Jeremy Kohomban

Panicked over looming staff shortages in foster care group homes, New York City nonprofit leaders spent the week pressuring Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Administration for help. Now, as coronavirus spreads to nearly 5,000 residents, the city’s child welfare agency says it is “aggressively” hunting for space to house youth who are sick or who need to be moved away from ill caretakers.

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.

Joyce McMillan, driving force of New York City’s Child Welfare Organizing Project, known as CWOP, resigned from the organization this week. McMillan, who began leading the nonprofit as program director in February 2016 and helped author the foster care task force report released earlier this year for New York City Council, told The Imprint she’ll be opening a for-profit entity called Credible Messenger Consulting.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) was furious and heartbroken. Nearly three years into an effort to fundamentally overhaul the nation’s foster care system, the bill Wyden had crafted alongside Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) was dying.

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.

On Wednesday, Senators Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) issued a report scrutinizing the management of private foster care providers, and skewering one especially notorious foster care agency.    Stirred by news stories chronicling dozens of child deaths because of management of foster care services by The MENTOR Network, a national for-profit provider, Hatch and Wyden directed the Senate Finance Committee to study the matter.

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.