A more compassionate child welfare system

A more compassionate child welfare system

At the beginning of the O'Malley-Brown administration, Maryland had far too many children in foster care, too many foster children in group homes and too few foster parents. The law virtually required the Department of Human Resources to license any new group home meeting minimum standards, despite the fact that most of the state was already oversaturated with group homes. Our procedures for processing applications for social service programs were outdated and inefficient. It had been more than 20 years since the law was changed to update the amount of child support a parent had to pay.