Need for foster families rises as more Arizona children are being removed from home

The number of Arizona children being removed from their homes has increased sharply in recent months, and some of them are in shelters waiting for placement in a foster home.

That’s what Mike Faust, director of the Arizona Department of Child Safety, outlined in a email last weekend asking Arizona’s foster families to take in more children.

“This morning there were 25+ children and youth at the Welcome Center, and despite efforts throughout the day, there are still 18 children and youth requiring placement with families able to meet their needs,” Faust wrote in an email sent Oct. 31.

“Over the past seven months we have seen many challenges facing the child welfare system and our communities. Regretfully those challenges persist as the public-health crisis continues.”

The increase is due to more child maltreatment reports coming in from law enforcement, Faust said in an interview Thursday. Those reports increased about 15 to 20% each week for the last few months, he said, while calls to the state’s hotline overall remain much lower than usual.

Unlike ordinary times when teachers or other school staff are the ones typically calling the state’s hotline, these calls are now coming to the DCS from police.

A common example is domestic violence, when police might come across children in a home needing help, Faust said.

But Richard Wexler, executive director for the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, said this is typical for Arizona, where he says high rates of poverty lead to a child removal instead of help being provided to the family.

“Arizona child welfare is responding to this crisis the way Arizona child welfare always responds to a crisis: Take the child and run,” Wexler said. “Some of the increase in alleged abuse may be real, but the track record of Arizona child welfare suggests most of it is due to the fact that there is now more poverty and Arizona routinely confuses poverty with ‘neglect.’”

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The pandemic is “putting more stress on everyone — that’s why some small portion of the increase may be real,” Wexler said.

Mandated reporters who are led to think that children who are out of sight are being abused in “pandemic proportions” are going to be reactionary, Wexler said.

“Why do we rush to assume that for poor people in general, and poor nonwhite people in particular, the only way they’ll cope with it is to beat up their children?”

Data from the DCS show the number of calls for neglect, physical abuse and sexual abuse have climbed each month since July, with 2,411 calls for neglect in July compared to 2,754 in September. Calls about physical abuse rose from 848 to 1,174, and calls about sexual abuse rose from 140 to 179 for those two months.

Over the same time, the number of children put into state care in Arizona rose from 775 in July to 964 in September.

Some foster families are apprehensive about taking in new children because of COVID-19, Faust said.

“There’s also the uncertainty of schools,” he said of prospective foster families. “If you are working, how do you support them if school goes virtual?”

There were 13,485 children in out-of-home care as of late September.