No good deed goes unpunished for foster youth.
In the interest of good relations between the legislative and executive branches of our state government, I’ve attempted to give the outgoing Gregoire Administration and the incoming Inslee Administration some breathing room before resuming my public discussion of many of the serious systemic issues raised by our state’s weak IT oversight and other important operational challenges. I have, as you can imagine, continued my battles internally and quietly with varying degrees of success but I’ve tried to be a bit less vocal as the new governor has settled in.
As chair of the House Finance Committee I spend my time on large scale issues of budget, taxes, financial strategy and fiscal legislation. Occasionally, however, I am forcefully reminded why my frustration level regarding IT spending, executive agency operations and other issues rarely wanes.
And sometimes the public needs visibility into the inner workings of the inside game.
This summer and fall I worked with foster youth advocates to design legislation for 2013 to better connect schools, Children’s Administration, Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) and outside service and advocacy organizations such as Treehouse, Mockingbird Society, College Success Foundation and others to help more foster youth graduate high school. I approached the Children’s Administration for help early on by sending a first working draft of the bill to senior agency officials, but they choose not to engage or respond substantively to my proactive outreach. As the session progressed, I waited for a response to House Bill 1566.
Recently a ‘fiscal note’–a document prepared by agencies and the Office of Financial Management–reported a need for $150,000 to upgrade the Children’s Administration’s computer system in order to implement the legislation I drafted tracking and supporting the educational outcomes of foster youth.
As you can imagine, I looked closer.
The agency effectively uploads the data from excel, meaning that they are asking for $150,000 to make adjustments to the state system consisting of uploads of three to five additional columns of data. How is it even possible for a modest amount of incremental data from an excel spreadsheet uploaded to the state’s computer system to cost government $150,000? The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t, but the agencies are used to the IT portion of fiscal notes being approved without much technical rigor so its a good bucket to throw random costs in.
The Legislature is not required to fund every request in a fiscal note but it makes it more difficult to secure political support when your proposed legislation carries the perception of a large price tag.
And here our troubles began.
Another section of the bill–requiring schools to proactively meet with foster youth in an effort to more aggressively avoid drop outs (our current high school graduation rate is 46% for foster youth, up from 32% in 2003 but still far below the 76% graduation rate of traditional students)–was a total and complete disaster.
OSPI and OFM apparently decided that improved educational support (there are none today so improved is a generous term) for foster youth services is so new, untested and radical that my little bill should pay the entire cost of the existing institutional infrastructure of support services in schools and within the agency, so they wrote a fiscal note for the state’s 6,434 foster youth in school that sent an unmistakable message.
Here’s the actual language from the fiscal note: “Assuming “proactively support” means meeting with a dependent student weekly to assure the student doesn’t fall behind, and asssuming each meeting takes one-hour; the cost per student per year for meetings with one certificated staff would be approximately $2,700 (36 meetings * $76/hr = $2,733). There were 6,434 dependent students enrolled in public K-12 schools in 2011-12.”
I’ll do the math for you: $17,584,122. All for the adults. Not a penny for the kids in foster care.
According to OSPI, $17.5 million in new costs to local school districts to attempt to motivate our educational system and Children’s Administration to focus on improving the 46% high school graduation rate of foster youth. But the story behind the story is that the Gregoire Children’s Administration leadership opposed my policy vision that they should have a formal role in ensuring their kids graduate from high school. Their job, they argued, is health and safety not education.
Still, Democrat or Republican, urban or rural, government critic or defender, it’s hard not to shake your head in resentment at an institutional infrastructure of government that wants to get paid $17.5 million incremental dollars to do their day job. There are about 450 foster youth who age out of the system each year, so the actual number of students that need hands-on wrap around services is substantially smaller than the entire base of students in out-of-home care statewide.
Eventually the agencies redrafted the fiscal note partially downward, but I barely had time to get the bill out of the Appropriations Committee before a critical deadline due to the confusion it caused and the legitimate angst of fellow legislators wondering what I had hidden in the bill.
No matter how powerful, respected or influential you are as a legislator or a governor, when you promote new policies that the system doesn’t support, it has a way of sending signals respectfully suggesting you get back in line. I wonder how long it’s going to take Governor Inslee to discover this little secret.
For foster youth, no good deed seems to go unpunished.
