One-third of Tennessee child-welfare cases are poorly documented

New report takes critical look at Tennessee's foster care system
Granju, Katie Allison. WBIR-TV, March 7, 2007.

Children are being shuffled from one foster home to another. Caseworkers aren't visiting the kids enough. And about a third of child-welfare cases "contained significant gaps in documentation."

But the state, through the Department of Children's Services, has made great strides with foster children in other areas.

Those findings by a group that monitors Tennessee's foster-care program were filed in a federal court in Nashville on Tuesday. Since 2001, Tennessee's foster-care system has been under a court order to reform its treatment of some of the state's most vulnerable children.

The report looked at how children are treated in the first six months after they come into the foster-care system in Tennessee. Most had been taken from their families because of abuse and neglect.

It found that more than half had moved at least twice during the six months, and 18 percent had been placed in three or more homes during that time.

"That level of multiple moves is just unacceptable," said Ira Lustbader, an attorney for Children's Rights, a New-York based advocacy group that initiated a class-action lawsuit against DCS that was settled with the court order.

"We've got to see more stability for these children."

DCS agrees.

"Some of the challenges we've got are with placement stability," DCS spokesman Rob Johnson said. "One of the things we're working hard to do is limit the number of times a child moves when a child comes into custody."

The department is working to get more foster parents, which would help limit the number of times a child has to move.

The report also faulted DCS because only a little more than half of the children in foster care received required visits by caseworkers during their first eight weeks in custody. Seventy-six percent received the required visits after eight weeks.

The report found that DCS had made conditions better for children, including moving kids out of orphanage-like institutions and into foster families and keeping more kids together with their siblings.

The number of children in state custody also has significantly decreased. There were 10,600 kids in DCS custody in early 2004. There are now roughly 8,700 in the system.