“Families not fees”: Dr. Jill Berrick’s fight against foster care collections

In the United States, around half of children in foster care ultimately reunite with a parent or primary caregiver. Yet while their children are in care, these parents often receive an unexpected bill for the foster care. Each year, states collect over $75 million from parents to cover their children’s foster care. 

Dr. Jill Duerr Berrick (pictured), Distinguished Professor and the Zellerbach Family Foundation Professor of Social Welfare, spent her recent sabbatical researching these little-known, but often devastating, laws.

What inspired you to take on this work?

In 2008, I was working on a book called Take Me Home about families impacted by our foster care system. I followed up with five different women who were in earlier studies of mine; they were all moms whose children were previously placed in foster care. 

I was conducting an interview in the living room of one of these women who excused herself to retrieve the mail. She returned with an envelope from the state of California, opened it, and started to cry. I asked, “What’s this?” and she said, “This is the bill from when my kids were in foster care.” 

It was a bill for close to $20,000. 

I’ve been doing research on kids and foster care my entire career, and I had no idea that the state charged families for their children’s foster care. 

As recently as 2022, California was collecting about $17 million annually in these fees. 

These collections force low-income parents to make impossible choices. For example, should they pay for PG&E or foster care? 

If parents pay the electric bill, they face astonishingly high interest rates on their foster care debt. And, when parents choose other obligations instead of the foster care bill, their kids end up staying in foster care for an average of six and a half months longer. Plus, there are hardly any links between the amount a parent has to pay and their income. For instance, a parent with an annual income of $36,000 may be on the hook for a $900 monthly bill.  

Over ten years after meeting with that mom, an MSW student in my child welfare policy class wanted to know: What was I doing about this issue if I was teaching her how to be a policy advocate? That student propelled me into action, because I wanted to make the changes I’d been teaching about. 

Source: Graphic from Families Not Fees; data derived from the Office of Child Support Enforcement (2022). “FY2022” covers the federal fiscal year, October 1, 2021 - September 30, 2022.

Where did you begin? How did you involve students and alumni in this advocacy work?

I began diving into our legislative process. Who drafts a bill? Who is the best sponsor for a bill? How do we get around these onerous federal regulations? 

I soon realized that working in child welfare for thirty years had given me all the contacts I could possibly need in California. My sabbatical started in January, 2022 and I started making phone calls. I activated my network of over one hundred people; they, in turn, made phone calls and wrote letters. 

I’ve reached out to many past graduate students who have helped to elevate this issue in various states. Melissa Jonson-Reid, a former PhD student and now a Professor of Social Work Research at Washington University introduced me to the child welfare director in Missouri, which created a context for policy reform in that state. Colleen Henry, who earned her MSW and PhD at Berkeley and is now an Associate Professor at Hunter’s Silberman School of Social Work, and Cassie Walter, an MSW student who interned at Just Advocates, collaborated on this op-ed for our efforts in New York in The Buffalo News.Celine To, who is earning their MSW and MPH, worked on this op-ed in the Albany Times Union. And Cassandra Simmel, Associate Professor at Rutgers and former Berkeley doctoral student, helped to pen an op-ed for the New Jersey Monitor to support our efforts in that state.

Vasiliki Marca and Max Abubucker are two fabulous undergraduate students who helped develop our website, Families Not Fees, designed to highlight policy progress across the states. 

“I chose to pursue an MSW at the School of Social Welfare after working at a public defender's office representing parents with child neglect and abuse cases in family court in NYC. I saw firsthand how parents are punished for the effects of living in poverty, and am inspired to work in social welfare reform to prevent future families from having child welfare involvement. My work with Just Advocates, and specifically Professor Berrick, is centered around legislative reform advocacy to end punitive policies that keep children in care longer and push families deeper into poverty.”

