After more than a year of hearings and investigating, the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Human Rights chaired by Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff released its report on the safety of foster children. The 64-page report used Georgia as a case study to focus on nation-wide problems with the foster care system.
The effort received bipartisan support with Ranking Member Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn also launching the inquiry. The investigation was at least partially launched through media attention on “systemic” breakdowns in the Georgia foster care system, with failures to keep children safe from physical and sexual abuse as particularly troubling.
“The most vulnerable children in our state and in our nation must be protected from physical abuse, from sexual abuse, and from human trafficking. We cannot and must not look away from these findings, though they are deeply distressing. We cannot accept the abuse, the trafficking, and the preventable death of children. I thank my Subcommittee staff and the more than 100 witnesses whose hard work and courage has brought these facts to the public,” Chairman Ossoff said.
The report honed in on seven key findings, and much of the report is framed around these findings. Among them, systemic failures in keeping children safe from abuse, even to the point that they contributed to deaths of children in the foster care system. Many of these are hard to understand how they are possible, including that nearly 2,000 children in the care of Division of Family and Children Services (DFCS) were reported missing from 2018 to 2022 – with at least 410 children likely sex trafficked.
Juvenile court judges also told the Subcommitte that DFCS has intentionally delayed releasing foster children from juvenile detention – even though they are eligible for release – because of a lack of adequate foster care placements. Two of these judges noted that this included children with special needs, and three additional judges corroborated the testimony in written statements and interviews. The judges also testified that they felt these proposals would violate state law.
Medical coverage was also a repeated concern, with the report noting that “DHS has asserted that its Medicaid provider, Amerigroup, frequently denies coverage for medically necessary services for foster children, making it difficult for the agency to ensure adequate care, and that DHS often covers the cost of medical services and appeals denials of coverage.”
On the other side from denial of coverage, DFCS has also acknowledged that it is not adequately monitoring the provision of psychotropic medications, resulting in the overmedication of children. Commissioner Candice Broce said overmedication is a longstanding concern at DFCS.
Broce was appointed in 2021, just within the time frame of the research in the report – as well as much of the testimony provided by former children in the foster care system. Her tenure is thus relatively early on to see improvement in the data but the Subcommittee report includes a finding that a previous investigation from the Office of the Child Advocate in 2022 was dismissed by DFCS, with the Office of the Inspector General being instructed by Broce to issue a “strong of a rebuttal as possible.”
Ultimately, limited resources from both the state and federal government are likely to get attention from the report but, also, more foster care families could potentially be as meaningful as more government resources.
To read the full report, click here
