The Storm Over Orphanages

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

adoption" -- but not with the cash that might keep mother and child together. Orphanages were not the subject of Gingrich's speech, but they were not a throwaway either. The notion reappeared in the Republican welfare-reform bill (with the inflammatory word orphanages changed to "children's homes"), which is a basis for Gingrich's famous "Contract with America."

It was not a smart move. The news media were quick to note the orphanage proposal's obvious incompatibility with "family values." Hillary Clinton told a New York audience last week that the "idea of putting children into orphanages because their mothers couldn't find jobs" was "unbelievable and absurd." Eager to be seen as the way of the future, the Newtonians found themselves tarred with images of the distant, Dickensian past.

Many Republicans were loath even to repeat the dread word. So it was left to a lowly House staff member who handles welfare policy for the Republican conference to deliver its likely epitaph. Were Republican lawmakers serious about the orphanage option? "If they were, they have buttoned their lips. This thing has been mercilessly crucified," he says. "I would not be surprised if they strike the provision from the bill, because it's given us so much grief."

Nearly everyone agrees that illegitimacy and teen pregnancy are key elements in poverty's vicious cycle and that the government should try to reduce them. Gingrich's orphanage proposal, however, seems punitive -- not to mention odd, coming from a man who was born to a 16-year-old mother eight months after she left his abusive father. It would violate federal law, which mandates family- based care over institutions, and ignore the public policy consensus -- first expressed by the Teddy Roosevelt White House -- that "no child should be deprived of his family by reason of poverty alone."

It would also be a budget buster. According to an analysis done for TIME by the Child Welfare League of America, the annual welfare cost of one child living with his or her mother is $2,644. The same child living with a foster family costs the public $4,800 a year. The average cost for the child's care in "residential group care," today's closest approximation of an orphanage, is $36,500. If even a quarter of an estimated 1 million children who would be cut loose under Gingrich's plan ended up in orphanages, the additional cost to & the public would be more than $8 billion.

That said, however, Gingrich perhaps inadvertently stumbled into a contentious ongoing debate among child-welfare experts about "congregate care." The wrangle is not about whether half a million mothers who may love their children should be forced to give them up to institutions. It is about the half a million children already in the system, whose parents are either dead or have proved themselves abusive or negligent, and whether orphanages should be used to supplement foster placements that don't work out. "Orphanages" proper have been out of vogue for so long that it is hard today to locate a building with "orphanage" in its name. However, a small but growing number of social scientists and social-welfare professionals has been advocating their return. And in so doing, they have broached a disturbing question: Have America's attempts to find families for its abandoned and damaged children failed so badly that some institutionalization looks good?

"Jason," a thin eight-year-old, cracks his knuckles as he tries to explain how he ended up at a place called Hollygrove. "It was time for me to go," he says. "I wasn't being bad or nothing, it was time for me to go."

The places he had to leave were foster homes. He liked two of them because "they had a lot of bugs, and I like to catch bugs." Some of his foster parents were nice and some were mean: "They pinched me, or they would spank me." It is impossible for a visitor to tell what really went wrong, and who, if anyone, was "bad." But someone is listening carefully to Jason now. "It's good here because you get to talk to your social worker about stuff that's private," he explains. "You talk about things you miss, or things you want to do."

Hollygrove is filled with kids like Jason. "It's not uncommon to see a seven-year-old who has come in with four failures," says assistant director Bob Morgan. In Hollygrove's seven houses, occupying most of a block in a faded neighborhood of Los Angeles, 54 children are taking a rest from what have thus far been taxing lives. Each house has three "child-care counselors"; there are six full-time social workers, a 24-hour clinic and a visiting psychiatrist. Behavior modification is mild: the kids receive ratings on a point system that is linked to privileges.

Hollygrove is not an orphanage. It is something called a residential- treatmen t center, a phenomenon very much of the current century. The last ! time orphanages were seen as a cutting-edge reform was in the 1820s: they removed destitute children from almshouses, into which they had been packed with adult paupers of all descriptions. But when researchers publicized the stunting effects of institutional life, group care gave way to welfare programs that allowed children who were simply poor to remain with their mothers. Children who were "parentless" owing to abuse or neglect or death were remanded into a new system, foster care. By 1980 the Federal Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act had codified the general expert consensus: families were almost always preferable to institutions. Any stay in an institution must be as brief as possible and aimed at reuniting the child with a family -- biological, foster or adopted.

Around this mandate grew a loose spectrum of care. The first stop for the children was a foster family. Sometimes adoption followed, but often it did not, in large part because of an official disinclination to terminate parents' rights. Most of the children stayed in foster care, sometimes bouncing from one family to another until they were pronounced "failures." Only then were they sent to group residential programs or -- for more troubled children -- facilities like Hollygrove. In accordance with the act, children were intended to stay at residential-treatment centers no more than two years. After that, "stabilized" kids were put back into the foster-care system; those still obviously asocial went to small "group homes" with psychiatric supervision.

