Lei, the foster kid who aged out of care into college and then went to teach in Taiwan,

also repeated a part of her history, by returning to New York to work in child welfare. I met with her this past summer, my very last interview, behind the 42nd Street library. It was the day of the National Puerto Rican parade, and all around us families waved flags, slurped up flavored ices, or leaned against one another on the library steps. In my own foster care experience, I had so many different workers, because the turnover rate is so high, but now that Im in the field I know why: the low pay, the high stress. Over time, you get burned out, and you feel really disappointed, Lei said about her new perspective as a giver rather than receiver. She looked different from four years prior: her hair was cut in a shaggy bob, and her face had softened. Gone was the mmm-hmmm tic that punctuated the end of most of her sentences, and she seemed tired probably because she was working full-time in preventive services for an agency that contracted with ACS and going to graduate school on the weekends. She earned $41,000 to case-manage thirteen high-risk families, and she was disappointed because she had to spend more time writing reports than meeting with her clients, and, she said, she had to conform to the bureaucracy around her. Theres a timeline for every case we have, and a number of contacts we have to make per week. The statistics are all about money so you know a family needs more help but you have to close the case because youve met the expectations. Still, preventive services, I think, are the hopeful future of child welfare, especially as states shift toward the Florida-esque waiver options. In 2011, President Obama signed an act that allowed all states to apply for flat-sum waivers from the government. With flat sums, kids dont have to be in foster homes to garner income for the agencies, so money is generally spent on preventive services to avoid the more costly removals. And agencies can spend waiver money as they choose (as opposed to the per diem pay structure where they have to justify each move with time-consuming paperwork), so ideally, people like Lei will be able to spend the time they should on the needier cases. By the end of 2012, nine states been approved for waivers, though more could still sign up. In New York City, ACS is currently piloting a foster care program with five of its agencies, wherein theyre allocating more money to hire more workers to provide deeper, more meaningful foster parent support and to make sure their kids are out of care within the ASFA timeline. Theyre front-loading the system, as Francine Cournos would say. And if it works, Commissioner Richter told me, it would be like operating under a waiver system wherein the pilot program has the freedom to allocate funding up front where the kids need it, and before theyve tumbled down a roster of more restrictive and expensive placements. In fact, he told me hed like to use the experience with the five agencies and expand it to the entire foster care system in New York by applying for a waiver for the whole city. Later, the state did apply for the waiver and is now awaiting federal review; this is undoubtedly a positive trajectory. Lei said she didnt know that ACS had merged with juvenile justice, even though the merger happened long before we spoke. Mostly, she spent her days battling bureaucrats who did the same old things in the same old ways: history playing itself. So Lei worked extra hours for the families she cared about. In one of her recent cases, a teenage boy hadnt attended school for three years; he was physically too large for the frustrated mom to force anywhere. Lei called the

police, hospitals, the courts, the Board of Education, even her congresspeople, and everybody told her the boy didnt fall under their jurisdiction; he hadnt committed a crime. Eventually, after nearly a hundred phone calls, Lei forced a residential school to accept him, the Board of Education to foot the bill, and ACS to pick him up and deliver him to the locked campus. I dont know if that boy will feel abandoned as Kecia did, to a residential school, or if hell feel that someone rocked with him all the way to an education; perhaps, right now, this is the best we can do. I do know that mother needed outside help, and she got it from an agency that contracted with ACS. Persuading families to trust child welfare will take tremendous effort, and perhaps several more generations. Lei lamented the grim reputation ACS still held with most of her clients. When an ACS worker investigates a case, they knock on the door like theyre the real police, and thats still a big problem for a lot of my clients. The agency is always talking about cultural competence, but how dare you go into a home, check this, check that, when all sorts of families Indian, Chinese are not very open, not very American in that way, Lei said. She waved her hands up toward the fancier apartments surrounding the library. I say this because ACS rarely investigates the upper class. They know those people have lawyers. Still, I think theres some hope on this front too, as in the past few years, groups like the Child Welfare Organizing Project in New York have changed the very business of child removals, making sure biological parents are involved in deciding where their kids go, and that they have more peer support as they work with the system rather than against it. Theres more room for allegiance and trust, but any partnership is promising. And everywhere, the foster care numbers are down, which means everywhere, more kids are staying home to begin with. When I started this book five years ago, there were 488,285 children in care nationwide; when I was done, there were 400,540. All the problems the racial disparity, the institutionalizations, the aging out into nothingness are ongoing and likely will be for decades, if history keeps playing. And the poverty aspect of foster care is particularly troubling, as the one shining truth in my research was this: the poorer you are, the more likely you are to get entangled with child welfare. Between 2000 and 2008, the number of children living in poverty in America increased by 2.5 million, or 21 percent. And that was before the recession. In New York City, more than a quarter of all kids lived at or below the poverty line in 2008. So thats the bad news. Poverty is everywhere. And we have a broken system, made by fallible people with fallible families (stare at my tree; stare at yours). As Arelis said, we may have better and more creative ways to shove the puzzle pieces together, but the game was shattered so long ago, its never going to integrate perfectly. There are fault lines; tap them and theyll break again. And still. Poverty is a wide, wide road with many on-ramps for improvement. Thats where I feel some courage and optimism for child welfare because we dont have to fix the system directly to make things better for our kids. Work on one small aspect and well be

working on the whole. Better school lunches, better libraries, afterschool care, neighborhood resources anything that touches social reform touches foster care too. I wrote this book to be more descriptive than prescriptive, placing the why above the what next. There are countless academics and organizers and families with countless good ideas. Even politicians are getting in on it; in 2012, Congress launched its first ever listening tour for its Congressional Caucus on Foster Youth, and listening is a good place to start. As for Lei, though, shes getting out. Shell stay in her job as long as it takes to get her masters degree in social work, and then shell move on to higher ground maybe, she thinks, doing policy for the UN. This is my steppingstone; I need some staybility, she told me, and she pronounced it that way stay-bility. She watched her case-managing peers, and she saw a depressing trajectory. People who have been in social work for a long time, they lose their passion. I mean, wheres their empathy? I dont want to lose my faith in humanity. Still, if I believe that everything around us touches child welfare and I do then Leis future work, whatever it is, will ripple out. Looking around at all the families clutching their Puerto Rican flags and heading home, Lei said, I want to get old and say to myself, You have treated people well. Thats all.