Proposed Copeland children's home up for key Eagan vote tonight

6/4/02

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The Eagan City Council is set to vote tonight on a proposed children's home.

Mary Jo Copeland, founder of the Sharing and Caring Hands homeless shelter near downtown Minneapolis, is sponsoring the home.

Several other suburbs -- Brooklyn Center, Brooklyn Park, Victoria and, most recently, Chaska -- have rejected her proposed children's home, but Eagan Mayor Pat Awada has welcomed it.

The group home could house up to 200 children and would have a private school on the site.

On May 28, the Eagan Planning Commission decided to allow rezoning of more than 35 acres for the home. The 4-3 vote came after dozens of people from Eagan and Minneapolis tried to derail the project, citing environmental concerns and worry over the fate of children who they said would be taken from the community.

Copeland was requesting approval of a rezoning from agriculture to planned development and a preliminary planned development on property south of Lone Oak Rd. and north of Hwy. 55 bordering Inver Grove Heights.

Developers plan to build 22 two-story residential units to house up to 10 children and two to three adults each. There also would be a 95,000-square-foot school and community center, several playgrounds, sports fields and a pedestrian walkway.

[Valin]

And another view.

Children need homes, not orphanages
Richard Wexler

Published Jun 4, 2002

ALEXANDRIA, VA. -- No matter how many times they stand corrected, those who want to institutionalize 4-year-olds in Mary Jo Copeland's proposed orphanage in Eagan keep repeating the same misinformation -- in the apparent hope that endless repetition will drown out the facts. The children of Minnesota deserve better.

• No matter how many times orphanage proponents say there is a "need" for the institution, there isn't.

Backers argue that the orphanage is needed because children in foster care bounce from foster home to foster home. But the data they use to support this claim are national data. In Minnesota in the year 2000, more than 87 percent of children in foster care had been in only one foster home.

Orphanage proponents may claim it should be used for the other 13 percent, sometimes called "permanency youth." But the vast majority of these are older children with behavior problems. Orphanage backers have said repeatedly that the welcome mat is not out for these children. If Copeland really is targeting "permanency youth" who bounce from home to home, she will have to fill her institution with 200 angry teenagers. If she won't take such teenagers, then she cannot serve "permanency youth." She will have to persuade counties to send her children who easily could be placed in good, stable foster homes instead.

• No matter how many times orphanage proponents say the institution will provide "stability," it won't.

If all a child needed for stability were bricks and mortar, a jail would be a perfect placement. Stability means the human beings in a child's life don't keep changing. But institutional house parents rarely stay more than a year or two. If orphanage backers really do persuade counties to send younger children without behavior problems to this facility, those children are likely to find less stability than they have now.

• No matter how many times orphanage proponents say the institution will keep siblings together, it won't.

Proponents claim that only 25 percent of sibling groups stay together in foster care. They don't say where that figure comes from -- but it's not Minnesota. In Hennepin County, for example, two-thirds of sibling groups already stay together. And in many of the remaining cases, siblings are separate because one has run away or is in jail. Or it's because close relatives have taken the children into more than one home.

Once again, the sibling groups that tend to be separated are the older children with behavior problems. How will the proposed orphanage keep a well-behaved 10-year-old with a 15-year-old sibling who has behavior problems? It won't. The older sibling will not be welcome.

The orphanage plans call for 10 children in each residential unit. Once you combine more than one family, you have to be very careful about mixing age groups. And you can't put boys and girls in the same house. Sibling groups of 10 are rare. Two groups of quintuplets, all of the same gender, are rarer still. Most sibling groups won't be able to live together.

• No matter how many times proponents invoke the name of Boys Town, this isn't Boys Town.

Copeland has said Boys Town will train the staff. But how will the staff respond when the trainers ask: "Why are you keeping 10 children in a unit, when we only house six to eight?" What will the staff say when the Boys Town trainers ask: "Why are you housing 4-year-olds? We almost never take children younger than age 9."

• No matter how many times orphanage proponents say it's like a boarding school, it's not.

Children attend boarding schools as a result of a voluntary choice by their parents. If the child is abused, or if anything else goes wrong, the parent can take the child right back out again. That parents actually fund a boarding school through tuition, and often are present on campus, helps keep the boarding school safe.

Places like the Milton Hershey School, often cited by orphanage proponents, don't even take foster children. Others, like Girard College, close during normal school-year vacations -- when the children go home.

In contrast, children are forced into orphanages. If they are abused or neglected or otherwise harmed, they are at the mercy of the orphanage administration and the authorities who put them there. Their parents can do nothing to help them.

• No matter how many times orphanage proponents imply that there is no taxpayer cost, there is.

Donations may pay for the $30 million construction cost, but Copeland's own newsletter says half the operating costs are to come from "fees." Those costs are likely to run to at least $5 million per year. The fees will come from the governments placing children in the orphanage -- in other words, tax dollars.

There are, in fact, some very serious problems in the Minnesota foster care system. But these problems argue for less use of institutions -- and less use of foster care -- not more.

No one would argue that Minnesota is the child abuse capital of America. But new federal data indicate that in 1999 a child was more likely to be taken from his or her home and placed in foster care in Minnesota than in any other state. The rate of removal in Minnesota was more than 80 percent above the national average. Minnesota also led the nation in the proportion of black children taken from their parents. Nearly four out of every 100 black children were taken away in 1999 alone.

So we should be especially concerned when Copeland proposes to institutionalize minority children while expressing no interest in even trying to help them maintain ties to their culture. According to Copeland: "Culture has nothing to do with it."

Furthermore, of all the children in foster care in 2000, 27 percent were returned home within 30 days, raising serious questions about whether they needed to be taken from their parents at all.

In other words, Minnesota is taking away a lot of children -- especially black children -- from parents who do not fit the stereotype of the brutal abuser or the hopeless addict. These children could safely have remained in their own homes had the right services been provided.

Thirty million dollars could go a long way toward providing those services. For that kind of money you could build hundreds of units of affordable housing, which could reduce the number of children taken from families because they lack a decent place to live. Add the $5 million per year it would cost to run the orphanage and you could instead provide an entire network of safe, humane, easily accessible family support and family preservation programs, right in the communities most foster children come from.

So why throw the money away institutionalizing 4-year-olds?

Eagan Mayor Pat Awada offers a curious answer: She says she knows orphanages are a good idea, because the two children she adopted got good care in the orphanage where they were living in Bulgaria.

But it wasn't good enough. Obviously, Awada knew that, because she didn't leave the children there. Instead, she generously opened her own home and her own heart to them. She understood that these white children from Bulgaria needed a real home with a real family. Black children from Minnesota deserve no less.

-- Richard Wexler is executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.

© Copyright 2002 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.

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A completely selfserving bump.