NYC child welfare agencies prepare for hard times ahead

As federal stimulus funds dry up, New York City's child welfare agencies are bracing for what could be the toughest year in recent memory.

"I have never seen the type of budget year we are all going to see next year and I've been at this for 29 years," said Bill Baccaglini, director of the New York Foundling, a foster-care agency where parents can leave their children for up to three weeks.

Both city and state governments face crippling deficits of 2 and 9 billion U.S. dollars, respectively. The first to go on the chopping block are almost always social welfare services like those that prevent abuse and protect children.

After the city announces its 2010-2011 fiscal budget in April and the state does the same in June, Baccaglini estimates that Foundling will lose six percent of its budget.

"For the budget next year, the dye has been cast and it is not pretty," he told Xinhua. "We're now going to see the city and the state pull back on the money they give us to support these families and we are going to be able to support considerably fewer of them."

Baccaglini and Stephanie Gendell, the associate director of Policy and Public Affairs for Citizens' Committee for Children of New York, told Xinhua that they wouldn't be surprised to see several agencies shut down over the next two years.

"We're just at the start of agency closures," Gendell said. " The stimulus funds really protected us last year in the way that we don't have anything like that coming in now."

DOUBLE WHAMMY

Baccaglini called the economic recession "a double whammy" for American families. They face unemployment and they are less likely to find support from welfare agencies whose own budgets will be cut.

Requests for beds at Foundling have increased by 22 percent in the last year, he said.

Ralph Dumont is the director of the NYC grassroots agency Lower East Side Family Union (LESFU), which works with distressed families who are in danger of having their children placed in foster care.

Unlike the Foundling, which has a sizable endowment, LESFU's ability to survive depends almost 100 percent on contracts from the city.

Dumont told Xinhua that LESFU, while it has managed to survive in the past, is on the brink of remaining viable.

"The shrinking of the system will take place but there will continue to be an expectation for the system to service the same number of families," he said, "or more."

Experts have voiced concern that higher levels of unemployment increase the chance for child abuse or neglect.

"Children with unemployed parents had two to three times higher rates of neglect than those with employed parents," said a federal study released last month.

The authors, who found a 26-percent decrease in the incidence of child abuse and neglect between 1994 and 2006, cautioned that their research ended before the economic recession hit.

They noted that children from low-income families were three times more likely to be abused and with today's unemployment rate at nearly 10 percent, child advocates have even more reasons to be concerned.

Source: Xinhua