For years, Georgia has failed to do right on behalf of its abused and neglected children. We have spent too little and cared too little. We have handed off responsibility for life-and-death decisions about those children to underpaid, overworked state workers, and when they have failed, resulting in tragic deaths, we have scapegoated those same employees for a failure that we, as Georgia citizens, had made inevitable.
We have been through that cycle time and again, and in the last days of the 2014 legislative session, we have come close to starting yet another one.
Last month, the state Senate passed a bill that would mandate privatization of most of Georgia’s child-welfare functions. Under Senate Bill 350, the state would hand off management of those functions — crucial decisions on adoption, family reunification, foster care, etc., — to local faith-based and community-based agencies.
During debate over the bill, state Sen. Renee Unterman, a Gwinnett Republican and its lead sponsor, showed her colleagues a picture of 10-year-old Emani Moss, the young girl who had allegedly been starved to death and beaten by her parents last year and then discarded in the trash. SB 350 would help prevent such tragedies in the future, Unterman told them.
It would not. The state of Georgia failed Emani by leaving her in the care of parents whom it had good cause to know were abusive. It failed her because to save money, we slashed personnel paid to investigate and decide her case and too many thousands like it. Shortly after Emani’s fate became public, Gov. Nathan Deal implicitly acknowledged that failing by announcing that he would request funding for 500 additional child-protective caseworkers.
Under SB 350, the responsibility to remove endangered children such as Emani from their homes would remain with state employees, as it must. But once they are put into state care, subsequent decisions on their fate would be made by private contractors.
According to Unterman and other privatization advocates, similar programs implemented by Florida and Kansas have improved outcomes for children. Other accounts paint a more mixed picture, with some successes and some failures. In Nebraska, a privatization effort much like that envisioned in SB 350 was such a dismal failure that it was abandoned in less than three years.
Even in Kansas and Florida, a 2010 study by the Casey Family Foundation found that costs were significantly higher than predicted, at least in the first few years. It also stressed the importance of implementing such change slowly, in phases. Florida, for example, began with five pilot projects, four of which failed and had to be abandoned. When it finally did go to a statewide system, it did so gradually over a period of several years. When Kansas tried to transition its entire system in just two years, it overwhelmed both the state and its non-profit partners, leading to serious problems.
As passed by the Senate, SB 350 requires Georgia to complete that entire transition, statewide, by 2017. That haste would put vulnerable children at serious risk, a danger that the governor apparently now recognizes. After initially expressing support for the change, he stepped in late last week to announce creation of a commission to study reforms to the state’s child-welfare system, a step that should slow the privatization push considerably.
Given what’s at stake, it was a wise and necessary move.
