California counties siphon Social Security benefits from some foster kids
When she was 15 and had been a ward of the courts for half her life, Kristina Tanner learned the cost of her stays in group homes and with foster families was coming out of her own pocket.
She had qualified for monthly survivor benefits checks, a Social Security program for children whose parents had died.
Instead of the hundreds of dollars a month going to her or toward savings, it went to Butte County, she said, to cover checks issued to her foster care providers.
Now Tanner, who works three part-time jobs while attending Sacramento State University, wonders why the government needed to take her money.
“You’re pretty much saying I’m paying for my time in care, and there’s other people that are getting their time in care for free,” she said. “It’s not like we have our parents to fall back on.”
California county child welfare agencies regularly reimburse themselves for caring for foster youth by applying for and taking the children’s Social Security benefits — money that advocates say should instead be going to the children.
Some children in foster care have disabilities and are from low-income families, qualifying them for a Social Security program called Supplemental Security Income, or SSI. Others are like Tanner, eligible for survivor benefits because one or both of their parents died.
The state does not track how much money is withheld from these children, who make up a fraction of California’s 55,000 foster kids.
In Los Angeles County, which cares for about a third of the state’s foster children, the Department of Children and Family Services receives the benefits of about 600 children in its custody in any given month. Last year $5.4 million of children’s SSI and survivor benefits went toward defraying foster care costs, DCFS said.
Advocates say taking the money hurts young people who are most in need of financial support, while it covers only a drop in the bucket of California’s child welfare system, which consumes nearly $5 billion in federal, state and local funds a year.
Offsetting costs
State and county child welfare officials say they’re using the money as intended – to provide for foster children as if they were their parents.
Federal dollars only pay for foster care for some children whose families meet strict poverty criteria, and states and counties must pay the full costs for other kids in their custody.
The Social Security benefits, when they’re available, are viewed as an offset of those costs.
“It’s not debatable that the government is required to pay for the upkeep of a child; it’s a legal obligation the state takes on when they remove a child” from their home, said Amy Harfeld, national policy director for the San Diego-based Children’s Advocacy Institute. “In this particular case they are so hungry to minimize their own financial liability that they are identifying assets belonging to the child,” she said.
But when young adults age out of foster care they are often at greater risk poverty and homelessness. One long-term study in California found in 2020 that a quarter of former foster care youth reported sleeping in shelters or being temporarily unhoused since exiting foster care.
Tanner said Butte County, as her guardian, took her survivor benefits of about $1,200 a month until she graduated high school and was no longer eligible for them. The money likely totaled tens of thousands of dollars over her time in state custody.
Now at 21 she has aged out of the state’s extended foster care system.
“Those benefits … would have been a game changer,” she said. “I would, if I had those funds, be able to support myself … It could be sitting in [an account] that’s just growing for you. It could be retirement.”
The average California child receiving Social Security supplemental income gets less than $800 a month. Those receiving survivor benefits get about $980 monthly.
Nationwide practice
A growing number of states are considering ending the practice of taking this money as reimbursements.
In 2018, Maryland passed a law requiring the state to set aside Social Security checks for foster youth to use in the future. New York City’s child welfare agency said it would do the same this year.
Similar legislation was proposed in Philadelphia and in Nebraska, Minnesota and Texas. And Alaska was embroiled in a class action lawsuit over the issue last year, according to a report by The Marshall Project and NPR.
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