FOR BROKEN FAMILIES, FINALLY A GLUE THAT MIGHT WORK

It sounds dry and technical, but the decision by the federal
government to grant Florida a "waiver" allowing more flexibility in
the use of child-welfare money is the best news the state's vulnerable
children have received in decades.

As things stand now, the federal government offers a perverse
incentive to states when they think that a family is having problems:
Take children away, and we'll pick up a large share of the tab. And
the money is unlimited; the federal government helps pay for every
eligible child thrown into foster care, no matter how many are taken.
But if a state wants to use safe, proven alternatives to foster care,
the state often must pay almost all of the bill itself.

The result: Though the alternatives cost less overall, foster care may
cost less for the Florida Department of Children and Families and
privatized lead agencies. So there is a huge incentive to destroy
families through the needless misuse and overuse of foster care.

Combine such perverse incentives with a leader like former DCF
Secretary Kathleen Kearney, who was fanatical about a "take the child
and run" approach to child welfare, and you get a foster-care panic.
Removals of children from their homes doubled in 1999, Ms. Kearney's
first year running DCF, and they've stayed at that obscene level ever
since.

But instead of making children safer, deaths of children previously
known to DCF actually increased. Because state caseworkers were
inundated with children who didn't need to be in foster care, they had
less time to find, and rescue, children in real danger.

Ms. Kearney, of course, is long gone. And now, thanks to gutsy
leadership from the current DCF secretary, Lucy Hadi, who got the job
in December 2004, so are the perverse financial incentives.

In the boldest effort of its kind, Florida for the next five years
will take its foster-care money as a lump sum. For the first year,
that will be about $140 million. The money still can be used for
foster care. But it also can be used for safe, proven
alternatives.

These alternatives work because most parents who lose their children
to foster care are not sadistic brutes. More often, their principal
problem is poverty.

If DCF acts wisely, the waiver means that when a family is homeless,
DCF and the privatized "lead agency" in each region can take the money
that would have been spent to tear the family apart and throw the
children into foster care and spend it on a rent subsidy and a
security deposit. It means that fewer single mothers will have to
choose between getting fired from a job they need, when the sitter
doesn't show, or leaving their children home alone, because money that
once was available only for foster care now can pay for day care for
poor families.

And it also will make a difference where the problem is substance
abuse. University of Florida researchers have found that even infants
born with cocaine in their systems do better when left with birth
mothers able to care for them than they do in foster care. Those
children also will benefit from the waiver. The waiver means that the
mother who sees the birth of her child as the moment she's ready to
give up drugs is more likely to have access to treatment, because
money formerly reserved for foster care can be used for that treatment.

Can changing financial incentives really make such a difference?
Illinois has proven that they can. Using a much more modest waiver and
moving on its own to radically changed financial incentives for
private agencies in its heavily privatized system, Illinois reduced
its foster-care population from more than 50,000 in 1997 to under
18,000 today. Illinois now takes away children at one of the lowest
rates in the country - less than half the rate of Florida. At the same
time, independent court-appointed monitors have found that child
safety in Illinois has improved.

The waiver means, of course, that there is no more "open spigot," no
more reimbursement for every eligible foster child, no matter how many
are taken away. Instead, the payment increases by 3 percent per year
for five years.

But we know that Florida is taking away far too many children. So as
the foster-care population declines, taxpayers will benefit, too.
Rather than lose federal money, the state can channel savings into
more efforts to help families.

Of course there is always reason to worry that DCF won't able to build
the necessary system of prevention. DCF can prove that it's up to the
task by changing another set of financial incentives:

It won't do much good for DCF to have more money for prevention if
lead agencies, or their subcontractors, are paid for every day they
hold a child in a foster home or a group home. All contracts must
reward private agencies for returning children safely to their own
homes or not taking them away in the first place.

When that truly is not possible, contracts should reward finding
permanent alternatives, such as subsidized guardianship and adoption.
Agencies should be penalized for allowing children to languish in
foster care.

Make those changes, and something that seemed unthinkable just might
happen. Florida's child-welfare system could go from national disgrace
to a national leader.