Ms. KNITZER. Thank you Mr. Chairman.

My name is Jane Knitzer. I represent the Children's Defense Fund which is a public interest organization that seeks to uncover problems affecting children. We just released a report which we shared with all members of this subcommittee on children who are at risk, or are in placement and we are vitally concerned about the legislation that you are considering today. Before I briefly summarize our findings for you -- and I did testify before you almost 2 years ago, I would first like to take this opportunity on behalf of CDF to thank you, Mr. Chairman, and all the other members of this committee, for your leadership in the last session and your beginning leadership in this session. We deeply appreciate and we desperately need it.

Let me briefly highlight what we found in our study because I think it really ties in very much with some of the issues that have already been raised in testimony today and last week. We have three major findings. The first is there is an antifamily bias that pervades the policies and practices of the child welfare system. The system works against families, not for them.

The second is that the children who are in these systems, in child welfare systems are in double jeopardy because they are also subject to neglect by public officials who have responsibility for them.

And the third major finding, which is why I am here today, is the Federal role exacerbates both the antifamily bias and the public neglect of these children. Let me just for a moment speak in some detail about these findings.

An antifamily bias is reflected at all points in the placement process. Children are inappropriately removed from their families. Let me share with you a case example. In the course of doing our study we learned about many children. I will share briefly what turns out to be a fairly typical kind of example of a mother who was receiving welfare payments who had five children. The oldest child was 8. She had a retarded 2-year-old and a set of 6-month-old twins. Her sister was killed in a car accident and the mother became severely depressed. She felt unable to cope with the heavy demands of her family. She turned to the local child welfare agency for assistance and as a result all of the children were placed in foster care. The mother was never offered crisis counseling.

She was never offered a home maker to give her a respite from her demanding family needs. Instead, at high cost to the taxpayers the children were placed. This is what it means in the lives of children. We were actually shocked to find the extent of the antifamily bias once the children are placed. What we found was the system sometimes actively discouraged parent-child contact. We did a survey and found that in 140 counties only half even had written policies requiring parent-child contact, so the case workers office did not even attempt to arrange visits.

When visits did occur, it is typical for such visits to be in court rooms, Just think about visiting with your own child in a court room. We even found one county that allowed visiting only on special occasions such as the child's or the parents birthday. That latter one is extreme. The courtroom example is not extreme.

We also found that parents did not know when the children were moved from place to place. They did not know where the children were.

The antifamily bias continues at a point when a decision should be made about the child too often there is no one to make a decision. Again let me share the case of a child. At the time we learned about him he was 7. At the age of 4 he was removed from his foster home because he was appropriate for adoption. The State then placed him in a child care institution -- removed him from a foster home and placed him in an institution so he should not establish too strong ties with foster parents who did not in that instance want to adopt him.

He was placed in this child care facility as a precursor to his being adopted. However, the system broke down. The child's case was never reviewed and at the time we visited the State 3 years later he was still in the child care facility and had no adoptive case worker, and there was no tracking mechanism so somebody would know this child was still sitting there.

This is what it means in the lives of these children. I could go on.

That is an example of the antifamily bias. It is also an example of public neglect, where there was no case worker for this child and there he was in an institution. The public neglect of children we found takes many forms. The first is that case workers -- you have heard this -- are overburdened and they don't get to know the kids or facility they are in. As a result, many children are inappropriately placed. This ties into the fiscal problems that we are all dealing with in terms of the cost of this system. They are also placed at great distance from their family. We found 10,000 kids are placed out of State.

And in our report we have a map that looks like airline maps of kids crisscrossing the country because there is no consideration in their placement, to placing them in the least restrictive setting and also the closest possible setting to their home and community consistent with their special needs.

Our findings tie in with what Senator Pisani said, they are placed where there are spaces.

We also found that for many of these children there are either no reviews or the reviews are pro forma. This speaks to the issue that came up before around the administrative case review, 6 month administrative case review and the 18-month judicial review.

In our study we found that reviews are simply very often paper reviews. We even found one instance in Massachusetts where we were simply told by the case workers -- I might say Massachusetts has good regulations about review requirements -- that they only did the case reviews, the administrative reviews, of the child, when they had a new case worker to train. Otherwise there were no reviews of the cases.

