How One Judge Almost Eliminated Foster Care Simply by Applying the Law – A National Model?

The Washington Post recently featured a judge out of Louisiana, Judge Ernestine S. Gray, who has reportedly "reduced foster care numbers to levels unmatched anywhere in the country" in Orleans Parish. Richard A. Webster, writing for the Post, reports: Between 2011 and 2017, the number of children in foster care here fell by 89 percent compared with an 8 percent increase nationally. New Orleans children who do enter the system don’t stay long. Seventy percent are discharged within a month; nationally, it’s only 5 percent. Gray has effectively all but eliminated foster care except in extreme situations, quickly returning children flagged by social workers to their families or other relatives. “We shouldn’t be taking kids away from their parents because they don’t have food or a refrigerator,” she said in explaining her philosophy. “I grew up in a poor family in South Carolina, and we didn’t have a lot. But what I had was people who cared about me.” The greatest threat of harm for most of the children who appear before her, she stresses, is being unnecessarily removed from their families. “Foster care is put up as this thing that is going to save kids, but kids die in foster care, kids get sick in foster care,” she said. “So we ought to be trying to figure out how to use that as little as possible. People have a right to raise their children.”