Time to help foster parents

As I read through the scores of lovely notes, thrilled that Dickerson would soon be struggling a little less, I found myself wishing for something more.

Wouldn’t it be great if she didn’t need such generosity?

Dickerson and thousands of other foster parents in this state open their hearts and homes to give love and stability to kids whose parents won’t or can’t care for them. Some take in children broken by their short lives, or battling serious physical or mental illness. They sign up for constant scrutiny, opening their homes to social workers, school officials, and lawyers.

Most people who become foster parents have something a lot of us don’t: boundless, selfless kindness. Many of them put aside their own needs, dis- regarding what is easy or convenient or safe. They do it because they have a lot of love to give, or energy to burn, or more mothering or fathering to do.

They sure don’t do it for the money.

The state gives Dickerson less than $18 a day for each of the four children she has taken in and hopes to adopt. The reimbursement rate for foster parents of very ill children, who need constant medication and around the clock care, is about $100 a day, though half of that usually goes to the social service agencies supporting and monitoring the family.

Anybody who has kids knows $18 a day doesn’t come close to feeding, clothing, and housing them, let alone paying for sports, bowling, and making their birthdays special. And $50 a day to care for physically or emotionally challenged kids, especially when the foster parents who do it usually can’t work? That is nothing short of embarrassing.

Dickerson, like most foster parents, uses her own money to make up the deficit. And since she doesn’t exactly have buckets of cash lying around, that means she struggles.

It’s the same story all over the country. But a 2007 study by Children’s Rights, based in New York, found that 20 states do a better job than Massachusetts, where rates are 45 percent lower than they should be, according to Julie Farber, the study’s author. She said it costs about $900 a month, plus travel and childcare expenses, to care for a 9-year-old. Massachusetts reimburses foster parents for only about $600 of that.

Until 2004, when daily rates for most foster parents were hiked two dollars, there hadn’t been an increase since 1996.

There are 10,000 kids in the care of the Department of Children and Families. Some will return home. Many will not. The place for those kids is in a loving, stable home, not some cold, anonymous group setting.

We’re desperate for more foster families. This is no way to attract them.

For years, rightly outraged advocates have been pushing the state to bump up the financial support it gives foster parents. Analysts said an enhanced program would cost the state between $8 million and $12 million a year.

Finally, last year, a bill passed unanimously in the House and the Senate which cleared the way for rate increases.

Then the bottom fell out of the economy. In March, Governor Deval Patrick announced that he would use federal stimulus money to bump up the rates. Then things got worse, and the money went toward plugging his ever-widening budget gap.

At a recent hearing, the state insulted foster parents with physically and emotionally challenged children by offering them a raise of 94 cents a day. That doesn’t augur well for other foster parents.

Nobody on Beacon Hill is to blame for our crumbling finances. But there have been plenty of fat years between 1996 and now. And a lot of people who could have transformed the lives of foster families like Dickerson’s did nothing.

Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at abraham@globe.com.