Child and Family Services of New Hampshire (also known as CFS) is a private nonprofit agency that works to advance the well being of children and families through an array of social services, including foster care. Keith Kuenning, director of advocacy for the agency, recently spoke about its mission.
Question: Can you explain what you do?
Answer: Not all nonprofits have an advocacy wing, or a full-time advocacy person like me. We advocate for children, on behalf of families and on behalf of elders.
Q Tell me about your work in the foster care system.
A Part of our mission is to recruit foster families to help children who find themselves in abuse and neglect situations. You have to think of foster care as the backbone of the child protective system. It starts with the fact that all people are mandatory reporters (which means that if we see abuse or neglect of a child, we are mandated to call in and report it to protect that child). Once that happens the state does an assessment. If there is enough information to warrant further action, there is an investigation, and if abuse or neglect is found, DCYF (New Hampshire Division of Child, Youth and Family Services) either works with the family or takes the child away from the family.
Q:Where does CFS come in?
A: Finding abuse or neglect means nothing if we can’t get the child into a protective foster care environment. We advocate for the dollars that allow the process to go forward. We’re currently working to raise the foster care rate, which hasn’t been raised from $16 per day in 10 years. There are some different rates for specialized foster care, but many first-time families are telling us they can’t think of fostering because the rates are so low that they can’t help their own families. We’re really seeing it increasingly hard to recruit people to become foster parents because the rate doesn’t keep up with the cost of living, so it’s not feasible for the average family to foster.
We’ve met with Gov. (Chris) Sununu and talked to people on House Finance Committee about the low rate. We’re trying to get the information out there that without these foster parents, foster protection does not work. Rates have to be increased so that foster parents can at least break even when they take in a child for guardianship purposes.
Q:What has the reaction been from lawmakers?
A: Most of the people we’ve talked to — including DHHS (New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services) Commissioner Jeffrey Meyers — are shocked at the low rate. The problem in New Hampshire is you always have more need than you have dollars. How do you convince legislators that this is the key issue when there are so many different needs in New Hampshire?
Many of these needs are intertwined. DCYF has seen the number of calls for help with kids go up by 30 percent in the past several years due in part to the opiate crisis. A lot of those kids end up abused or neglected, which means we need more foster parents, and more specialized foster parents.
Q: DCYF has been under fire recently for the large number of children who’ve died in its care, including Brielle Gage, whose mother was convicted in her beating death. Can you speak to the situation?
A: The light has been shone on the problem but things are not moving fast enough to help the kids out there; these abuse cases are happening in real time, right now. We are getting to the bottom in terms of finding out what happened. However, we still have the lowest “founded” rate in the U.S. — meaning a case is brought forward and abuse and neglect are found. New Hampshire averages 5.6 to 6 percent. We have about the same amount of calls, but what the audit found was that DCYF only intervenes when there is actual harm. Where we really have the gap is that there is hardly any intervention in high-risk cases.
In New Hampshire, we don’t see extremely high risk as danger. Until that child has a broken limb or burnt finger, DCYF doesn’t get involved. In other states, high risk would trigger a finding of abuse and neglect.
If you read about this in another country, you’d shake your head in disbelief. Here in New Hampshire, this highly educated, highly mobile state, it’s happening all around us, it’s happening right now. It’s not like the Concord Monitor series came out and people stopped abusing their kids.
Q:Is there a typical child who is at risk?
A: I have never dealt with any issue before that affects every economic and social class in this way. There are 10,000 grandparents around this state taking care of grandkids, and the main reasons are alcohol, opiates and incarceration. I know from talking to grandparents those are the three that continually arise.
Q:What would you say to people who are reluctant to get involved?
A: There are more kids than ever who need help; we need new foster parents to foster kids who are abused and neglected. We need people to call their reps to put more money in the budget for foster care families, so people can afford to provide care.
There can’t be an association with what’s happening at DCYF and foster care. When someone is found to need to be fostered, that system is working. It’s the assessment end of the child protective system that is failing, not doing enough to find and rescue all the children who are being abused and neglected. The only weakness in the foster care system is that we don’t have enough parents and the rates are too low.
This is a changeable wrong that we can make right. These are problems that can be solved — with money, best practices, and generosity we can solve it, but we need to come together, recognize as a state that it is a problem and all work together to solve it.
What does every child need? Love and stability, and predictability. If you think you can provide that, think about how you can change a life for the better. Think about how you can make a positive impact. Contact DCYF or the private nonprofit Child and Family Services of New Hampshire. These kids need help. Their lives can be changed in a positive way and we can’t forget that.
For more information about Child and Family Services of New Hampshire, visit www.cfsnh.org, email info@cfsnh.org or call 603-298-8237.