Shortening Children's Stays in Temporary Care
Far too many children are growing up in foster care. Over the last 10 years, foster care rolls have grown dramatically because more children, especially infants and youngsters, are entering the system and fewer are leaving. Children of color are significantly over-represented and are also experiencing longer stays. Legislative reforms in the early 1980s were aimed at reducing the number and length of stay of children in foster care, but states are struggling more than ever to achieve that goal. A number of innovative programs for permanency planning are showing ways it can be done.
Key Factors in the Struggle
Family and community problems increasingly affect the welfare of children – drug and alcohol addiction, AIDS, poverty, and violence. The inability of child welfare agencies to respond adequately to these unprecedented demands has contributed to poor outcomes for children and families. Here are some of the barriers to moving more children into permanent homes:
- Systems fail to assess family problems early in a case and to provide and monitor services targeted to meet their unique needs.
- Families and children of color receive fewer and inferior child welfare services, which contribute to poorer outcomes and extended lengths of stay.
- The issue of what permanency means for children in kinship care remains unresolved.
- Systems frequently do not include family and community in decisionmaking.
- Foster care placement resources are extremely limited.
- Poor agency-court relations and inefficient court practices delay permanence.
- Overuse of long-term foster care as a case-plan goal denies children a permanent home.
- Current funding streams provide incentives for keeping children in care.
What is “Shortening Children’s Stays in Temporary Care”?
This tool offers a framework for assisting public child welfare agencies in examining factors that contribute to long stays for children in foster care. It is divided into the three areas where barriers occur: in public policy, program management and structure, and program operations. It offers some practical solutions for policies, management techniques and practices to overcome the barriers described, and outlines 26 innovative programs nationwide that have made significant progress. The report is targeted toward child welfare leaders working to reduce the number of children in foster care over 18 months.
The report provides:
- An in-depth look at the complex interplay between family characteristics and system barriers that contribute to long stays for children in foster care;
- A framework to assist public child welfare agencies in examining system barriers and implementing change;
- Practical policy, management, and practice solutions for moving children out of foster care more quickly;
- Detailed information on 26 innovative permanency planning programs, specializing in concurrent planning, substance abuse treatment, family conferences, kinship care, foster and adoptive parent recruitment, subsidized guardianship, and legal processes.
What did we learn from these applications?
Effective reform will require changes at more than one level in order to reinforce one another and to address adequately the true complexity of the problems. It will also require change throughout the entire child welfare system and coordination with every other system that serves vulnerable families and children. Only through a comprehensive approach to systems change will agencies improve the lives of children and families in their care.
How to find out more:
resources, examples, references:
Contact the Annie E. Casey Foundation, or the North American Council on Adoptable Children, 970 Raymond Ave., Suite 106, St. Paul, MN 55114-1149, Tel. 651.644.3036, Fax 651.644.9848, E-mail NACAC@aol.com.