We are so much more than what we’ve become.
Your partner in service,
Reuven.
Great post, Reuven. This is not the only example of the education system demanding additional payment for work they should already be doing. Think about the costs they are demanding to evaluate principals and teachers. And the hours and days of instruction they take from children for professional learning and other efforts they should be doing after the school day. The first casualty of any improvement is the student day and the taxpayers’ pocketbooks. Then, to pour salt in the wound, they tell the media their budgets have been cut when their budgets increase.
Reuven, look into student centered finance, also known as fair student funding. Creating a grant that follows the student to his school, less 5 percent for administrative overhead, would shift millions to the schools. Students with challenges get an extra allotment. Thirty large school districts across the nation are using this formula to give school principals control over the actual dollars in their budgets. Baltimore City schools, New York city schools, San Francisco, Oakland, and many others.
Thank you for your service, Reuven. My best to you and your family. Liv
Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE DROID
Official Reuven Carly
Reuven:
This appears to be the same kind of waste of resources that DES is pursuing on the Time, Leave and Attendance procurement. They claim they have a $10.9 million COP in the transportation budget to purchase a software “system.” That is just what their RFP that hit the street last week requires. Even though my client, ADP can fully (and probably exceed) the state’s technical and functional requirements, they are completely left out of even responding to the RFP. This is because the RFP repeatedly requires that state to “own” software and must purchase it directly from the software “manufacturer.” ADP could met these types of functional requirements in other states for just $1.5 million, but we are a hosted, SaaS model where the state would not own anything. What a waste! Can you get on them too? Zach will help. I talked to him about this too.
Dools
And don’t get me started on the waste in the federal programs I have been involved with, party to, unwittingly, but see so much opportunity for improvement and frustration with having to work with a bureaucratic system that rewards not the results, but appearance of a false appearance of acceptable work product. I applaud all your efforts and desire to figure out how to participate in the beneficial part of the program without contributing to the waste. Initially, I ignorantly contributed to the problem, but I can’t continue to participate in what I believe to be important initiatives, poorly managed. Hope you keep working till you’re 100.
Keep up the good fight. While working at DIS, one of my major complaints was the utter waste of money on state IT, and lack of audits. Much of the money that is spent on IT and the hundreds of millions spent on the state data center could have been spent on program for the poor, the sick, and other vulnerable groups such as foster children.
The state data center continues to plug along with Cisco firmly at the wheel guiding the design, hopefully CTS will be a little more vigilant than the state of West Virginia ( http://www.businessinsider.com/west-virginia-slams-cisco-2013-2 ) at least Cisco is jumping in with come refunds ( http://www.businessinsider.com/cisco-west-virginia-update-2013-3 )
Keep up the good fight. While working at DIS, one of my major complaints was the utter waste of money the state spent IT, and lack of audits. Much of the money that is spent on IT and the hundreds of millions spent on the state data center could have been spent on program for the poor, the sick, and other vulnerable groups such as foster children.
The state data center continues to plug along with Cisco firmly at the wheel guiding the design, hopefully CTS will be a little more vigilant than the state of West Virginia ( http://www.businessinsider.com/west-virginia-slams-cisco-2013-2 ) at least Cisco is jumping in with come refunds ( http://www.businessinsider.com/cisco-west-virginia-update-2013-3 )
Hi Reuven,
Helping foster youth is a necessary role for our society and for too long we have not met our obligation to this under served population. Your bill to improve graduation rates merits consideration and hopefully the intent will be adopted by everyone. But I don’t understand your dismissal of the need to fund staff for such a system. Teachers, counselors and principals all work as hard as they are able to help every single one of our students. To suggest otherwise is an insult to all educators. I agree that the education system should be better serving the foster youth population but as it is currently staffed and funded, there isn’t time or personnel for this to happen to the extent that our society should expect. Caseloads for school counselors is consistently over 450, our district has only one family advocate, teachers are being asked to add additional meetings to monitor and advocate for individual students and yet their class size hasn’t been reduced so they might have more time for each individual in their classroom. There is a built in assumption that schools already have all the personnel in place to help these foster students. We don’t and we are already being asked to do more than is possible in a day. It hurts me to know that there are under served students in every district and it embarrasses me that our society/government allows it to happen.
Clark Youmans, from your district.