It feels like every day, there is a new story documenting the failures at the Maryland Department of Human Services. First, an audit showed that children were not receiving appropriate medical and dental care, investigations were not being completed in a timely manner and at least 280 children in DHS’s care were living virtually unsupervised in hotels. One of these children, 16-year-old Kanaiyah Ward, died of an apparent suicide after struggling with her mental health for years. In addition, DHS has been accused of not keeping proper records of child fatalities when abuse or neglect is suspected.
It would be easy to go after DHS’s leadership, as many have done. And perhaps that is the right approach. But changing leadership alone will not solve the deeply ingrained problems with the system itself.
Generally, research shows that high numbers of children who are in the foster system experience abuse in their foster placements. Foster children have worse outcomes than their peers on almost every metric of child wellbeing, in large part due to the neglect they experience while in the system. Due to disruptions in their education, they are less likely to graduate from high school. Trauma and failure to provide proper medical care lead to higher rates of behavioral, physical and mental health issues. These children are also more likely to be targeted by the juvenile legal system. When many of them age out of the system with no supports, they are left impoverished, unhoused and generally unstable as adults. Child Protective Services is also more likely to remove the children of former foster youth when they become parents. One study found that children in the foster system are more likely to die than those in the general population — as evidenced by Kanaiyah Ward.
Many of these children come from families that are economically disadvantaged. They struggle to put food on the table and a roof over their heads or to find child care that they can afford. A recent story highlighted that the parents of nearly two-thirds of children under four in Baltimore can’t change their diapers as often as they’d like because they can’t afford them. Some families are dealing with untreated mental health or substance use issues that lead to child welfare intervention. People with lower incomes are not the only ones in our community who are facing these problems, but they’re the only ones who lose their children because of it. Those with means are able to access and afford the treatment that they need to safely care for their children.
The recent horrible news surrounding DHS should be a wake-up call to us all, not that we need more child welfare intervention, but instead, that we need to seriously reconsider our approach to child and family well-being. There is a better way. Simply put, we could allocate more of our resources toward supporting families, rather than punishing them for systemic failures. We could invest in programs that address the problems at the root of so many child welfare cases and expand access to food, housing and child care. New Mexico, often ranked worst in the nation for child wellbeing, made child care free for low-income families, and its poverty rate immediately began to drop. Rather than paying foster parents or hotel chains to house a child whose family can’t find stable housing, we could help that family to pay rent. These investments would be a net benefit for our community, reducing the number of cases in the system, keeping children safer and almost certainly costing taxpayers less. Each child housed in a hotel costs the state an estimated $96,000 per stay or $1,400 a day. Last fiscal year, that cost taxpayers $59.5 million. I can think of 59 million ways to better spend that money to support our families, can’t you?
Kanaiyah Ward’s tragic death highlights so many of the failings of the foster system. Rather than providing Kanaiyah with the higher level of care that she needed, DHS left her alone in a hotel room, where she reportedly took her own life. While we may never know if Kanaiyah’s death could have been avoided, we do know that the government agency charged with safeguarding the health and wellbeing of children failed to do so in this case and, based on the audit, in many others. We need to stop simply nitpicking and pointing fingers. It’s time to think bigger and more broadly. Maryland’s children and their families deserve better.
Shanta Trivedi is an assistant professor of law at the University of Baltimore School of Law.