We believe it is important that there be a provision for an administrative review built into any bill try to guard against this sort of problem.

Most States, two-thirds of the States, do not require in addition to these administrative reviews that there is any independent periodic reviews of the children. New York is one of the 20 that does. Two-thirds of the States do not require any independent review by somebody who is not responsible directly for the child and not within the agency responsible for the child.

You have already heard today how the Federal fiscal dollar is implicated in sustaining these problems and I am not going to go into that in detail. Suffice to say it provides incentives in all the wrong directions.

Let me now turn briefly to some of the specific proposals before you. We are pleased to see that many of the issues that you addressed so carefully and with such great detail last year in 7200 are again in the bills before you. We believe it is absolutely crucial that the address to this issue be comprehensive, that it deal in one bill with preventive service, with quality of the foster care that the child receives and with adoption subsidies.

There will be no substitute in terms of reforming the system for putting those all together in one bill.

Let me just make a few specific comments in terms of some of the bills that are before you. We believe strongly there must be a conversion of title IVB program to entitlement program. This is fundamental. There must be a strong maintenance of effort clause and there must be a prohibition on the use of any new moneys for maintenance cost of children in foster care. We also believe the phase-in approach reflected in the administration bill may in fact be a realistic way of trying to insure that States are able to comply with the requirements.

We support wholeheartedly some of the modifications in the AFDC foster care program proposed in the various bills particularly including voluntarily placed children in the program and second reimbursing for public agencies for small facilities. We think that is important. We heard over and over again in our visits to States there is a desperate need for the development of these kinds of smaller public facilities particularly for adolescents.

Let me say a word about the voluntary placements of children that came up briefly before. We believe that an adequate protection would be the use of the written voluntary placement agreement in which the parental rights and obligations and the State rights and obligations are made explicit. We are very concerned about the present system by which children are in fact funneled through the court.

It is not at all clear to us that the required judicial determination now serves as a protection for children. In fact, it serves to guarantee Federal funding and the children in many cases are simply being run through the court and rubber-stamped to become eligible for AFDC foster care program. We believe it is a better protection for the children to have those children who should be placed as a result of court order so placed and voluntarily placed children should be covered under a different kind of mechanism.

In other words, we are concerned again about the pro forma use of the court as a trigger for the fiscal dollar.

We are fundamentally opposed to placing a ceiling on the AFDC foster care program. We too are concerned as Ms. Martinez testified -- about the inappropriate foster care placements. We do not believe a cap is the appropriate way to address this problem.

Let me give you three reasons we believe this. First there is absolutely no substitute in terms of turning around a system for increased targeted funds for preventive and reunification service and strong protections including periodic reviews and dispositional hearings. The administration's bill would impose a cap regardless of whether the States have such services and protections in place.

We have grave reservations about what the consequences of this will be in terms of the lives of the children coming into care. There will be no guarantees that those children who need the care will get it or that the children in care will be able to be moved through the system. You can assure with a cap some people will be kept out of care but how do you insure that the right children are kept out of care?

Second, we are opposed to a cap because it does not take into account the realities of increased case loads, of inflation or of new demands on the child welfare system. For example, in our study -- I know you have heard this in testimony before -- there are increasing in numbers of adolescents, so-called status offenders who are being moved into the child welfare system and who need care and placements. A cap also does not allow for the States that will be effected by a recent Supreme Court decision which permits the reimbursement to relatives under the AFDC foster care program if children are formally placed with them, nor would it be responsive to the intent of Congressman Downey and Rangel's bill to extend coverage to voluntarily placed children.

These are all legitimate kinds of demands on the system and a cap is not responsive to them.

Third, we believe that even after the States have set up the kinds of service and protections envisioned in this legislation before you a ceiling would be dysfunctional because presumably then only the children who truly need foster care will be coming into the system.

Finally we think it is outrageous that the administration bill includes adoption subsidies under the ceiling. To put a ceiling on the numbers of children who can be assured permanence is beyond foolish public policy. It is inconceivable.

