Director Martin: To Save Children, Save Their Families

The most cost-effective and humane way to save Arkansas children is to direct recuperative forces toward families before they spiral into crisis.

“So many people in our community are all about saving the kids. But they forget that if you really want to save the kids, you’ve got to save the family,” says Mischa Martin, the six-year director of the Arkansas Department of Children and Family Services.

“We are tasked at DCFS with protecting children in our communities, and we’re not miracle workers; we’re doing the best that we can do to try and assess a situation and keep a child safe,” Martin says.

“Sometimes the community thinks, well, you just placed a child in foster care and that’s a miracle solution – but foster care comes with its significant challenges and it causes trauma. Just the removal process, placing a child in foster care, causes trauma which can have long-lasting effects on that child’s health, mental health, their social and workforce outcomes.

“So we don’t just want to prevent foster care; we want to work with families to help them get back on a path of strength and stability, and prevent any future maltreatment.”

A shift toward preventative care began in Arkansas about 2015, and well-positioned the state for passage of the 2018 Family First Prevention Services Act, landmark federal legislation providing funds for prevention and emphasizing the importance of children growing up within their families and avoiding the trauma of entering foster care.

Arkansas was the first state to implement Family First, going live and receiving funding in October 2019.

“The system before had been set up to focus on foster care, including through our funding structures. In 2015-16, we started those conversations about how do we build a child welfare system that doesn’t just focus on foster care but focuses on getting upstream and keeping kids safely with their families. What services and supports need to happen? At the time, only about 17 percent of children in foster care were placed with relatives. Today, 40 percent of kids come into care with either a relative or fictive kin,” Martin says.

More than 7,000 children are in foster care in Arkansas each year. Yet the department also serves about 14,000 children under Protective Services cases, which are responses to allegations of abuse or neglect. Workers visit the homes and offer services such as for substance abuse, mental health and parenting, depending on the families’ needs.

With these cases, the preventative approach can shine. “And when I say prevention, I mean really offering services and support to the families before crisis,” she says.

Prior to the pandemic, DCFS was steamrolling ahead with impactful changes, Martin says, but what concerns her the most now are significant workforce challenges.

“We have had such significant turnover related to the pandemic and the work that we do; the work moving forward has to continue to focus on how to build a strong workforce – not just hire, but now we have a whole bunch of new people who need institutional knowledge.

“There is a lot of work that happens in working with families that you can’t teach in a book, that you have to learn in the field working with families, and that’s going to take a little time. But we need to figure out how to keep the staff, so that we can get them experienced. If we truly want great outcomes for our children and families, we have to have a strong workforce that is stable, that has institutional knowledge. Not just book knowledge, but knowledge of working in the community and working directly with families. You can’t teach wisdom, right? It comes with time.”

The human aspect of working with broken families is emotionally tolling, she says, particularly with the erratic nature of substance abuse, a factor for more than half of the children entering foster care.

“It’s the most significant factor of kids in care,” she says. “It destroys families. As a society, we need to figure out how we get these people on the right paths.”

Removing children to punish a parent is never the right motive, she says.

“It is super frustrating to me when adults think that foster parenting should be a punishment tool for parents. Because while they stand on their soapbox about helping kids, that type of mentality does nothing but hurt kids.”

She favors helping families navigate the intricacies of rebuilding their lives.

“Even if you get clean, you’ve got to get all this other stuff together: healthcare, criminal fines, education, workforce. I love going to the 100 Families office; you can see how they’re working on the education piece, the workforce piece, how they’re doing case management: how do you get your driver’s license back, how do you take care of your fines, how do you do a Medicaid application? The list goes on and on of all a parent has to do to get back on the right path – even if they got clean!”

To effect true healing for Arkansas families, a commitment is vital from business leaders, churches, nonprofits and the public at large – not just government entities.

“I think that there’s a lot of people in government with big hearts that want to make a difference, but to make a community difference the community has to come together.”