Children’s Village

Soon central South Dakota’s wind-swept prairies will be home to a new village — one that aims to create a community on the Cheyenne River Reservation for children who would otherwise be sent off the reservation to far-flung foster homes.

At 15-years old, Sarah* had already moved between a handful of New York City’s foster care agencies. She was a victim of sex trafficking, an illicit industry that disproportionately targets children in the child welfare system.

Five years ago, the leaders of Onondaga County, New York — home to nearly half a million people, the city of Syracuse, and hills, lakes, rivers — saw an opportunity. The number of children placed in foster care had dropped to a little more than 200 from the nearly 900 placed in the system in the late 1990s.

Foster care is an imperfect system, often criticized for its failures, bureaucratic inefficiencies, and poverty and racial bias, leading to the harmful and unnecessary removal of children from their homes, disproportionately from homes of poor families of color.

As we reported last week, New York’s Office of Children and Family Services has formally opposed the Family First Prevention Services Act, which would open up the federal IV-E entitlement for certain services to prevent foster care while limiting the federal contribution to group homes and other kinds of congregate care.

The field of child welfare is brimming with policy proposals and legislation that could dramatically change the way the federal government invests in foster care and families on the brink. What’s more, some appear to have bipartisan support or the potential for it.