Let me turn now to addressing what we believe is one of the core elements of this legislation and that is the protections that the bill affords to children and families. One of the tragedies of the current system is parents and children have so few protections against its capricious functioning. We believe that there are a number of protections that are absolutely essential that must be built into any kind of legislation and we believe that these protections must be afforded as a right to each child in foster care and they must be clearly made a condition of funding under both AFDC foster care program and the IV-B program.
These protections include preventive and reunification service, written voluntary placement agreements, case plans, placement in the least restrictive setting in reasonable proximity to the child's home community appropriate to the child's needs. Six months periodic case reviews and dispositional hearings. We also believe that any legislation should specify the due process safeguards to be afforded to parents and children at various points in the placement process.

And we believe that it is very important that in this legislation there be some kind of clear mechanism for fair hearing. Having said that let me make some comment on what we think are necessary within each of these specific protections to maximize the likelihood of success.

There is some degree of unanimity in the bills before us as to these protections. There are however some subtle differences that may be loopholes or that may be will weaken the effectiveness of these protections so I would quickly like to run through them.

First, we believe that preventative and reunification service requirements should only be waived in non emergency situations if a parent refuses services. Otherwise it can become a loophole for getting the State off the hook and not offering preventative service.

Second, we believe that the least restrictive close proximity standard appropriate to the child's needs should apply both under the AFDC FC program and under Title IVB.

Third, and this we think is very important -- the 18 month dispositional review mechanism must have some kinds of built-in follow- up to insure reporting back to the body doing the reviews to make sure that there is compliance. There must be some continued check on the bureaucracy to make sure that there is not simply a dispositional order saying free this child for adoption and no further followup because we can predict that the child may not be freed for adoption.

So in thinking through the components in the dispositional review some followup mechanism is absolutely crucial.

We believe that any bill should spell out due process protection such as the right to notice, the right to participate and the right to have representation when critical decisions are made about the children.

Finally on fair hearing mechanism it is not enough to have a fair hearing mechanism only for the denial of benefits. Parents, foster parents, children in this system need to have some mechanism where they can raise questions about the adequacy of service or the failure to receive the benefits or the service and the protections to which they are entitled.

We believe -- and others have said -- that these protections will be cost effective; requiring placement in the least restrictive setting, would be likely to cost less than over institutionalizing children. Preventative service as Senator Pisani eloquently said, cost less than foster care.

Finally, I would like to just briefly mention our hope that the bill will include strong accountability provisions and to reinforce what Senator Pisani said about the need to build in some of these mechanisms into the legislation. We believe that accountability mechanisms ought to be established so there can be increased public participation both in the planning process for the child welfare system and in the information available to the public so they can know what is going on with these children. We also believe that there must be provisions for adequate periodic on-site reviews, on-site case reviews as well as reports.

Thirdly, there must be public and periodic data available on these children and the bill should require this.

Let me make a few specific comments to expand on what I said. One thing that we believe would be very important would be at the point that a State becomes eligible for full funding under title IV-B we believe it is crucial there be a careful determination as to whether or not the State is really in compliance with the protection and service requirements of the bill.

We believe this should be an on-site case review kind of mechanism to make sure that in fact individual children are being protected in the ways envisioned by the bill.

In terms of the need for aggregate data we appreciate the fact that the administration bill requires an inventory of children. We are concerned this be more than a one-time inventory. This must be a periodic kind of inventory. It must be available on a State-by- State basis and it must be available to the public.

Let me not comment any further on the bills but respond to any of your questions and just take a minute to make some comments about title XX.

CDF would like to submit for the record some detailed written comments. Let me briefly say once again we are appreciative of your leadership, this subcommittee's leadership and trying to insure that social services are protected for the people who need them and we hope to continue to work with you to achieve an increase in the permanent ceiling to $3.1 billion in 1980 with 70 percent cost of living increase subsequently, retention of the child care earmarked and the 100 percent nature of that earmarked under Public Law 94 -- 401, improvement in training efforts.

We are opposed to the administration's proposed 3-percent ceiling. I believe that would be destructive. We would like to submit for the record more detailed comments.

Let me say I really appreciative the opportunity to testify before you and again we will be happy to work with you in any way we can to get these bills passed.

Thank you.

Jane Knitzer