President’s proposed budget abandons foster
care commitment for abused children, cuts child care and cuts quality standards
and local control of Head Start
WASHINGTON, Feb. 7 – Law enforcement leaders warned that the President’s
proposed budget would severely reduce critical supports for at-risk children
thereby increasing the chances they will grow up to become violent criminals.
The budget would abandon the national commitment of a safe foster home for
abused and neglected children, cut child care for over one million children in
struggling working families and threaten to lower the quality of Head Start and
take it out of the hands of local communities. Research shows that failing to
ensure safe foster homes for abused children and provide quality early education
through Head Start and child care supports for working families increases crime
when the children become adults.
“The federal budget is more than mere numbers, it is an accounting of our
country’s priorities. The President’s budget just doesn’t add up for children
and instead makes the wrong choices on crime prevention,” said Gil Kerlikowske,
Seattle Chief of Police. “We should not endanger our public safety by cutting
crucial programs for at-risk children that steer them away from crime as
adults.”
Chief Kerlikowske is the chairman of the national, bipartisan, anti-crime
organization Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, whose members include more than 2,000
police chiefs, sheriffs, prosecutors and crime victims.
The President’s budget presents Congress with proposals to limit or cut three
critical programs for vulnerable children:
Foster Care. Current law ensures that states can protect as many abused
and neglected children as need help. Whenever a state has to provide more
eligible children with foster homes, it can count on the federal government to
provide a matching share of the needed support. The President’s budget provides
incentives to states to accept a rigid limit on federal support for foster care.
Law enforcement leaders believe that would lead to a shortage of adequate
foster homes, and to more abused and neglected children being re-abused or
neglected. Three-quarters of the states had increases of children needing
foster care in at least one of the past four years, so they would have had a
shortfall if the prior year’s funding level had been locked into place. Also,
research shows that among children who were abused and neglected and left in
their homes, but later needed to be placed in foster care because of further
abuse, four out of 10 committed violent crimes when they grew up.
Head Start. The President’s budget would drop important national quality
standards and move control of Head Start, the nation’s premier early childhood
education program for low-income children, from local programs to states. The
proposal would result in cuts to children being served. Research shows that
kids left out of quality early childhood programs were five times more likely to
become chronic offenders by age 27 than those who participated in the program.
Also, the programs save as much as $17 for every dollar invested, including $11
in crime costs. Low quality programs do not achieve either result.
Child Care. The President proposed cutting the Child Care and
Development Block Grant that provides crucial child care assistance to families
leaving welfare and working families. The proposal would cut 1.2 million
children from child care over the next five years.
“When we know that locking young children out of Head Start, child care and
foster care means locking far more behind bars when they are adults – this just
doesn’t make sense,” said Sanford A. Newman, President of Fight Crime: Invest in
Kids. “If we break the commitment to America’s children this year, we will pay
later with more victims of crime in the years to come.”