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State foster-child secretary pushes for 50% increase in living-expense rates
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BATON ROUGE – Department of Children and Family Services officials are working to improve Louisiana’s foster care system by advocating for a 50% increase in largely unchanged living-expense rates to help foster families cover basic necessities, DCFS Secretary Rebecca Harris said in a Senate committee meeting Monday.
The agency is hoping to increase the foster parent board rates, which have been adjusted for inflation only once in 19 years, to encourage families to foster. Currently, foster parents receive $19.47 per day, a total of about $600 per month. The goal is to raise that rate to $900 per month.
“Increasing board rates helps solve an imbalance,” DCFS Undersecretary Christopher Bahm said during the Senate Appropriations Committee on March 16. “Competitive, sustainable foster care board rates help us retain foster families and signal that Louisiana values the families who open up their homes for our children in need.”
National board rates vary from state to state, ranging from $450 to $1,200 per month per child.
The scrutiny DCFS has faced recently is not new, according to Sen. Thomas Pressly, R-Shreveport. The agency has been plagued by trouble for years, with lawmakers upset about the recent deaths of children who were already on the radar of the agency because of abuse or neglect claims.
“I’ve been in the Legislature for six years, and somebody mentioned it was like a roller coaster,” Pressly said. “Last week during that hearing, (I felt) very much the same.”
Marley Perrilloux, a 5-year-old from Gonzales, died in January, weighing only 19 pounds after allegedly being starved by his parents. DCFS reported in February that it had received three complaints prior to the child’s death, but those reports did not mention explicit signs of abuse or neglect that would warrant a welfare check.
In 2022, 2-year-old Mitchell Robinson III died from a fentanyl overdose despite hospital staff members having previously saved him twice before from opioid overdoses and having filed three separate reports with DCFS.
“They need our help, and we cannot fail them, ’cause when we do fail them, it may actually mean the death sentence of the child,” Sen. Regina Barrow, D-Baton Rouge, said last week while presenting legislation to eliminate DCFS.
“We can’t say that they’re not getting enough, that there’s not substantial funding going to the department,” Barrow said. “I think that it is structurally broken.”
Members of the Senate Health and Welfare Committee believe that DCFS should be reworked instead of abolished.
“We cannot fail the children of this state,” said Sen. Patrick McMath, R-Covington. “Dissolving the department, and you and I have spoken about this, is likely not the answer.”
In 2022, Marketa Walters, then-head of DCFS, resigned following the highly publicized deaths of two children.
DCFS currently sits below the national average in placement retention. For every 1,000 days a child is in care, the child averages 7.66 different foster placements. The national average is 4.48 foster placements. The agency’s goal is to shift foster care placement to prioritize family-like settings, rather than having to place children in group homes.
Harris said group homes entail “higher costs and also result in less-desired outcomes for our kids.” She said children need to live in a small, family-home environment.
Sen. Glen Womack, R-Harrisonburg, recommended that DCFS streamline its foster-parent qualification process to support the growing number of foster children without placements. Harris told the committee that for every 48 homes, there are 100 foster children who need placements.
Legislators voiced their concerns about DCFS’s budget allocations, saying there are important issues being neglected by the agency in its budget proposal for the 2026 fiscal year.
“I was just confused as to why there would not be a line item for investigating allegations of abuse, because you hear stories all the time, at least I do, of these foster parents, making these kids essentially slaves, either house-cleaning slaves or sexual slaves,” said Rep. Alonzo Knox, D-New Orleans.
In an effort to increase transparency between the agency and the Legislature, DCFS announced in a House Appropriations Committee meeting last Tuesday that it would begin informing lawmakers of any and all child abuse cases, including information such as the parish in which it occurred and as many details about the case that it can release.
DCFS is also proposing and implementing new policies that would help it connect more thoroughly with children in care, including a policy that would allow the agency to monitor children following their adoption to ensure they are not being revictimized in their adoptive placements.
A Youth Bill of Rights is also being implemented to ensure children know how to contact the agency. On a case-by-case basis, foster children receive cell phones from DCFS to allow children a direct line of contact to the agency should they need it.
“The Office of Technology Services is moving all phones to a master data management system, so we can push things to the phones, just like we push things to a computer,” Harris said. “So they'll have the information on their phone.”
Harris mentioned wristbands with DCFS’s contact number that children would receive upon coming into care.
“It doesn’t matter which side of the political aisle you’re on,” Sen. Pressly said. “We want our kids to be safe and protected.”
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