USE SAFE, PROVEN WAYS TO KEEP FAMILIES INTACT

A child dies, allegedly abused by a parent. The child was previously known
to authorities. In fact, it soon becomes clear that the case file had more
"red flags" than a Soviet May Day parade.

As investigations begin, caseworkers panic. Fearful of having the next such
case on their watch, they tear far more children from their homes.

Rochester, 2005?

No. New York City, 1996. The child's name was Elisa Izquierdo. And
Rochester can learn a lot from what New York City did wrong after she died,
and then what it did right.

The first reaction was panic.

By 1998, the number of children torn from their parents over the course of
a year had soared 50 percent. But instead of making children safer, deaths
of children "known to the system" increased by 50 percent.

That's not as surprising as it sounds. When a child "known to the system"
dies, it's almost always because an overwhelmed, undertrained caseworker
didn't have time to make a good decision.

A foster-care panic overwhelms workers even more. With so many new cases to
deal with, caseworkers have even less time to find children in real danger.
New York City's experience is not unusual.

Similar panics in Illinois and Florida also were followed by increases in
fatalities.

So New York City reversed course and embraced safe, proven approaches to
keep families together. It cut the number of children taken from their
parents in half.

In 2003, a child was twice as likely to be taken from his parents in Monroe
County as in New York City, after adjusting for child poverty rates. And
while Monroe County is projecting little change, in New York City, the rate
of removal continues to fall.

Again, New York City is not alone. Illinois learned from its mistakes and
now takes away proportionately far fewer children than Monroe County -- and
independent, court-appointed monitors have found that child safety in
Illinois has improved.

This, too, is not as surprising as it sounds. Though it is cases like the
death of A.J Gibson that naturally make headlines, most parents who lose
their children to foster care are neither brutally abusive nor hopelessly
addicted.

Far more common are cases in which a family's poverty has been confused
with neglect. Other cases fall between the extremes, the parent neither all
victim nor all villain.

But the reason to avoid a foster-care panic is not for the sake of the
parents. A recent study of 600 foster-care "alumni" found that only 20
percent are doing well. One-third said they were abused by a foster parent
or another adult in a foster home. Another study found that even infants
born with cocaine in their systems developed better when left with birth
mothers able to care for them than they did in foster care. That means drug
treatment for a parent is almost always a better choice than foster care
for her child.

And it means that the reaction to a child-abuse tragedy should never be to
mindlessly sweep more children into a system that churns out walking
wounded four times out of five.

Wexler, a former Rochester-area journalist, is executive director of the
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform (www.nccpr.org) based in
Alexandria, Va.