Prepared Statement by
Ira Burnim, Legal Director for
the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law
Los Angeles, CA - The following are prepared remarks by Ira Burnim,
Legal Director for the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, on introduction
of a lawsuit brought to address failures within the Los Angeles foster
care system:
Good morning. My name is Ira Burnim and I am Legal Director of the Bazelon
Center for Mental Health Law, the nation’s leading civil rights group
advocating for the rights of adults and children with mental disabilities.
The Los Angeles County foster care system is the nation’s largest
and its failings provide a powerful example of what’s wrong with
child welfare systems in this country.
In California and across America, a significant amount of the money available
for children’s mental health needs is spent on kids in state and
county child welfare systems. Studies estimate that between 60 and 85
percent of foster children nationwide have significant mental health problems.
In Los Angeles—as in many places in the country—the child welfare
system is failing these children. The foster care system charged with
helping them has instead turned a blind eye, failing to provide the help
these children need to succeed at school and live safely in a stable home.
The system provides little assessment of the individual mental health
needs of children in foster care. And once children’s emotional and
behavioral impairments have been identified, they receive precious little
in the way of services.
Without appropriate services, children with mental disabilities bounce
between foster home placements and group homes. Then, when their worsening
mental conditions render them “unplaceable,” they are abandoned
to languish in institutional settings.
These problems are not restricted to Los Angeles’ system. Across
the country, a lack of commitment, combined with bureaucratic inertia,
has created a dearth of community-based services that could help children
deal with their mental health impairments.
We know that therapeutic foster care and wrap-around services work, but
the policy-makers who oversee child welfare and mental health systems
in states like California seem unwilling or unable to support appropriate
treatment in the community – even when it is cheaper and of more
benefit to children with mental disabilities.
Counties, including Los Angeles, continue to rely heavily on restrictive
congregate shelters, despite widespread agreement among children’s
mental health experts that such shelters are harmful to the children with
the most severe emotional and behavioral problems.
The number of children who have been doomed to a life of lost opportunities
is staggering. It is imperative that America reform its child welfare
systems.
Today the Bazelon Center joins the advocates gathered today to call for
system reform – not just for Los Angeles but also for communities
across the country that have too-long ignored the behavioral health needs
of their foster children.
The lawsuit demands the creation of service delivery systems to ensure
that the children in the Los Angeles foster care system receive effective
treatment in the community.
We know that we can make this system work the way it’s supposed
to. In communities across the country, the intensive community-based services
that we advocate in this lawsuit have enabled children with emotional
and behavioral problems to grow up to lead independent and dignified lives.
Our hope is not only to improve the lives of the 50,000 children in the
Los Angeles County, but also to send a clear message that child welfare
systems will be held accountable when they fail their charges.
America’s child welfare systems can – and must be – improved.
Thank you.
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Ira Burnim is the Legal Director for the Bazelon
Center for Mental Health Law. He also serves on the advisory
committee for the Research and Training Center on Family Supports and
Children’s Mental Health and was one
the principal authors of Making
Child Welfare Work, an important guide to reforming child welfare
systems.
The Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law has been the nation’s
leading legal advocate for people with
mental illnesses and mental retardation for three decades. The Center’s
precedent-setting litigation has outlawed
institutional abuse and won protections against arbitrary confinement.
In the courts and in Congress, our
advocacy has opened up public schools, workplaces, housing and other
opportunities for community life.
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