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Sarah Reingewirtz / MediaNews Group via Getty Images
Sarah Reingewirtz / MediaNews Group via Getty Images
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The Los Angeles County Regulatory Agency passed a motion to ensure foster children receiving Social Security benefits have access to these checks. District chairwoman Hilda Solis, co-sponsor of the application, said the new policy is a “game changer.”
Sarah Reingewirtz / MediaNews Group via Getty Images
In Los Angeles, the County Board of Supervisors has taken a step to ensure that foster children receiving Social Security benefits can actually use that money – a move that is extremely rare nationwide.
The board unanimously passed a motion this week calling on the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services to ensure foster children receiving Social Security benefits have access to these checks when they leave the system. The vast majority of state and county child welfare organizations across the country routinely use these services for themselves, often without notifying the youth or a family member, a recent research by NPR and The Marshall Project found.
The state and county youth welfare offices, as the NPR investigation found, take the checks as reimbursement for room, board and other services that they provide to the foster children – although the authorities are required to provide these services under federal law and other foster children are not obliged to Reimbursement of care by the agencies.
It is estimated that 10 to 20 percent of foster children and adolescents are entitled to social security benefits – because they have a disability, or one parent has a disability, or because one parent has died. These checks can run to hundreds of dollars a month or more.
In many states, when foster children are retired between the ages of 18 and 21, they often leave with little money. That’s one of the reasons many ex-foster children become homeless quickly – about 36 percent in one study – and many end up in jail and few graduate from college.
Hilda Solis, the Los Angeles district manager who co-sponsored the application, said the new policy is designed to reverse those poor outcomes for teenagers in foster care.
“It’s a game changer for her life,” she told NPR. “Many of these youngsters … when they leave our services, they become homeless if they do not receive financial support. And we have to break this cycle. “
Los Angeles has more foster children than most states. About 33,000 children live there in foster care, about half of all in California.
The application is an intermediate step. This instructs the district’s child welfare authority to “ensure” that an interest-bearing bank account is set up for all foster children receiving social security benefits so that they have access to the money “after they leave the foster family”.
The application also required government agencies to report back within 30 days with data – on how much social security benefits are being collected and where that money is going. California law already requires bank accounts to be set up for foster children, but Sue Abrams of the Children’s Law Center of California says her attorneys “notice this is not a regular occurrence”.
The pandemic, she says, has increased the financial challenges for children in foster families. These social security checks, Abrams says, are “a key benefit for anyone, and especially for teenagers who are leaving a foster family.”
Abrams said the manager’s move was a “great step” in determining if additional policy changes need to be made to ensure foster children have access to their social security benefits.
There is also a move in Congress to create a similar federal law. Rep. Danny Davis, a Democrat from Chicago, is working on a new version of laws he put in place in the past that would require child protection agencies to screen foster children and teenagers to find out who is eligible for Social Security benefits to do so to apply for funding and then put this money in a bank account for the foster child or young person.
In 2018, Maryland – the only state in the country – passed law requiring social security checks to be provided for teenagers in foster care. Forty percent of the check is set aside when the teen turns 14, and then 100 percent from the age of 18.
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