Child and Family Services Improvement and Innovation Act

Floor Speech

Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I rise today in support of the Child and Family Services Improvement and Innovation Act, which this Chamber adopted late last night by unanimous consent. The bill demonstrates that improving the lives of vulnerable children remains a national priority. In the midst of deficit panels and continuing resolutions and fear of government shutdown, Congress came together to pass this bipartisan, bicameral legislation and that is illustrative of our concern for the needs of children.

This legislation also reinforces our recognition of the need for flexibility and accountability. We must enable public agencies to be responsible stewards of public funds, manage performance, innovate and enhance their ability to achieve positive outcomes. The underlying law we reauthorized could not be more aptly named: Promoting Safe and Stable Families. I am particularly pleased that this bill continues to stress the importance of kinship care. This is something I know a little bit about. In the 1996 welfare reform bill, I successfully fought for the inclusion of an amendment with, Senator Coats, to ensure that relatives be given preference over stranger caregivers when the state determined where to place a child who had been removed from the home. Having worked with senior citizens and with the Gray Panthers before I came to Congress, I often heard the frustration of grandparents whose grandchildren--as far as they knew--disappeared into the state child protection system and literally vanished from their families' lives. I realized the immense potential in making it easier for grandparents and other family members to care for children and introduced legislation to recognize that. We ought to have policies that make it easier, instead of more difficult, for families to come together to raise their children. And as we continue to rethink our child welfare system, we need to rededicate ourselves to looking to families, including extended families, for solutions. When children are separated from their parents, it is usually a painful and traumatic experience. Reading over the Record from that fight in 1996 reminded me just how far we have come since then to recognize that fact.

The following year, in 1997, other provisions of my kinship bill were included in the Adoptions and Safe Families Act. And subsequent bills passed by this Chamber, including the 2008 Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act, furthered our progress promoting kinship care by allowing relative caregivers to receive foster care payments just as a stranger would. We know that sometimes, all the goodness in a grandparent's heart can't buy their grandchild basketball shoes or school books. And I am grateful to Senators BAUCUS and HATCH for continuing to draw attention to the value of kinship care. The bill we passed last night again moves the ball forward by rewarding States for operating kinship guardianship programs as well as kinship navigator programs that help brothers and sisters stay connected should they enter the child welfare system.

Slowly but surely, we are learning what works--and we are learning it from States. Through innovative approaches like kinship care, we have dramatically reduced the number of children in foster care. In roughly a decade, the number of children in foster care has declined about 20 percent, and that's something to be proud of. But we must continue our goal of safely reducing the number of youth in care, while constantly asking ourselves, ``what comes next?''

Earlier this year I introduced the Promoting Accountability and Excellence in Child Welfare Act, legislation that took a number of ideas from the States and from the advocates and from experts in Oregon and around the country for ways to improve the well-being of all vulnerable children and their families, just like we did last night. And one thing we can all agree on is that our Federal spending must drive positive outcomes. It is time we develop some consensus as to what those outcomes are, though. When we talk about child welfare, we typically measure success in terms of reducing the number of days a child spends in foster care. But what about those children who never enter foster care but still are involved in the juvenile justice system? Or aren't attending class regularly? Or don't have access to health care? And what about the child that, for one unfortunate reason or another, spends the majority of her childhood in foster care and ages out of that system at age 18? How do we gauge whether we have lived up to our responsibility, as a society, of preparing that child for adulthood?

My bill gets at these very issues. It seeks to improve the well-being of all at risk children and their families by tracking outcomes on the individual level. Importantly, it asks States to be the pioneers by telling us what will work, and then proving it. If we don't check up on vulnerable kids until they are in foster care, or worse--until they are in the emergency room or in prison--we are missing opportunities not only to save the government money, but missing opportunities to save lives and preserve families. My bill also asks for a report to Congress on recommendations on how to update Federal foster care financing so that eligibility is no longer tied to the obsolete AFDC program.

When the Child and Family Services Improvement and Innovation Act passed out of the Finance Committee earlier this month, I withdrew two amendments to ensure its passage move quickly. And I was pleased to have the assurances of Chairman Baucus that we could work together to further explore this idea of child well-being through a roundtable in the Finance Committee as well as take the lead on a request to the GAO asking for policy options to modernize Federal child welfare financing. I commend the chairman and ranking member as well as congressional leadership for their hard work to ensure passage of this bipartisan bill and I look forward to continuing to work together to improve the lives of vulnerable children and their families.

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