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After years of litigation and drawing up plans, it looks as if the state budget signed by the governor on April 1 is finally going to give foster children in Washington the improved care called for in a 2004 settlement of a lawsuit brought by former state ward Jessica Braam.
The budget, says Braam co-counsel Casey Trupin of Columbia Legal Services, includes $6.3 million for foster care (nearly $5 million of which will provide foster children monthly visits by Children’s Administration caseworkers), ensure that siblings placed in separate homes get to see each other twice a month, and screen the educational, mental and physical status of children within 30 days of their entering the foster system.
Trupin says that represents three of the four settlement items for which Braam attorneys took the Children’s Administration back to court in January. But he says the state still needs to come up with funding to meet a fourth requirement named in the Motion to Enforce: reducing high caseloads.
The budget also provides additional staff to license foster homes and more funding to expand Mockingbird Family homes, a model that provides support and respite time for parents. Trupin says he’s stumped, however, by two things the governor struck from the budget by line-item veto: $900,000 to expand a program that trains foster parents to deal with the most difficult children to place — those with high numbers of behaviorial problems — and $943,000 to hire nine more educational advocates who work to keep foster children from dropping out of school. The state currently has 10 positions.
Both programs save the state money in the long run, Trupin says, particularly the behaviorially focused Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care. He calls the MTFC veto confounding, as statistics show that every dollar spent on the program keeps the state from spending $10 to $40 down the road on juvenile offenders.
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