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Some children in Tennessee foster care and some families seeking to regain custody are paying around $12 million per year to the Department of Children’s Services, representing a drop in the bucket for the financially strained foster care system and a significant personal loss for the often indigent population.
DCS received a little over 1 percent of its $1.2 billion budget in 2024 from Social Security payments to children in state custody with a deceased parent or parents who qualified for Social Security Income and from parents paying child support to the state.
Like most states, Tennessee collects SSI payments from orphaned minors in state custody and uses the money to fund foster care. Thus, the intended recipient never receives a direct payment. In 2024, the department collected nearly $6.5 million through these payments.
“We’re talking about a truly vulnerable population of children who lost parents and are in state custody, with very few assets in the world,” State Sen. Jeff Yarbro (D-Nashville) said of the practice on Friday.
Yarbro is working on a bill to establish a trust to save the payments made to a minor in state custody so that the recipient would be paid the accrued amount when they turn 18, rather than allowing the state to spend the money.
“It’s just miserly of the state to seize the only things these kids own,” he added.
While department policy states that money received from any child’s federal benefits — like Social Security, Veterans Affairs or other benefits passed on from qualifying parents — will only be spent for “direct care and maintenance and/or personal needs of children and youth,” DCS policy does not specify that the money be spent on the child eligible for the payment…
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