The Alaska State Capitol seen on the first day of the second session of the 34th Alaska State Legislature on Jan. 20, 2025 (Photo by Corinne Smith/Alaska Beacon)
As someone who was lucky to succeed through foster care, it’s hard to watch a neglected foster care system that allows so much damage to Alaska’s most neglected children. Alarmingly, the state has chosen to violate the most important of the comprehensive foster care reforms the Alaska State Legislature passed, across party lines, in 2018. Those reforms added studied, state-of-the-art practices to improve youth health and success.
Fortunately, right now many legislators are asking questions. The current version of the House Finance Subcommittee budget responsibly fixes much of what’s broken at the Office of Children’s Services, which runs the state’s foster care system. A huge amount of what needs to be done can be directed by the Legislature, which is debating the budget right now.
Today Alaska foster children, already agonized by being taken from their parents, sometimes find themselves sleeping in OCS offices. Some wait for a home in lonely motel rooms. That’s because OCS lost almost 500 foster homes since 2018.
The state is required by law to actively recruit foster families in “times of shortage.” This ongoing shortage has demanded action for years. Many of the best families have quit out of frustration. OCS has done little to let Alaskans know they need help.
Doing the work to advertise the dire need for foster families is a first step. But it’s just a small part of fixing a system that will create as many scars as we allow it to.
Here are a few of the gold standard practices OCS still doesn’t follow eight years later.
The evidence is clear we should replace “traditional foster care” whenever possible with loving extended family placements. Familiar relatives and responsible family friends make the best foster parents when that’s safe. Youth don’t suffer as much trauma being placed with people who already love them.
In 2018 many caseworkers weren’t doing comprehensive, detailed work to identify and work with family members to take in foster youth. The law now requires OCS supervisors to meet with caseworkers to confirm, in writing, that the hard work to achieve family placements has occurred. If not, the supervisor must make sure the work gets done.
It’s been eight years. OCS is still violating this important provision.
State auditors stated in a recent audit of the department that OCS leadership should ensure supervisors “certify in writing whether OCS staff has searched for an appropriate placement with a relative or family friend as required by law.”
OCS argues they do better than many other states on family placement. That’s both possible and irrelevant to illegal OCS conduct. If we want to cherry-pick statistics, let’s also note that after an encouraging increase in family placements for one year after the reforms passed, with strong OCS support at the time, today we place 150 fewer youth with relatives than in 2019, according to state data. The reality is most states do poorly on foster care work. Comparing bad apples to bad apples isn’t much of a goal.
It’s undeniable that if OCS followed the law, more relative homes would be found, more youth would live with loving families, and fewer youth would live in hotel rooms and OCS offices.
Here’s the root of OCS’s dysfunction.
In 2020, OCS argued it was faced with a shortage of qualified caseworkers. If so, it had two choices. One was to pay what the market demanded to attract professional workers for complex work. The chosen, reckless option was to eliminate all professional job requirements to keep pay as low as possible. That decision came from somewhere between OCS and the Governor’s office.
We came to a fork in the road and chose the one with the impassable ruts.
Today, a caseworker doesn’t need any relevant work experience, or any social work, master’s or any college degree, to be hired. A recent high school graduate can be hired if they’ve never had a full-time job. That has reportedly happened. In 2018, 80% of caseworkers had a college or master’s degree in social work. Today that’s 50% of caseworkers, officials with OCS told senators at a presentation on Mar. 24.
That means half of child welfare case workers now working in Alaska do not have relevant professional or academic degrees.
The complex work of deciding whether to separate a family, how to put that family back together, how to get help for a traumatized child, and convince relatives to take a child into their home is not for someone without qualifications, at poor pay. It’s not fair to well-meaning caseworkers, roughly half of whom quit within a year.
The number of case workers leaving the job has remained high since 2019, with 45% quitting last year.
The centerpiece of the 2018 reforms was a requirement that caseworkers carry an average of 13 or fewer cases. That’s an evidence-based, crucial tool to reduce burnout and turnover, and allow caseworkers the time to do real social work. Instead, OCS wastes money to train people who quit, and to pay overtime to the overburdened workers who remain.
Today, the average caseload is double what’s legal at OCS’s largest office in Anchorage, and 50% higher than what’s legal statewide.
The 2018 reform law also requires six weeks of comprehensive training for new case workers. To cut the training budget, OCS has replaced much of the comprehensive in-person training with ineffective Zoom meetings.
State auditors questioned the training time in their 2024 audit, and a state legislative consultant rightly called the job qualifications and training reductions “woefully insufficient” to protect children.
This year we should implement the reforms we’ve already passed, hopefully across party lines again.
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