Responding to the Needs of the Lost and Forgotten:
Foster Children and Battered Women
Before and After Hurricane Katrina
Richard J. Gelles, PhD
The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina revealed an inadequate local and national response system to major disasters. More importantly, the inadequate preparation and response to the hurricane disproportionately impacted on the poor and disadvantaged who, having no means to flee, were left behind in a flooding city to fend for themselves. The plight of two groups remains largely unknown, unnoticed, and still uncovered by the media. Children in foster care and battered women who had fled their abusers and were in shelters, were already dispossessed when Katrina hit. That they remain dispossessed and largely unaccounted for is an even deeper tragic consequence of the storm.
On August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina struck the U.S. Gulf Coast, there were nearly 13,000 children placed in foster care in Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2005).1 More than 50% of these children were from minority populations. In addition, an estimated 179 women resided in shelters for victims of domestic violence in the greater New Orleans area.2 By September 1, 2005, it was estimated that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of foster children, and all 129 women in shelters joined the approximately 350,000 to 600,000 individuals displaced by Hurricane Katrina (Katz, Fellowes, and Mabanta 2006; Tierney 2005).
The situations and plights of foster children and women in domestic violence shelters in the hurricane-affected areas share a number of unique characteristics. First, and most obvious, the two populations were already displaced by the time the hurricane struck. Second, and this is especially true for the children in foster care, the two populations were primarily comprised of minorities who were largely economically disadvantaged and who already had suffered dislocations and disruptions of their normal family support systems. Thus, any safety net that might have protected these two populations was already fragile. Moreover, the information systems in place that kept track of foster children and victims of domestic violence in shelter care were (and continue to be) inefficient and inadequate. Six months after Katrina, an intensive search for the whereabouts and well being of foster children and abused women displaced by the storm yielded negligible reliable and factual information. Finally, from August 30, 2005 until March 31, 2006, the situation of these foster children and victims of domestic violence remains completely off the media and public policy “radar screens.” While there have been numerous newspaper and television accounts regarding pets and other animals abandoned and displaced by Katrina, there is but one media article on either foster children or battered women affected by the storm, and that was a CNN report from September 16, 2005 that stated:
BATON ROUGE, Louisiana (CNN) -- Louisiana officials working to rebuild families torn apart by Hurricane Katrina are being especially challenged in trying to locate some 500 foster children still unaccounted for by guardians.
It is unknown and uncertain whether the children, foster caregivers, and parents are receiving financial support, medical services, and social services.
The Data on Children in Foster Care in Affected States
State and Federal government reports on child maltreatment reporting and the status of children in foster care are lagged by two years. Thus, the most recent reports from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on children in foster care pertain to 2003. Therefore, estimates of how many children were in foster care on the day of the Hurricane Katrina can only be developed from data as of September 30, 2003. This is a severe limitation. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, those data yield the following estimates of children in foster care in August 2005:
Louisiana 4,353 (56.4% African American)
Alabama 5,200 (55% African American)
Mississippi 3,196 (59% African American)
Neither Alabama nor Mississippi has county level data on children in foster care so it is not possible to estimate how many children in foster care were in the path of Katrina. Louisiana data are available from the state’s “Kids Count” project (http://www.agendaforchildren.org/kidscountdata.htm). Figure 1 presents county-level data for the children in foster care in the direct path of the hurricane. Orleans County, where New Orleans is located, had an estimated 477 children in foster care. The CNN report cited above seems to confirm that number, in that the state was trying to locate nearly 500 foster children two weeks after the hurricane hit.
How difficult a task it would be to locate foster children after the hurricane is, in part, dependent on how closely the children were being monitored prior to the hurricane. According to the U.S. Inspector General (United States Department of Health and Human Services 2005b), both Louisiana and Alabama had standards for monitoring children. Thus, at least in principle, the parish or county child welfare agencies were seeing foster children at least once per month. Mississippi has no standard for face-to-face contacts, and thus it is impossible to know, without data from the state, how often caseworkers had face-to-face contact with children in foster care.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to know whether children in foster care were being seen by their caseworkers, as neither Louisiana nor Alabama had management information systems that could actually track whether children were being seen.3
The Impact of Katrina
My research assistant, Christina Arena, and I attempted to piece together the impact of Hurricane Katrina on children in foster care and female victims in shelters for domestic violence. Since New Orleans was near “ground zero” for the hurricane’s impact and flooding, and since the state had the best county (parish) level data available, we focused on the impact of Katrina on that city and Orleans Parish.
We searched for data in all types of directions. We made calls to John McInturf, Acting Director of the Louisiana Department of Social Services; Walter Fahr, Division of Child Welfare Program Development, Office of Community Services, Louisiana Department of Social Services; Joe Bruno, Section Administrator, Foster Care, Office of Community Services4; faculty and administrators at the Tulane University School of Social Work; officials at the Child Welfare League of America; the American Bar Association Center for Children and the Law; and, the American Public Human Service Association. The result of these extensive contacts, six months after Katrina struck, yielded an incomplete and hazy picture of the current structure and function of child welfare services in New Orleans.
