Nevada Child Welfare Fails in their Family Preservation Practice

In a talk to an audience at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, NCCPR  director Richard Wexler stated “that many private foster care agencies look forward to per-diem payments they receive for keeping children in foster care. In many cases, he said, these financial incentives override the best interest of the child.”

He shares this shocking statistic: “Ten times more federal money is spent on foster care and adoption than on programs aimed at keeping families intact.” He goes on to say that “Nevada… takes away children at a rate 60 percent above the national average.

In Clark County, he said, the removal is 35 percent above the national average.”

He mentioned that poverty is still a large cause for removal of children from homes in Nevada.

Reform ideas include focusing on kinship care and  family preservation  as the “child welfare system spends far more on foster care than it would cost to provide housing and other concrete services to these families,” he said. “In addition, by unnecessarily removing as many children as we do, we overload our foster care system and reduce the quality of care that it is able to deliver to the smaller number of children who cannot be safely left with their own parents.”

“Study after study has shown that if a child really has to be taken from his parents, the best way to cushion the blow of removal is to place that child with a relative, usually a grandparent,” Wexler said.

Child welfare advocate speaks against foster program, shelters
[The Rebel Yell 2/28/11 by Kendle Walters]

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