The city of Baltimore has let down more than 2,500 foster children who are suffering without proper care, lawyers alleged this week in U.S. District Court in Baltimore.
“The way abused and neglected children needs have gone unmet in Baltimore is indefensible,” said Matthew Joseph, executive director of Advocates for Children and Youth.
Lawyers representing those foster children filed a motion for contempt in a 19-year-old order by a federal judge that ordered the city to provide better care.
The city has failed to do so, the lawyers said, citing the following:
» Almost 50 percent of foster children do not receive annual dental exams.
» More than 50 percent of children entering foster care do not get timely health assessments.
» More than 60 percent of foster children have not had a recent physical exam.
» The Department of Social Services continues to use an “illegal and unlicensed” office building as overnight housing because city and state officials have failed to create emergency foster homes.
» The number of foster homes in Baltimore has dropped by more than 55 percent during the past six years.
The city needs “a sweeping overhaul of how cases are handled, while making sure that the horrendous overuse of group care is curbed,” Joseph said in a statement.
Mitchell Mirviss, a lawyer who has been working on the case for more than 20 years, said city and state officials “have been unable ? or unwilling ? to take the necessary steps” to fix the problems.
Norris West, a spokesman for the city?s Department of Human Resources, which oversees social services, said many criticisms in the suit represent “a small portion of the foster care system.”
“It?s a picture that?s being painted of the past,” West said of the suit. “What?s happening right now points to a brighter future. We?re sorry that any child was mistreated in the foster care system. That?s why we?re working so hard to make sure those kinds of problems don?t exist.”
