February 23, 2006

SHORT TAKES

How much to manage the kids?

The lawyers who won the Braam foster care settlement say the state Department of Social and Health Services isn’t moving very fast to make initial upgrades due later this year.

Last week, after the state Senate released its supplemental budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1, Columbia Legal Services wrote to DSHS’s counsel at the Attorney General’s Office demanding to know how much funding the agency needs to implement the settlement, which sets foster care goals that DSHS has to meet over seven years.

In the letter, attorney Casey Trupin also questions why DSHS is asking for a new data management system that costs $3.8 million, when the Senate has budgeted only $3.6 million for actual services mandated by Braam.

The $3.6 million includes $2.2 million to help caseworkers reach a goal of visiting each foster child every 30 days; $594,000 for House Bill 2002, a new pilot to keep college students in foster care up to age 21; $521,000 for foster parent support; and $270,000 for placement evaluations.

Funding for the 30-day visits, in particular, “appears to be $4 million short of what the governor asked for and would be a serious gap in allowing the department to implement the Braam settlement,” says Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson (D-Seattle).

Back in December, during a House hearing of the Children and Family Services Committee, Dickerson says she and Rep. Ruth Kagi (D-Shoreline) asked DSHS what it would take to fund implementation of the Braam settlement. She says she has yet to get an answer.

Dickerson says she’s hoping the House budget, which is due out this week, will include the full $6.2 million the governor wanted for 30-day visits.

Speaking on DSHS’s behalf, Steve Hassett in the Attorney General’s Office says he doesn’t know why the agency hasn’t provided the requested information. But he notes that the settlement’s oversight panel is expected to release a report within the next month identifying some of the data the Braam plaintiffs are seeking.

In the meantime, “The department is not going to apologize for improving the data management system,” Hassett says. “The Braam agreement lasts seven years. If at the end there’s going to be real, substative, and lasting change, there has to be some foundational changes made now. One of those is a data management system that works and takes the department into the future.”

Today’s system, he says, sucks up caseworker time that could be spent on children and families. Given that the Braam settlement demands DSHS generate thousands of pages of data, Hassett calls it “hypocritical and disingenuous” for the plaintiffs to question the cost of a new system.

“ It’s a great soundbite for someone to pound the table with,” Hassett says, “but I think it’s a twisted argument.”

— Cydney Gillis