Mississippi is at the epicenter of one of America’s most terrible man-made disasters — the foster care system.
Stories abound about the atrocities: drugged-out birth parents who care nothing about their children, bad foster parents just in it for the state money, good foster parents who have children transferred away for no reason, an overstretched Department of Human Services that turns a blind eye because it knows the state couldn’t handle the volume of children if every one of them in a neglectful situation was taken from their home.
The state has struggled for years to comply with settlement terms of a 2004 lawsuit, called the Olivia Y. case, where six children in foster care successfully sued the state for not providing adequate care.
Michael Garrett knows those stories from the inside out. The son of an alcoholic father, he and his two sisters were broken up and placed in foster care, where Garrett says he was abused. Eventually he was able to get out and into a Baptist children’s home in Monroe, La., where he finally found stability.
Now grown, he and his wife began working with children’s homes but weren’t happy with the options. Garrett, who spoke to the Columbia Rotary Club on Oct. 9, says there are two ways that such homes typically get children: 1. Dropoffs by parents; and 2. Placement by the state.
Neither, he argues, are good. First, he said in the past parents could give their children to a group home and continue to receive the government benefits associated with having a child. But now he says those benefits are cut off when the child enters a group home. Rather than discouraging waste, the effect has been that drug-addicted parents simply stopped dropping their children at homes. He said the Baptist children’s home in Jackson has closed and the one he grew up in, which had more than 100 children when he was there two decades ago, now has only about 20.
The other option, Garrett says, is equally bad because the state only sends those to group homes who are so violent and uncontrollable that they can’t be anywhere else. When you have those kind of children, you have to become a prison rather than a home, Garrett says.
Those kind of children are received because Garrett says the policy of the state is that individual foster homes are preferred over “institutionalized” group homes. The problem is that, according to Garrett, the state has a goal of having children in no more than three different foster homes every 14 months. That instability is a death knell to any hope of a successful life. Children need time to develop friends and routines.
So what’s the answer? Garrett says he’s found it through a first-of-its-kind approach: Go find children in need of help and take the battle to court to get a judge to assign the children to Garrett’s facility, Homes of Hope for Children in Purvis.
Typically he says a concerned relative who is not on drugs will alert Homes of Hope to an abusive situation. To get involved, there must already be documented cases of abuse yet the children remain in the home, Garrett said. Traditionally judges have taken the advice of DHS workers in such situations, but Garrett said Homes of Hope comes in as a third party who argues that what DHS is saying about the home situation is not true. Homes of Hope hires private investigators and its own attorneys — Garrett said he does not want a free effort so they pay their attorneys and can fire them if they’re not happy with their work — and argues to the judge why the children should be placed with Homes of Hope.
They’ve never lost a case, Garrett said.
“What we have been able to prove, I think without doubt, is that the state is comfortable with the standard of care that meets their needs of less kids coming into the system. It does not meet the needs of the child,” he said. “They do not have enough beds for all the kids that need to be taken out of the homes so they bottleneck the number of kids coming in and they give a passing grade to homes that absolutely don’t deserve it.”
Garrett said a key difference for Homes of Hope is that the Christian nonprofit gets all of its money from donors. He says that has allowed it to escape the corruption that comes with money being tied to children.
They have 19 boys and girls on their campus now that he says are thriving and most have been there five to seven years. They can stay in adjacent house after turning 18 while working or going to college.
I have no direct experience with the foster care system, but what Garrett says makes sense. If others have experiences they’d like to share that are different from the picture he paints, or confirm what he says, I’d welcome you to contact me. Part of the problem with foster care is a lack of public awareness of what goes on. I think it would help to have more media coverage to shine a light on it.
Charlie Smith is editor and publisher of The Columbian-Progress. Reach him at csmith@columbianprogress.com or (601) 736-2611.