The Impact of the Storm
The Louisiana Office of Community Services (OCS) estimates that 1,800 to 2,000 foster children resided in Katrina-affected areas. This number seems to be consistent with the data obtained from Louisiana “Kids Count” (http://www.agendaforchildren.org/kidscountdata.htm). Louisiana OCS estimated that 1,601 providers, and therefore the foster children under their supervision, were also affected by Katrina. Lastly, caseworkers also felt the blow, and the affected parishes had an estimated 738 caseworkers and staff.
As Louisiana had no comprehensive management information system (per the U.S. Inspector General report), follow-up after the hurricane was arduous and labor intensive. The state “cut checks” for foster care providers and contractors, but had no means of actually finding the providers. Thus, OCS and staff from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (a private, non-profit that receives substantial federal government funding), visited shelters and asked foster care providers to identify themselves. OCS set up an 800 number so that parents and foster care providers could call to receive their monthly Title IVE “board rate” payments. The National Foster Care Association attempted to link foster care providers in other states with displaced foster parents from the impacted areas.
Children in foster care are eligible for Medicaid health care coverage, and the coverage continued after the children and their providers were displaced. However, anecdotal information provided by officials from Louisiana seems to indicate that some states would not accept the Louisiana Medicaid care.
Not only are the children and their foster care providers lives disrupted, but also the 1,408 parents and relatives of the children in foster care. Many, if not most, of these relatives were receiving services designed to lead to a return of their children.
Since Louisiana has a county- (parish-) based system for receiving reports of suspected child abuse and neglect, the hurricane shut down, for all intents and purposes, Orleans Parish’s system for receiving and investigating suspected reports of child maltreatment. Orleans Parish received no reports of suspected child abuse and neglect for the first several months after Katrina. On the one hand, officials said there were no children in New Orleans anyway. If there were children remaining in the city and if they were maltreated, there was no one to whom to report any harm and nothing that could be done about it.
At the time of the hurricane, an unknown number of reports of suspected child maltreatment were open and under investigation. OCS printed out a list of open cases, triaged the cases as best they could, and then classified the cases according to risk. This was only possible for the cases that were in the system (that is, the caseworkers had actually entered their notes into the management information system) and for which safety assessments had been completed. Given that there is often a delay in caseworkers actually entering their notes and completing safety assessments, it is likely that on August 29, 2005 the information on open cases was not current.
Cases where the families could not be located (and this may well have been the majority) were closed. Cases classified as “low risk” were also closed. Cases that were open for services, but the families could not be located were also closed. This later group would be families in which the agency had “substantiated” or found sufficient evidence that a child was maltreated, but whose children were allowed to stay in the home. In all likelihood, these families were not highly motivated to keep in touch with Orleans Parish child welfare services, since being released from child welfare scrutiny outweighed the benefit of the services. Finally, cases that were deemed “moderate” or “high” risk received a “protective services” alert that was distributed to other states. Under normal circumstances, states are often reluctant to investigate abuse cases that cross state boundaries. Thus, “protective service alerts” would be useful only if the open case from Orleans Parish were reported for suspected maltreatment in their new location.
Subsequent to the hurricane and the scattering of child protective service cases, foster families, families from whom children had been removed, and many of the child welfare system workforce, additional problems affected child welfare services. The Louisiana child welfare system saw its funding cut by $6,000,000. Since Louisiana continues to face economic problems, additional funding cuts are likely. Foster care contractors and service contractors were dislocated; thus, the agency lost existing contracts for case management and services. As mentioned, state and contract agency workers were displaced. Many agency workers are still without homes, some continue to live in other states, and many of those who returned to work were relocated to other offices.
The Office of Community Services was unable to move back into its offices until February 2, 2006. The office staff face the same challenges as all other returnees to the city—disruption of basic communication systems. The St. Bernard Parish child welfare office was completely destroyed, and all their records were ruined.
Thus despite the apparent best efforts of the remaining administrators and staff, the child protective service system in Orleans Parish and the surrounding parishes was essentially destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. There is no evidence that the child protective service system is yet able to respond to reports of suspected child maltreatment, protect children who are risk of maltreatment, and meet the needs of children in foster care. For the children in foster care the immediate prognosis is frightening, given that rates of maltreatment of children in foster care in Louisiana, without the stressors of the hurricane and subsequent dislocation, are already nearly one in a hundred (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration on Children and Youth, 2005c).
1. This number and the other statistics on the number of children in foster care are, at best, estimates. As will be discussed throughout this essay, the management information systems that keep track of children in foster care have many limitations so that any discussion of numbers of children in foster care should be taken with the traditional “grain of salt.”
2. Information was provided by Julie Fitch, Community Outreach Coordinator, Louisiana Coalition Against Domestic Violence, February 3, 2006.
3. Mississippi reports having a management information system that could track children, but the state had no actual standards that require such tracking.
4. Mr. Bruno was on medical leave and had not yet returned to work (as of March 13, 2006).