After years of neglect by Democrat former Gov. John Bel Edwards, Louisiana is picking up the pieces of its child welfare system, but can’t make the mistake of Edwards’ Minnesota doppelganger.
In budgeting, Edwards pursued a strategy of growing government as much as possible and then baking it in by directing the increased spending towards wealth redistribution that targeted leftist priorities and presumed constituencies. Perhaps the foremost example of this was Medicaid expansion, now costing the state $400 million annually with much of that gong to individuals previously insured or who had the resources to do it themselves, while health indicators in the state are no better. Worse, people with disabilities suffered as even a fraction of those dollars could have ameliorated a growing abuse problem in congregate settings and another relatively small portion could have staved off a growing crisis in inability to provide home- and community-based services because of low reimbursement rates and reactive rather than proactive oversight.
But these clients don’t provide much in the way of votes for Democrats or gain plaudits from leftist interest groups and media, unlike with expansion, explaining Edwards’ priorities. But even he took a hit from the left when the Department of Children and Family Services continued to have failure after failure in preventing child abuse that came down to insufficient attention to and funds for child welfare – shortcomings well known to the Edwards Administration over the years but allowed to linger as dollars went to more politicized priorities rather than protecting children from abuse, who of course can’t vote.
Nor probably do a number of other family members affected by the abuse of a child at the hands of a parent or another household person (too often, relationship partners of a single parent). Poverty strongly associates with the likelihood of child maltreatment, likely because the same set of values and behavior extending from those that tend to keep individuals in poverty also encourage abusive behavior with children. And, poorer people are less likely to vote.
This observed linkage is of particular concern for Louisiana, with its income profile of citizens lower than average among the states. And it should have been for a state ranking nearly 30 places higher on this metric, Minnesota, in its policy-making on this issue. Instead, it injected ideology into it, abandoning what the data tell us.
Minnesota is the province of Democrat Gov. Tim Walz, who would like voters nationwide to promote him later this year into the vice presidency. Until two years, on a smaller scale he faced the same policy-making dilemma as did Edwards: checked by Republican control of at least one chamber of the legislature.
But as a result of 2022 elections that gave Democrats narrow margins in both chambers (so narrow, in fact, that a recent state Senate vacancy left that chamber evenly divided), with this window of opportunity that could (and did) close at any time Walz and Democrats went hog wild in pursuing far left proposals. One of these championed by Walz disrupted the state’s existing child welfare system by assuming resolution of endangered children occurred for racist reasons.
In essence, this most radical child welfare legal change makes it harder to remove black or other “disproportionately represented” children (by the numbers in Minnesota, only black or Hispanic children) from homes where they may have been neglected or abused, thus keeping these children in unsafe environments in the name of racial equity. It weakens the already low standards for removing children by prohibiting a court from ordering removal unless there is clear and convincing evidence that the child is at serious risk of harm; it requires state agencies to make “active efforts” to reunite such children with their families “as soon as possible;” and it excises factors like “substance use, [or] prenatal drug or alcohol exposure” as disqualifying factors for removal. The assumption behind all of this is the disparate numbers signified some kind of racist operations, thus equity in outcome must implemented – regardless of whether that puts more black and Hispanic children at risk.
Fortunately, Louisiana’s system features none of this, relying on a standard of reasonableness for removal and detailed procedures for courts and DCFS to follow in removal and reunification decisions that takes into account sensible factors not dependent at all on any disparate impact. In Louisiana, black children are almost 50 percent more likely to enter into the child welfare system base upon population proportion, which is lower than Minnesota’s more than twice as likely, probably because the proportion of poorer white families is significantly higher in Louisiana. And, like Minnesota, in Louisiana black children have been reunited with family less often than white children, results that undoubtedly come as a result of typical poverty patterns.
Instead, the Republican Gov. Jeff Landry Administration this year successfully added dollars to beef up enforcement and he and legislators also got together to strengthen the role of the state’s child ombudswoman that should improve DCFS performance. And just to ensure that there isn’t something extraneous like racism or other factors preventing best practices, a legislative resolution created a study commission to investigate how allegations of sexual abuse of children is handled that begins meeting next month to report before next year’s legislative session.
Next week, DCFS will present to a legislative panel a preliminary look into its budget request for next year, with further opportunity to gain funding if needed. Not that redistributive politics doesn’t continue to interfere with funding going to genuine need: this spring, legislators who should have known better browbeat the agency into accepting from the federal government unnecessary additional food aid to select families, forcing millions of dollars extra expenditures on administrative costs that could have gone to improving child welfare response.
However, the early indications from the Landry Administration and legislative allies promise significant improvement in child welfare services, a welcome departure from the neglect by his predecessor, as long as stupidity doesn’t ascend as in the case of Walz’s agenda.
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