Foster Care Costs to Society

Long-term costs of inaction

Mark Cohen, Ph.D., of the Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University, has calculated the potential benefits of “saving” a high-risk youth by estimating the lifetime costs associated with the typical career criminal, drug abuser, and high school dropout. The overall estimate of the “monetary value of saving a high-risk youth” is $1.7 to $2.3 million in 1997 dollars. This amount does not include the cost associated with the likelihood of the cycle repeating itself in future generations.

Foster care costs include special education costs, therapeutic foster care costs and costs of the child welfare system itself. Residential care for emotionally disturbed child abuse victims approximates $182,000 annually, per child. Eighty percent of foster care children have developmental, emotional, or behavioral problems.

Mentoring Works

Independent research completed by the Big Brothers and Big Sisters program, which focuses on single parent households, demonstrates that one-on-one mentoring works:

• 67% of children mentored improve school attendance
• 69% of children mentored improve grades
• 73% of children mentored stay out of trouble with the law
• 91% of children mentored have increased self-esteem

Even better results are coming from Friends of the Children (FOC) originating in Portland, Oregon, a program much more closely aligned with BEST Kids. FOC selects the most at-risk children in the fourth grade, uses paid mentors assigned to eight children, and keeps a mentor in the child’s life until he or she is 18 years old.

Evaluation is a key component of FOC’s program, including the use of independent third-party evaluators. In Portland, the first class of mentees are now 10th graders and they are outperforming their peer group of at-risk teens. These mentees were the children identified by their elementary school teachers as most likely to fail.

• 98% of all program children are in school
• 97% have passing grades
• 98% have never been incarcerated
• 97% do not use drugs or alcohol on a regular basis
• Fewer than 10% are involved in gang activity

BEST Kids Mentoring Program averages at least 10 hours a month of one-on-one mentoring and adds the following components to the FOC model:

• a regular peer group learning component
• extensive mentor training by mental health professionals
• focus on children identified as the most at-risk youth in the child welfare system
• periodic evaluations of each mentor-mentee match
• mentor coaching on individualized short- and long-term goals for each child

Return on Investment

How would you like to obtain a return of at least thirty-fold in your investment over ten years?

Based upon both our own and Dr. Cohen’s research, we believe that the cumulative cost of supporting a volunteer mentor in the life of a foster care child over ten years will (conservatively) save society 30 times that cost.

BEST Kids Mentoring Program’s Unique Approach is based upon early intervention with a well-trained, caring adult in a one-to-one long-term relationship. BEST Kids invests in our mentors (Mentor Support). Further, our distinct approach is to combine the long-term one-on-one relationship with a positive peer group program of life-skills learning.

We want to ensure BEST Kids Mentoring Program is making a difference. To evaluate progress, Dr. Chris Cox, a psychologist at the Kennedy Krieger Institute and Department of Neurology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, has developed a set of specific measurements to produce benchmarks and indicators to measure the program’s effectiveness.

We firmly believe that

• BEST Kids Mentoring Program is an investment in high-risk children to help them break the cycle of substance abuse, violence, and crime.
• BEST Kids Mentoring Program is a new way of looking at social spending – a movement away from spending billions on remedial education, rehabilitation, and incarceration (which has been proven to be ineffective at changing behavior, evidenced by relapse and recidivism rates) to spending millions on preventing negative behaviors through a solid program rooted in the latest and best social science research.
• BEST Kids Mentoring Program is a model that leverages the collaborative efforts of existing resources with the many adults who possess the willingness and the heart to make a difference in a vulnerable child’s life.

There are over 4,000 children in the District of Columbia’s Child Welfare System and over 500,000 in the System nationwide. Most of these children are headed toward lives of poverty or criminality. If we are unwilling to provide them with the appropriate imprinting in their childhood years, we will continue to spend more, generation after generation, both to protect ourselves and to punish them.

Please consider this request from BEST Kids to become a Donor or Volunteer in launching a positive and life-changing program for our community’s most vulnerable children.