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EDITORIAL

It's a depressing tale: Dorchester's Mariluz Cortes, just 30 years old, has seven children. She uses drugs and is without a job. The state eventually acts, taking custody of her kids. Cortes becomes despondent, falling even deeper into addiction. Without their mother and split up from each other into a number of different homes, each kid is a mess.

The oldest, a runaway just 14, is soon to give birth to her own child, meaning Cortes will become a grandmother at an age when most people are just becoming parents.

Against all odds, though, Cortes's story does not end tragically. Clean and sober now for 27 months, her family will be reunited with her in a few weeks. Hers is a success story, the result of an inventive collaboration by private agencies and the state's Department of Social Services.

Few agencies in state government are more disliked than DSS. The sibilant hiss of its acronym evokes the image of a snake, and that's the way many think of it: a beast that tears apart families, ripping children from the arms of their mothers and fathers.

And it does so with thousands each year.

There are reasons for this, of course. Most have to do with the safety and welfare of the children involved. Still, as Cortes says, "I hated DSS." As bad as they may be at parenting, parents still love their children. And the kids DSS takes away usually never return. Most end up being placed in foster homes. Well less than half are ever reunited with their birth parents.

The situation grows even more complicated when there are many children in a family. Foster homes can usually only take one or two. As a result, siblings are split up, often never to see each other again. The effects can be devastating. Sometimes the only stability in kids' lives has been their relationship with their brothers and sisters. When that is gone, the kids are lost. The social ills - delinquency, crime, drugs and unwanted pregnancies - are almost inevitable.

This makes DSS's task often hopeless: It faces the challenge of doing something better in circumstances where there are few, if any, good choices.

Last May, Boston's Home for Little Wanderers initiated a program with DSS to grapple with these issues. The Home, first founded during the Civil War, is perhaps best known for its residential programs, such as the Knight Center in Jamaica Plain. Having recently merged with Boston Children's Services (itself founded in 1799), it is now the largest child welfare agency in the region.

The Home's notion was to change the way foster care was delivered. Instead of splitting them up, siblings would be placed together in one family. Foster parents would be paid as professionals, making them salaried positions. Social workers would concentrate on the whole family: parents as well as kids. And the goal - seemingly obvious yet actually quite groundbreaking - was eventually to return foster kids to their families.

Cortes wanted her family back. But she had to deal with her drug addiction. She needed to learn the skills of parenting, a job that is rarely taught in any school. And DSS had to help her reconnect with her kids. Before the program, Cortes saw her children perhaps once or twice a month. Now it's twice or more a week.

And it's working. In an interview, Cortes sits calmly with two of her children at her side. Her gaze is direct and her voice steady and clear as she talks about her life. It hasn't been easy. There are times, she acknowledges, she still feels the lure of addiction. Yet, her desire to be a mother, to care for and raise her children, is stronger. Indeed, Cortes has been so successful in her efforts that she now teaches parenting classes to others in the program.

The Home's program, called Sib-Links, is funded by DSS and a group out of Seattle called the Casey Family Foundation. Sib-Links is an experiment, a $1 million test to reform foster care. Right now, just four families with 19 kids are in the program. It will shortly expand to cover another six cases with about 30 children. If it's successful, the Home and DSS hope Sib-Links will become a model for the state and perhaps for the nation.

There's much that makes sense about Sib-Links. By keeping families together, it's possible to provide better services to children and their parents. Moreover, it's cost-effective. Rather than many case managers and social workers dealing with a dispersed family, now they can concentrate their efforts.

But most important is the philosophy that underlies it: Kids need families. DSS and the Home are now working to bring them back together.

Tom Keane can be reached at tomkeane@tomkeane.com.

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Op-Ed; Sib-Links strengthens family ties