Mr. Minkoff quotes an aspiring politician by the name of John Van Doorn in his article. Mr. Van Doorn succinctly addresses the issue and points to the reality of the situation. It is ashame that no one in Berks County has the courage to honestly address the issue.
The single greatest threat to the people of San Diego County is our county’s (as well as the state’s) abuse of Title IV-D programs (Child Protective Services, Child Support Services, foster care and adoptions, VAWA, etc.). Mandated by federal government, these programs are intended to provide a social safety net for our children and the elderly and a deterrent to domestic violence but instead, they have become a means by which our local governments extract great profits. In exchange for providing these services, the federal government reimburses local governments for the cost of providing these services—at times, greatly in excess of the cost of that service. As such, our local governments find themselves sorely tempted to provide a service where one is not necessarily warranted (since reimbursements grow as the amount of services rendered grows), and unfortunately all too often where the provision of unneeded services ends up being destructive in the lives of those “served.” For instance, in the case of foster care, the present reimbursement to state and local government for each child taken into foster care is approximately $6000/month. Yet the foster care provider (the foster parent) receives only somewhere around $600/month. Allowing about the same for administrative costs, each child in foster care is worth about $5000/month; that’s pure profit on the bottom line! With a little investigation, it is easy to find many situations in which a child was properly taken from the custody of a parent, yet there were extended-family members fighting to take custody of that child all to no avail (I testified on behalf of one young African-American child and her father and grandmother before the Board of Supervisors, with no subsequent response from the county; that child remains in foster care because, as the county argued in court, the grandmother’s 900 sq. ft. house was too small for the two of them). And children are improperly taken from families (without credible evidence or cause) as well.
The group at BCCYS corruption has heard case after case of families being destroyed due to "intervention" from BCCYS. A number of families were going through some issues--most notably divorce. This became a foot in the door whereby unethical lawyers could and did procure the services of CYS in order to win custody battles.
In one case, a child was placed in an orphanage in Berks County. Her parents were dealing with some family issues and the children were placed in foster care. The child was unhappy and, instead of sending her home to her loving family, she was placed in an institution. The parents were forced to undergo all sorts of counseling and therapy in order to get their daughter back.
In another case, a family dealing with divorce got an unwelcome call from BCCYS after a child went to school with a scratch.
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