Foster Children

Even as state officials prepare to track Baltimore foster children with a new $67 million computer system today, they are contemplating $10 million worth of repairs to fix serious glitches and shortcomings that have already surfaced. Baltimore's Department of Social Services will be the last of the state's 24 jurisdictions to implement "Chessie," the Children's Electronic Social Services Information Exchange. The city agency is also the largest, with 6,500 foster children and 800 caseworkers, making it more prone to chaos should the new system falter.

WASHINGTON -- Seventeen-year-old Montrey Bowie of Frederick is poised to receive his high school equivalency degree in a few months, and he has an entry-level job lined up with a carpenters' union.But upon his 18th birthday at the end of the summer, federal law requires him to leave the foster care system and strike out on his own, with almost no money in hand."I don't want to live a fancy life," said Montrey, who noted he had been taken from his neglectful mother's home at an early age and briefly turned to dealing drugs after running away from indifferent foster parents.

After rising steadily for years, the number of Maryland children entering foster care is declining, prompting state officials to claim success in their efforts to keep troubled families from splintering.More foster children also are being adopted, earning the state a bonus of $317,947 in federal funds last month.State Department of Human Resources officials take credit for both trends, saying their efforts to keep families together -- and to find homes for children who cannot stay with their parents -- have begun to pay off.But the state's efforts have not been able to shrink the number of children remaining in foster care.

IT'S GOOD to see a regional approach being taken to help solve what some consider a "city problem." About 600 boys and girls in Baltimore await adoption. Most have been waiting at least two or three years for a family.They may find one in Howard County, which has started an adoption program called Project Bridge.A $600,000 federal grant was announced last year for the three-year program, which will match city foster children with adoptive families in Howard County. But with the naming of a director and hiring of a recruiter, the program is just getting started.

Two former Finksburg men who were charged in 1994 with sexually abusing boys who lived in their foster care were arrested by FBI agents late Tuesday in Knoxville, Tenn.Federal warrants to arrest Marshall M. Kirkpatrick, 32, and Samuel L. Glover, 49, were obtained in June 1994 after investigators for the FBI and Maryland State Police determined that the men had jumped bail and fled Maryland.Kirkpatrick gave FBI agents a false name when arrested at a Knoxville convenience store where he worked, Special Agent Scott Nowinski of the Knoxville office of the FBI said yesterday.

WASHINGTON -- A children's advocacy group called yesterday for major reforms in the nation's foster care system after issuing a report showing that 53,000 children who are eligible for adoption still languish in temporary homes.The group, the Boston-based Institute for Children, concluded that the main obstacle is the lack of strong incentives for states to help move foster children into permanent homes.Conna Craig, president of the institute, noted that the federal government reimburses states based on the length of time a child stays in foster care, no matter how long.

NO ONE can argue with President Clinton's call to double the number of adoptions of children in foster care over the next six years. Foster care is a necessary respite in many cases, but for too many children, what was meant to be a temporary solution becomes a permanent limbo. The president is right to highlight the need for swifter resolution of cases of children who cannot or hTC should not return to their parents.In Maryland, foster children who cannot return home now wait an average of 32 months for adoption.

After its first six months, a Howard County courts program in which jurors can donate daily stipends to aid foster care children has not yielded nearly as much money as expected -- so officials are preparing a publicity blitz.Before the program began, county officials conducted a survey that indicated that 50 percent of jurors would be willing to donate their fees of $10 to $20 a day. But so far, court officials say, only about 25 percent of those called for jury duty opt to participate.Since May, only about $3,000 has been collected.

WASHINGTON -- President Clinton directed the federal government yesterday to take steps to double the number of children moved from foster care to adoption during the next six years.Clinton announced the initiative in his weekly radio address, this time joined on the air by his wife, Hillary, by adoptive families and by children hoping for a permanent home."I can think of no better way to fulfill the promise of this season than to bring a child into a family, and a family to a child," Clinton said.

Helen McCray, who opened her heart and home to foster children and the developmentally disabled, died Saturday at Good Samaritan Hospital of complications after surgery. She was 72.While raising their three children, Mrs. McCray and her husband, Willie, a retired city police officer and clothing store manager, also took in four developmentally disabled adults and 19 foster children -- three of whom they eventually adopted.They were foster parents for the city Department of Social Services from 1958 to 1983, then began taking in clients of Chimes Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping the mentally disabled.

