world for bringing the Wilder v. Bernstein lawsuit and litigating the Marisol A. v. Giuliani settlement, two major civil actions that have shaped the administration of child welfare in New York City. "What's sort of monumental about this, is [Mattingly] was allowing pretty much unprecedented access to an external entity ... that's sued the city in the past," Farber said.
Mattingly also called the study "groundbreaking," both for the participation of private groups, and the intention of his agency from the outset to work with advocates in addressing the report's eventual findings. "It will provide information to the public in order to get thoughtful people thinking together about what it is we can do to achieve permanency for kids in care," he said. "We should be able, at the end of this, to stand up together and say: These are issues we are all concerned about ... here's how we are going to work together to make the numbers look different."