The progression was always a bit jury-rigged. But in the 1980s it imploded, leaving massive carnage. The crack epidemic unleashed a new tide of kids on overburdened social-service agencies. Beleaguered child-welfare workers juggled huge case loads, and soon the newspapers were filled with horror stories not only about failures to remove children from dangerous homes but also about abuse in foster families and kids who bounced almost unnoticed from one inappropriate foster-care experience to the next. A report commissioned by the Reagan Administration in the late '80s concluded: "Foster care is intended to protect children from neglect and abuse at the hands of parents and other family members, yet all too often it becomes an equally cruel form of neglect and abuse by the state."

A new category of "extraordinary-needs children" was invented and quickly overpopulated by children drug addicted at birth, sexually abused at an early age or impaired by fetal alcohol syndrome. Many were doomed to fail in foster care. Annette Baran, 67, a psychotherapist and adoption expert, recalls, "In 1945, when the Holocaust children began arriving from Europe, everyone was dying to rescue them. But these kids could not be in nuclear families. They were so traumatized they couldn't trust. They couldn't be vulnerable. This is true of today's kids."

The system buckled, especially in the big cities. In some places the small group homes that absorbed the most troubled kids were themselves rife with drugs, violence and sexual abuse. Recalls 19-year-old Kenyetta Ivy, a survivor of nine New York group homes: "There were rats in the stove. I know some girls who tried to commit suicide, and the staff wouldn't even check on them." A traumatized child-care community launched the debate that continues today. Some championed earlier and more extended placement of damaged children in residential treatment, maintaining that institutional permanency was far preferable to a nightmare sequence of foster-care failure after foster-care failure. Says Sarah Breding, Hollygrove's director of social work: "These kids learned through their birth families that adults are going to hurt them. And a foster home is itself a really emotionally charged situation. But they can be successful in residential care." Others argued that foster care had been fairly effective until the '80s onslaught -- and could be made so again. "The foster family is the solution to our problems," says Joe Kroll of the North American Council on Adoptable Children. "Professionalize it, support it, compensate it. The costs of foster care would go up, but they would still be far less than the costs of institutions." Awarding foster- parent status -- and financial support -- to a child's relatives became a new focus.

Then in 1988 a retired senior trial judge in Philadelphia named Lois Forer published a heartfelt article in the Washington Monthly about children she hadn't been able to save. There was April, age 10 her molesting stepfather had been jailed, but she was forced to continue living with her retarded mother and her alcoholic grandfather because, wrote Forer, "it was the policy . . . to keep the family together." Also Tyrone, 8, whose father, a boxing trainer, had beaten him so badly for wetting his bed that he bore 70 permanent scars: "No agency would even attempt to find placement for Tyrone; the family should be kept together."

In summation, the judge declared, "For at least the past quarter-century, Americans have been captivated by two concepts that have become accepted public policy: deinstitutionalization and preservation of the family. Both are worthy goals pursued to unworthy ends. I suggest that it is time for us to demand that government provide permanent, well-run orphanages for the more than 2 million abused children who are de facto orphans."

Forer's modest proposal drew support from a few child-welfare experts like Joyce Ladner, now acting president of Howard University, and from such conservative social theorists as Charles Murray and James Q. Wilson. "Not all families are worth preserving," Wilson wrote. "And . . . foster care has its own problems. We don't know as much as we should about how well institutional care might function under contemporary conditions." (To which Murray added, "Think of it as 24-hour day care.")

But it was only in 1993 that a whole state, Illinois, began considering orphanages on a practical level. Between 1986 and 1994, the number of children in the Chicago area's substitute-care system skyrocketed from 8,000 to 36,000. The public faces of this catastrophe appeared in 1993, when a toddler named Joseph Wallace was returned from foster care to his mother, who hanged him with an electrical cord; and again last February, when 19 children were discovered living in squalor in a North Keystone Avenue apartment.

Such incidents supercharged a campaign by state senator Judy Baar Topinka, who was recently elected state treasurer. "I've lost my patience," she declared in July. "I want to act now. Act yesterday. Kids are being killed, tortured, starved, abandoned." She adds now, "Illinois will have orphanages. It's just a question of what form they will take." Both Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, a Democrat, and Illinois Governor Jim Edgar, a Republican, are on board. But perhaps most vociferous on the subject has been Cook County public guardian Patrick Murphy, whose father spent three years in an orphanage. "Foster care cannot handle adolescent kids," maintains Murphy. "What residential care provides is consistency." Consistency is a function of duration-of-stay, however, and proponents await a commission report due out at the end of this month to suggest whether Illinois may actually defy the family-first paradigm and invest more in institutions that do what orphanages once did: hold on to children for five, 10, even 15 years.

Informally, in dozens of residential-treatment facilities around the country, some of this occurs in any case. David Tribble, head of the Bethesda Home for Boys outside Savannah, Georgia, insists, "We're not an orphanage. That's not what we do." Yet at least one child lived at Bethesda for 14 years, and stays of four or five years are not uncommon there and at similar institutions around the country. The trend's most adventurous examples are, coincidentally or not, in Illinois. Hephzibah Children's Association, named after a biblical benefactor, operates a small facility funded by the mostly well-to-do citizens of Oak Park; it accommodates children ages 3 to 11 for however long it takes them to be adopted, thus sparing them the foster-care shuffle. Even more unusual, it allows them to veto adoptive parents they don't like. "They stay here until they find a place they are comfortable with," says executive director Mary Anne Brown.

