Patten: We are failing to keep up with the safety needs of Vermont children

Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Cyrus Patten, the director of the Comprehensive Care Program for Children, Youth & Family Services at the Howard Center in Burlington.

As a new father, I see an innocent and optimistic little girl striving to absorb the world around her. My wife and I returned to Vermont to raise a family, and because I love this state where I grew up. I am excited for my daughter to experience the uniqueness that characterizes Vermonters as resilient, creative and pragmatic.

We hold values here that I found wanting in other parts of the country such as integrity, openness and community. I came back because I wanted this “village” to help raise my child.

However, as a social worker and non profit administrator, I am genuinely concerned for the community in which my daughter will grow up. I see brutal child abuse and heart-breaking neglect and I am frustrated by the bureaucracy intended to protect them. I am concerned for Vermont’s children.

Over the last four years in Vermont, child protection cases have increased an average of 5 percent, passing 15,000 last year. That equates to one call for help every 33 minutes according to the Commissioner of the Department of Children and Families. Perhaps it is the increasing desperation felt by working families, but the need for early and effective intervention continues to grow.

These trends are the result of a paradigm from which we have been unable to escape. Our need to manage crises has distracted us from the more critical need to invest in the nurtured development, health and well-being of our children. Even with almost 10 percent more state social workers than two years ago, we are failing to keep up with the safety needs of Vermont children.

Any social worker will affirm that the myriad social issues we face are inextricably related. Forty percent of children in the child welfare system over the last decade are now on public assistance or in the corrections system. Vermont spends over $475 million annually on corrections and child welfare. But the actual costs of addressing preventable social challenges are much higher when the efforts of our education, mental health, law enforcement and justice systems are factored in. The true cost of supporting people in our community that have fallen victim to generational poverty, abuse, neglect, developmental trauma or even poor parenting is staggering. Any attempt to correct an economic nosedive will have to include dramatic revision of our state systems.

Vermont’s social infrastructure is barely treading water while state and federal financial support is shrinking. As part of Challenges for Change, dozens of talented people around the state are attempting to reorganize the system of care in order to provide more services to more people for less money. Meanwhile, state departments compete for the shrinking funding and guard their current budgets more closely than ever, hesitant to pay for the treatment of a child that “belongs” to another service area.

Our children are our future and Vermont can do better than this. The solutions lie in simplicity.

First, investment in the healthy development of all Vermont children must be our number one priority. Addressing the causes of our strained child welfare system is much more efficient that coping with the crises. We need a robust social infrastructure that will effectively and permanently break the cycle of generational abuse.

Increased and streamlined funding mechanisms that pay providers based on the actual cost of services, not a complex algorithm requiring excess bureaucracy to interpret them. Increased funding for community based, preventive services at all levels of the continuum from low-risk family coaching to high end residential treatment.

Second, we must see our children as part of a community. In order to effectively use the resources already committed to protecting our children, we have to break down the silos. Our children can no longer be quarantined to mental health or child welfare funding streams but rather supported as children of Vermont.