Nevada's much-criticized foster care system changing

CARSON CITY - Nevada's foster care system has been termed nightmarish by some critics and slow and ineffective by state auditors. But system chief Steve Shaw says lawmakers are working on big changes.

Shaw, head of the state Division of Child and Family Services, says the Legislature is focusing on accountability, more communication, streamlining and privatization concepts.

By the time lawmakers adjourn on May 31, he's hoping for changes that will do for Nevada's foster care programs what welfare reform has done for the nation's welfare system.

"This radically modifies the way we do adoptions and foster care in this state," he says of the expected revisions.

The changes can't come too soon for many of Nevada's 869 licensed foster families that care for nearly 2,000 children - most suffering physical or emotional problems due to abuse.

John and Peggy Pauly run a foster home in Yerington and are vocal critics of the system. They say that often the system itself traumatizes the children it's designed to protect.

"We got our baby girl, Heather, when she was one week old. Her birth mom was traveling on a bus to Las Vegas. She was drunk," Mrs. Pauly said.

She added Heather's mother dropped her three times before the bus driver pulled over in Hawthorne and called sheriff's deputies who arrested the woman for felony child endangerment.

"A few hours later we were blessed with a 6-pound, 8-ounce baby girl. She was stiff and her feet were black and blue from trauma. There were no clothes for her and only an empty vodka bottle was found in her diaper bag," Mrs. Pauly said, adding that Heather suffers from fetal alcohol syndrome.

Heather's mother never tried to visit or even contact the Paulys and the child's father is unknown. Still, it took a judge eight months to order parental rights terminated so the Paulys could move to adopt the child. And it wasn't until last December that the termination process was completed - 26 months after the judge's original order.

"By the time many children are freed for adoption, they are labeled unadoptable due to behavioral problems or age or both of these. If the termination process is shortened, how many of these children will be less traumatized?" Mrs. Pauly recently asked an Assembly panel reviewing the proposed changes.

Social workers' heavy caseloads, the court system's crowded dockets and the difficulty in terminating parental rights make it likely that children will languish in the system for months and often years, the Paulys told legislators.

Currently, the state must wait 18 months after a child is taken into custody before looking for a permanent foster home - a search that could take an additional year or more, according to Shaw.

AB158 would let state officials look for foster homes as soon as a child enters the system. At the same time, caseworkers could investigate whether or not a family is fit to care for the child.

The bill is partially designed to meet 1997 federal standards designed to shorten the time children spend in foster care and move a third of them out of state care and into permanent homes by 2002.

By meeting guidelines set by the national Adoption and Safe Families Act, Nevada will be eligible for $17.5 million a year in federal foster care support funds. That would be on top of the division's current $38 million-a-year budget.

Shaw says his agency is eager to implement the legislation because it will help speed children through the system.

"I've chased a lot of federal dollars before, implemented federal law in order to get the dollars. I'm not real fond of doing that if it's not good public policy," Shaw said. "In my opinion, this is excellent public policy."

The bill also limits a search for relatives to one year, requires judges to allow advocates and foster parents to testify on a child's behalf in family court, and mandates the termination of parental rights six months after a court order.

"The system is overburdened and we don't really have the resources to throw more caseworkers on," said Larry Morehead, a foster parent in Washoe County.

Morehead and his wife Joy have cared for 45 children over the last four years.

"We've had children come through our home in limbo for years, there was no way to speed that up," Morehead said, adding that AB158 will change that.

"Being in the system, one of the most frustrating things is the length of time it takes to resolve these issues - things would drag on and on and on. This act is really going help these children get on with a normal life," he said.

The bill also creates a board to oversee rural foster care and adoptions and allows the state to automatically move for termination of parental rights if a parent has murdered another child or is implicated in other cases of severe abuse.

"The average time is 3.1 years in substitute care in Nevada. We need to speed that time up," Shaw said.

Another big change for Nevada's foster system would occur under SB232, a bill to help the division get out of the private adoption business and give workers more time to find homes for wards of the state.

Shaw says the legislation will discourage families from using state adoption services by hiking the state's price for facilitating adoptions from $2,500 to the going market rate - currently about $7,500.

Because the state's current rates are so much cheaper than private agencies' prices, families looking to adopt a child will often chose the division as a go-between.

"The way it is now, every family has to go through us, whether it's a private adoption or not," Shaw said.

"Something like 40 percent of adoptions we do aren't our kids. Ninety percent of our kids are special-needs kids - they have fetal alcohol syndrome or they're minorities or they have large sibling groups or there is some barrier to adoption," he added.

Healthy infants make up most of the private adoptions facilitated by Shaw's division, and half the families have an income of between $75,000 to $400,00 a year.

"They can afford to go to a private agency. We're subsidizing private adoption agencies. Plus there's a 60-day time clock on these private adoptions. We have to drop our special-needs kids to work on the private side," Shaw said.

The new rules might have helped the Adkins family, who operates a foster home in Washoe County.

"Our experience with the state was very frustrating, specific to an individual caseworker," said Kathleen Adkins. The social worker assigned to Sara, an eight-year-old girl the Adkinses eventually adopted, rarely returned phone calls, wasn't forthcoming with recommendations for resources, wasn't available for home visits and had a caseload from 40 to 60 children, Mrs. Adkins said.

"The ramifications of that is that you get so frustrated with the system, you take it out on the child. You think, 'If it wasn't for you we wouldn't have to deal with these people,"' she added.

Shaw says that SB232 will free up several caseworkers to concentrate on children like Sara who are in state custody waiting to be adopted.

The current system can traumatize children, and squanders $1 million every year because children are left in so-called emergency shelters too long, according to a legislative audit.

Shaw's division could have saved that money if children were moved within 10 days from emergency care to foster care, according to the report. Instead, children spent an average of 33 days in state custody.

"I'm not real proud of the audit," Shaw said. But he added the division "walks a fine line" between protecting children and trying to keep spending down.

"The assumption is that we have an unlimited amount of foster care and that's just not so. The major, major issue is I don't control the number of kids coming through the front door," he said.

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