A federal judge denied state and city requests to immediately end court oversight of the city's foster care system Friday because of concerns about underlying violations of the children's constitutional rights, despite decades of reform efforts. Instead, U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz signed an updated version of a 21-year-old arrangement, already modified several times, that was designed to fix Baltimore's foster care system through sweeping changes. Unlike earlier versions, this one offers an exit plan from supervision after 18 months of documented improvement.

The Baltimore Sun's August 5 editorial "A Breach of Trust" reflected several inaccurate conclusions about the state's continued commitment to reforming the foster care system in Baltimore City; the legal duties of attorneys; and the level of public accountability for the Maryland Department of Human Resources (DHR). Shortly after Gov. Martin O'Malley appointed me Secretary of DHR in February of 2007, I began implementing a comprehensive child welfare reform agenda called Place Matters.

May is a special month for my family and me - not only because of Mother's Day but because it's also Foster Parent Appreciation Month. My husband and I are proud to have raised four biological children, adopted one other and opened our home to more than 30 foster children over the last 11 years. Some of those children couldn't live at their original home because their parents or caretakers were dealing with substance abuse or mental health issues. Some were neglected. Others had been abused.

The troubled and costly implementation of "Chessie," a statewide computer system to monitor child services, hampered the Department of Human Resources' ability to ensure compliance with state and federal foster care service requirements, according to a legislative audit released yesterday. Chessie - the Children's Electronic Social Services Information Exchange - is designed to help keep track of nearly 10,000 foster children and 6,000 child protective services investigations. It cost more than $67 million in state and federal funds, including about $10 million to fix flaws.

Advocates for better foster care say they are worried that the state is not moving fast enough to find new foster families and move away from group homes, which critics say cost more and do not always meet neglected and abused children's needs. A status report released yesterday by Advocates for Children and Youth says that since June 2007, the state has gained 89 new families. The Department of Human Resources, which oversees foster care statewide, set a goal in November of signing up 1,000 new families by 2010.

Under a pavilion at Druid Hill Park, a little girl deftly twirled a hula hoop. The spry 10-year-old easily matched dance steps with a crush of practiced teenagers and sat patiently while a volunteer painted her face with feline features. But the minute she spotted her brother, she raced toward him. She held him in a fierce hug, saying the 11-year-old's name over and over. The pair had not seen each other since Easter. No one better understood that reaction than Shantel Randolph, a former foster child who organized the picnic to reunite siblings in foster care.

Tamara Lee spends her days trying to fix broken families. As a state foster-care caseworker in Baltimore, she spends hours talking with abused and neglected children and asking gentle but probing questions to gauge health, happiness and healing. She is a human face in an enormous state agency tasked with caring for more than 10,000 children who have been removed from dysfunctional living conditions. In recent years, the Maryland Department of Human Resources has been criticized for mishandling implementation of a mammoth computer system, housing foster children in a downtown office building overnight and failing to provide proper medical and dental care.

A teenage girl developed an infection because she could not bathe. Suicidal and aggressive teen-agers mingled with abused children and neglected toddlers. Overworked and frightened case workers were ill-prepared to deal with youths with severe mental illnesses. Those are some of the things that went wrong in 2005 when a downtown office building was used to house at least 168 foster children, two of them for as long as 40 nights, according to lawyers representing Baltimore's 8,000 foster children in a long-standing consent decree.

Baltimore foster children are still being sheltered at a state office building and still missing medical and dental appointments, according to lawyers charged with monitoring a long-standing court decree on care for these children. In a more than 400-page document filed yesterday in federal court, the lawyers say the state Department of Human Resources and Baltimore's Department of Social Services have persistently failed to comply with a 1988 agreement that called for swift reform in the care of foster children.

The quote marks were almost audible every time Charles E. Harris Jr.'s friends and relatives spoke about his "retirement" Friday night, at a party to mark the end of a 40-year career as an information technology specialist at the Social Security Administration. Everyone knew, after all, that retiring from his day job would merely free him up to devote even more time to what increasingly has become his life's work - as a foster parent, advocate and all-around go-to guy for children in need.