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 on 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 trouble with the law
• 91% of children mentored increase self-esteem

Even better results are coming out of Friends of the Children (FOC) originating in Portland, Oregon, a program much more closely aligned with the BEST Kids(need trademark) Mentoring Program. 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 is 18 years old. FOC's first class of children are now 10th graders.  

FOC reports:

Evaluation is a key component of our program, including the use of independent third-party evaluators. In Portland, our children are now 10th graders and they are outperforming their peer group of at-risk teens. These 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

The 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
• mentors given extensive training by mental health professionals.
• focus exclusively is on children identified as the most at-risk--foster care children.
• evaluates children upon in-take and annually by mental health professionals. Provides feedback to the mentors which also helps to individualize 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?

We believe the cumulative costs of supporting a volunteer mentor in the life of a foster care child over ten years can conservatively save society 30 times its costs.

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 BEST Kids™ Mentoring Program’s effectiveness.

We firmly believe that

• BEST Kids™ Mentoring Program is an investment in high-risk children to prevent them from following their parents and siblings into lives of poverty, 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 rate) 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 3,000 children in the District of Columbia's foster care system--over 500,000 are in the Abuse and Neglect System nationwide--most of whom are destined for 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.