In the United States today, there are more than half a million children in foster care. Utah has more than 2,100 foster children. These vulnerable children need our help.
Children remain in foster care for an average of more than two years and move more than three times. Some will remain in the system far longer and experience dozens of moves. This instability has a lasting impact on foster children who never know how long they will remain in one place.
Each move means new rules at home, a new school, leaving friends and family behind. Not surprisingly, one study indicated that children who had been in foster care suffered from a rate of post traumatic stress disorder twice as high as Vietnam veterans.
If these were our children, would we be satisfied with how they are treated? Or would we move mountains to ensure that they felt safe, secure and loved? The truth is that when the state assumes custody for foster children, when we take them away from their own families, they become our children. We must help them find safe, permanent families.
Unfortunately we fail more than 24,000 youth in this country every year - young people who "age out" of foster care without finding a permanent family. At 18, the typical age for youth leaving foster care, these young people are suddenly forced to make adult decisions. They must find housing, food, a job, all without the support or advice of a family.
In Utah, more than half of our foster youth are between 13 and 21. While some will return to their families, be adopted or leave foster care to live with a grandparent or other relative, others will "age out" of the system, alone and adrift. In 2004, 169 Utah foster youth - 9 percent of our foster care population - aged out of care.
They wonder, "Who do I call when I have had a bad day?" "Where do I go for Thanksgiving?" or "Who will walk me down the aisle when I get married?" Each year in this country, we send 24,000 kids into the world with these questions, and we subject 500,000 more to this risk.
We must do better. By changing the way that the federal government pays for foster care services, we can.
The current federal financing structure encourages an over-reliance on foster care at the expense of services that might keep families together or move children more quickly out of foster care and into a permanent family. To qualify for most the federal support available to these children they must first be removed from their homes.
The national, nonpartisan Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care, of which I was a member, determined that spending money smarter and more innovatively could help children and their families. We recommended several ways to do so.
One is making federal foster care funding more flexible, so that states can meet the needs of the children and families in their care. In some states, that might be supporting drug counseling programs, family counseling or other services aimed at preventing removal by fixing the underlying problem, or when removal is necessary, helping children more quickly and safely reunify with their families. In others, it might mean funds for foster and adoptive parent recruitment.
States know the needs of their own children and families in care - why not give them the flexibility to use these funds to best serve these children and their families?
We need states to engage in preventive efforts, so that fewer children enter foster care and more families stay together, and ongoing support, so when children leave foster care it is for a permanent family and they are in less danger of returning to the system. And we need the federal government to be an equal partner in supporting these efforts.
Across the country and in Utah, agencies, courts, tribes and communities are sitting down together to determine how we can do more for children in foster care. We need to help them. As one former foster youth reminded me, "Kids do not fail." But the system can fail.
We must not let it fail these children. They are our kids too.
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* WILLIAM A. THORNE, JR. serves on the Utah Court of Appeals and is a member of the Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care.
