Commentary - Diane DePanfilis: Maryland’s foster care rates rank favorably to study’s benchmark

That means families who provide foster care have to pay for food and clothing from their own pockets, and abused and neglected children in foster care do not get adequate care to help them with their healing and adjustment. Major disparities exist among the states, but current national average rates are in the $400-$500-per-month range (only $13-$16 a day) compared with a rate of $600-$700 per month ($20-$23 a day), the amount needed to actually cover children’s needs. The report proposes a new standard rate for states to use in fulfilling the federal requirement to provide foster parents with payments to cover the basic needs of children in foster care, including food, shelter, clothing and school supplies.

At any given time, there are about 500,000 children in foster care in the United States. Yet depending on where an abused or neglected child lives, a state may reimburse a foster family as little as $226 or as much as $869 a month to meet the basic needs of the child. Differences in cost of living alone cannot account for these differences.

In Maryland, the basic foster care reimbursement rate meets the proposed standard for younger children and is just slightly lower than the standard for teenagers ($750 a month versus $789 a month).

Children are only placed in foster care when there is evidence that they have been seriously maltreated or abandoned and when keeping them safely at home is not possible. The current national shortage of foster families is partly due to inadequate reimbursement rates. The result is that some children will be raised in group or institutional care where the costs are at least five times greater than the basic foster care rate and the lessons of positive family living may go unlearned.

Until now, there has been no national standard for setting foster care rates. In a recent survey asking about rate setting methods used by state agencies, many states were unable to report any methodology used to set their rates.

Using national consumer data provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on the costs of caring for children, this study calculated the true costs of caring for children in foster care and then applied a state-by-state cost-of-living adjustment to arrive at individual rates for each state and Washington, D.C., called Foster Care Minimum Adequate Rates for Children (“the MARC”). While rates set in D.C. are hitting the MARC in all categories, and rates in Maryland are meeting the MARC in two age categories and only slightly under for older children, our neighbors in Virginia, Pennsylvania and Delaware are not doing so well. The results of this study suggest that rates should be raised as much as 69 percent in Virginia, 32 percent in Pennsylvania and 52 percent in Delaware in some age categories.

By establishing foster care rates that cover actual costs, children in foster homes can receive necessary care and have happier and more normal childhoods, child welfare systems may be better able to maintain a stable pool of foster parents, and children may have better chances of growing up in permanent families.

Certainly, low foster care rates are not the only factors affecting the well-being of children in the child welfare system. Maryland recognizes this with its comprehensive new initiative, “Place Matters,” which recognizes that children are best off when they can stay in their homes within their communities. But when there is a serious concern for their safety at home, it is much better for them to live with a local foster family than to be placed in group or institutional care. The end result means better outcomes for children and their families and savings for state taxpayers.

Diane DePanfilis is an associate professor, associate dean for research and director of the Ruth H. Young Center for Families and Children at the University Of Maryland School Of Social Work.