John Burton: Governor's Cuts to Child Services Run Deep

By John Burton
Special to The Bee

Published: Friday, Sep. 11, 2009

A child goes to school too weak from hunger to cry, much less learn. A foster child is turned out on the street on her 18th birthday, with no shelter, no job, no health care and no one to turn to. Sound familiar?

These are stories too often reported on the pages of this newspaper and others across the state. They are stories I've spent my entire career trying to prevent.

And tragically, these are stories that will become increasingly familiar because Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger – acting without warning or any public debate – unilaterally cut 57 child welfare programs and services with his "blue pencil" vetoes to July's state budget package, putting tens of thousands of foster children and other at-risk youths in grave danger.

Schwarzenegger's last-minute cuts are so deep and widespread, human services experts have only recently been able to assess their impact. These cuts drive at-risk children in an already seriously underfunded child protection system to the brink of calamity.

Currently, more than 50 percent of boys and 25 percent of girls who "age out" of the foster care system wind up incarcerated shortly after leaving foster care. The governor's actions would slash transition services for these young people, and more young adults will needlessly wind up in our already overcrowded jails or be made homeless.

By cutting adoption services, Schwarzenegger has placed more than 40,000 children who could be placed in permanent homes in foster care limbo. Already, children in foster care wait four years on average before being adopted.

And as a result of the governor's massive layoffs of social workers who provide emergency response services, as many as 143,000 reports of child abuse and neglect will go uninvestigated.

Newspapers across the state have reported bone-chilling cases of children's deaths. Stories like these make the urgent case for more, not fewer, case workers on the job to protect our children.

Gov. Schwarzenegger knows that his cuts to child services will unjustifiably put kids in harm's way; he's already admitted as much. In 2004, Schwarzenegger signed legislation to reverse child welfare cuts – cuts similar to the very ones he made unilaterally in July – acknowledging that even one-fifth the amount of reductions in services would "jeopardize the health and safety of California's most vulnerable children."

But now Schwarzenegger has abandoned the state's responsibility to the 75,000 children taken into protective care.

Aside from being irresponsible, the governor's actions fly in the face of the fiscal responsibility and public safety. Studies show that a stunning 70 percent of California's inmates have been in the state's foster care system.

If compassion for California's children doesn't motivate the governor and the Legislature to include support for foster youth as part of a comprehensive approach to prison reform, dollars-and-cents pragmatism should. While transitional support for a vulnerable youth costs as little as $1,200 per year, the average cost of incarceration an inmate in a California state prison is more than $35,000 annually, according to the National Institute for Corrections.

Providing cost-effective preventive services makes sense any time, but it couldn't make more sense at a time when legislators are grappling with how to meet a federal court order to reduce overcrowding in the state's prisons by 40,000 and how to trim $1.2 billion from the state prison budget without endangering public safely.

The governor and legislators must make reversing these irresponsible and shortsighted cuts their top priority, and there are precious few days in this legislative session to do it. A two-thirds vote of the Legislature can restore these funds immediately. The vulnerable children whose welfare hangs in the balance deserve a unanimous vote from every legislator regardless of party.

John Burton chairs the John Burton Foundation for Children Without Homes and is chairman of the California Democratic Party.

http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/story/2174561.html

John Burton