-Cassie Walter, MSW candidate

"Social workers hold profound power for systems change. A social worker can be so many things: a therapist, a case manager, a program developer, or a policy advocate. We provide services that keep our communities and societies intact by supporting the most vulnerable in communities. Our knowledge is power and it is up to us to wield our collective power to advocate for better institutions of care and policies by reimagining how social welfare can service our clients." 

-Celine To, MSW and MPH candidate

When you brought up that these fees harm families, how did lawmakers and agency administrators react?

Overwhelmingly, only child support collections staff even know these fees exist. The collections process has been automated in many states, so it’s invisible. In some California counties, where child welfare administrators thought the practice had long ago ceased, they were surprised to learn that parents were paying these fees. Even parents’ lawyers may not know about these collections, because the collections process happens in a different courtroom. 

How did you determine which states to focus on?

In July, 2022, the Biden administration released guidance offering a new interpretation of the federal law relating to child support collection and foster care. The guidance urged states to review their policies and to narrow the circumstances under which states would collect these fees from parents. States like Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Nevada, New Mexico, Rhode Island, and Vermont had already taken administrative steps to sharply curtail the practice. I have since focused my efforts on the states with the most aggressive practices that extract the largest amounts of money from parents. This spanned both liberal and conservative states. But thankfully, I found proponents of eliminating fees on both sides of the aisle.

Representative Terry Moore from Montana—which has a Republican governor and state legislature—introduced a bill to eliminate the collection of fees in January, 2023. He pushed it through the legislature in three months and got the governor to sign it. When I called him from blue Berkeley, Representative Moore introduced himself as the “most conservative person you’ve ever met.”  

Representative Moore shared that a constituent contacted him and told him that something was upside-down with how Montana expected payments from these parents. He explained his reasoning in pushing to eliminate the fees: “Paying the government distracts parents from what they need to do. I want you to show me that you’re a safe parent, that your eyes are on your kid, that your kid is your first and only priority.” Legislators from both sides of the aisle generally agree with Moore’s views on this issue.

What advice do you have for other academics, alumni, and students who want to leverage research to inform policy?

• Networks matter. Hold on to all of your connections—life is long, and the people we meet may be important to your cause at some point, decades later. Part of what has kept me doing this work is that I love having conversations with such generous, kind, warm-hearted people who want to make a difference for kids and families. I contacted people I met briefly, years ago at a conference: Because we shared a moment then, they would let me in for a twenty minute conversation. Through their connections, my network exploded exponentially. 

• Policy-making shouldn’t be this hard, but it is. American democracy is a slow-moving train. I’ve been teaching about that for thirty years and now I’ve seen it firsthand. Sometimes there are wins; sometimes we need to wait until next year and try again. 

• Incrementalism gets you somewhere. Child welfare has revolutionized; it isn’t what any of us want, yet, but it’s much better than it was thirty-five years ago when I started my career. We may get a partial win, we may move things forward piece-by-piece, but in the long-run, things get much better. 

What have been the results of this advocacy? What’s ahead?

My work on this topic began in California, where Assembly Member Isaac Bryan introduced a bill that eliminated future foster care fees for parents. Governor Newsom signed it into law in September, 2022, and it was implemented in January, 2023.

I worked with Assemblymember Bryan on a second bill in 2023 that would forgive parents’ existing debt. The bill stalled, but California’s child support agency leveraged its legal processes to forgive the debts without going through the legislature. That effort went into effect in summer, 2023.

Several states—including Colorado, Michigan, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon and Washington—have since taken action to stop state child support collections. My students and I are currently engaged in supporting the legislative process in New Jersey and New York, where there are bills pending to do the same. 

Despite that progress, I’m not sure if the tide is turning. Sometimes it’s seen as too administratively cumbersome to overturn these laws. Kansas and Utah recently introduced bills, but both bills died early on in the process. We’ll be engaged over the next several months to set the context for those legislators to reintroduce their legislation next year.  

My goal? To fix all 50 states before I retire.