The average length of stay at Mooseheart, near the city of Aurora, is six years. Run by the Loyal Order of Moose and financed mostly through charity, the institution currently houses 230 children, from infancy to age 18, in 24 houses. Mooseheart, where all placements are made on a voluntary basis, will give a child back to his or her biological parents or legal guardians on request. But Rose Haggerty, its director of student services, states firmly, "We don't try to reunite families. We don't mean to usurp biology, but we promote the idea that the child is growing here."

An even more interesting enterprise is 35 miles southwest of Chicago. The SOS Children's Village in rural Lockport contradicts standard protocol in any number of ways. For one, SOS accepts, or rather seeks, sibling groups, which are difficult to place in foster care. It looks for children 10 and younger -- an age at which most states believe children should still be trying to fit into foster homes. And it does so with the goal of long-term residency that replicates -- and replaces -- family life. "We are a source of frustration for the Department of Children and Family Services," says Village director Bill Mathis. "They would like us to have a more open policy and offer short- term emergency placements. We felt that if we started that, we would be locked into it."

One of the reasons Mathis may sound so sure of his unorthodox arrangement is that the SOS Village, and a sister operation in Florida, are part of a mammoth chain based in Innsbruck, Austria. Founded in 1949 for war orphans, SOS- Kinderdorf International, now established in 124 countries, cares for a total of 180,000 children. In each "village," the concept is the same: long- term residency and house mothers who commit to 20 years with the project.

So far, the Lockport SOS Village has assembled only 10 of a projected population of 60 children. In one house, Toni Wagner, a Franciscan nun from Dubuque, Iowa, cares for an abandoned family of five siblings, who are white. Michele Haldeman, the "mother" next door, oversees five children, all black, from three different families. The two "families" mix happily in the common yard.

One of the most troubling unresolved issues about "congregate care" is its psychological effect. Doctors familiar with children adopted from foreign orphanages have noted delayed cognitive development, an inability to form emotional attachments and alienation. But not everyone shares that view. Richard Hoover, who met his wife Darlene 40 years ago at the Tressler Orphans Home in Loysville, Pennsylvania, says, "I really feel it was the best place to grow up. Though you had no parents, you had no worries. You always had someone to look after you."

And Jennifer Butler, 19, a graduate of Wayside Union Academy who spent two years in short-term group homes before being placed in the Marlborough, Massachusetts, treatment center, says, "I'm so glad I got help. A lot of kids say, 'They stole my teenage years from me.' But I would rather be a normal adult than a normal teenager. A lot of teens see 'normal' as having a mom, dad, brother, sister and a dog. But 9 times out of 10, that doesn't become reality, just a fantasy."

Cost alone ensures that the U.S. will not institute congregate care for children on a large scale -- quite aside from the abysmal record of most state-run residential-care facilities. "Whatever the abuses in foster care -- and there are many -- there is absolutely no reason to believe that equal, if not worse, abuse won't occur behind the walls," says David Rothman, a professor of social medicine at Columbia. "The difference will be that nobody will hear the screams." Even at well-regarded private institutions such as Mooseheart, four house parents were arrested and convicted of sexually molesting about a dozen children between 1988 and 1992.

Nevertheless, it may be time to admit that in the case of some subset of the system's children, the American foster family in its current, underfunded state cannot answer their needs. Even Americans appalled by the hard-line rhetoric out of Washington may find themselves supporting further experiments with long-term residential care, whether the word orphanage is attached to them or not. "Steve's" mother gave him up, but she did so only because she was dying of cancer. When he was eight, she sent him to the Bethesda Home, a 50-child establishment on the banks of Savannah's Moon River, which was erected on the site of an orphanage by the same name founded in 1740. The grounds are dotted with live oaks, a herd of cattle roams its own 100-acre pasture, and there is an Olympic-size pool. But there are also intensive instruction in Christian values, psychological counseling and a grueling "total restriction" discipline program that most residents care to experience only once. The home has paid Steve's tuition at a private school in Atlanta and will fund his college education. Because of the circumstances of his arrival, Steve has never been in a foster home, and he has never rotated out -- he has spent 10 years at Bethesda. "I've been through four sets of cottage parents," he says, "and I learned something from all of them." Steve has noticed that people who have spent their whole life with a real family don't understand the place, and "some boys say it's a prison and don't like it," he says. "But ((to me)), it's home away from home. There are people who want to see you make it through thick and thin. I kind of think growing up at Bethesda is going to help me a lot."

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington, Wendy Cole/Chicago, Jenifer Mattos/New York, Sylvester Monroe/Atlanta and James Willwerth/Los Angeles suggested in a speech that unwed teenage mothers should be denied welfare. If they could not support their children, America sh