LA child welfare recovery can't replicate MN
Blog: Between The Lines
After years of neglect by Democrat former Gov. John
Bel Edwards, Louisiana is picking up the pieces of its child welfare system,
but can't make the mistake of Edwards' Minnesota doppelganger.
In budgeting, Edwards pursued a strategy of growing
government as much as possible and then baking it in by directing the increased
spending towards wealth redistribution that targeted leftist priorities and
presumed constituencies. Perhaps the foremost
example of this was Medicaid expansion, now costing the state $400 million annually
with much of that gong to individuals previously insured or who had the resources
to do it themselves, while health indicators in the state are no better. Worse,
people with disabilities suffered as even a fraction of those dollars could
have ameliorated a growing abuse problem in congregate settings and another relatively
small portion could have staved off a growing crisis in inability to provide
home- and community-based services because of low reimbursement rates and
reactive rather than proactive oversight.
But these clients don't provide much in the way of
votes for Democrats or gain plaudits from leftist interest groups and media, unlike
with expansion, explaining Edwards' priorities. But even he took a hit from the
left when the Department of Children and Family Services continued to have
failure after failure in preventing child abuse that came down to
insufficient attention to and funds for child welfare – shortcomings well known
to the Edwards Administration over the years but allowed to linger as dollars
went to more politicized priorities rather than protecting children from abuse,
who of course can't vote.
Nor probably do a number of other family members affected
by the abuse of a child at the hands of a parent or another household person
(too often, relationship partners of a single parent). Poverty strongly
associates with the likelihood of child maltreatment, likely because the
same set of values and behavior extending from those that tend to keep individuals
in poverty also encourage abusive behavior with children. And, poorer people
are less likely to vote.
This observed linkage is of particular concern for
Louisiana, with its income
profile of citizens lower than average among the states. And it should have
been for a state ranking nearly 30 places higher on this metric, Minnesota, in
its policy-making on this issue. Instead, it injected ideology into it,
abandoning what the data tell us.
Minnesota is the province of Democrat Gov. Tim Walz, who would
like voters nationwide to promote him later this year into the vice presidency.
Until two years, on a smaller scale he faced the same policy-making dilemma as did
Edwards: checked by Republican control of at least one chamber of the legislature.
But as a result of 2022 elections that gave
Democrats narrow margins in both chambers (so narrow, in fact, that a recent state
Senate vacancy left
that chamber evenly divided), with this window of opportunity that could
(and did) close at any time Walz and Democrats went hog wild in pursuing far
left proposals. One of these championed by Walz disrupted the state's existing
child welfare system by assuming resolution of endangered children occurred for
racist reasons.
In essence,
this most radical child welfare legal change makes it harder to remove black or
other "disproportionately represented" children (by the numbers in Minnesota,
only black or Hispanic children) from homes where they may have been neglected
or abused, thus keeping these children in unsafe environments in the name of
racial equity. It weakens the already low standards for removing children by
prohibiting a court from ordering removal unless there is clear and convincing
evidence that the child is at serious risk of harm; it requires state agencies
to make "active efforts" to reunite such children with their families "as soon
as possible;" and it excises factors like "substance use, [or] prenatal drug or
alcohol exposure" as disqualifying factors for removal. The assumption behind
all of this is the disparate numbers signified some kind of racist operations,
thus equity in outcome must implemented – regardless of whether that puts more
black and Hispanic children at risk.
Fortunately, Louisiana's system features none of
this, relying on a standard
of reasonableness for removal and detailed procedures for courts
and DCFS
to follow in removal and reunification decisions that takes into account sensible
factors not dependent at all on any disparate impact. In Louisiana, black children
are almost 50 percent more likely to enter into the child welfare system
base upon population proportion, which is lower than Minnesota's more than
twice as likely, probably because the proportion of poorer white families is
significantly higher in Louisiana. And, like Minnesota, in Louisiana black
children have been reunited with family less often than white children, results
that undoubtedly come as a result of typical poverty patterns.
Instead, the Republican Gov. Jeff Landry Administration
this year successfully
added dollars to beef up enforcement and he and legislators also got
together to strengthen
the role of the state's child ombudswoman that should improve DCFS performance.
And just to ensure that there isn't something extraneous like racism or other
factors preventing best practices, a legislative resolution
created a study commission to investigate how allegations of sexual abuse of
children is handled that begins meeting next month to report before next year's
legislative session.
Next week, DCFS will present to a legislative
panel a preliminary look into its budget request for next year, with further opportunity
to gain funding if needed. Not that redistributive politics doesn't continue to
interfere with funding going to genuine need: this spring, legislators who
should have known better browbeat the agency into accepting from the federal
government unnecessary
additional food aid to select families, forcing millions of dollars extra
expenditures on administrative costs that could have gone to improving child
welfare response.
However, the early indications from the Landry Administration and legislative
allies promise significant improvement in child welfare services, a welcome
departure from the neglect by his predecessor, as long as stupidity doesn't
ascend as in the case of Walz's agenda.
