By Dana Mandolesi on March 4, 2010
During the fourth and final meeting of San Francisco’s Human Services System Improvement Plan Core Team Meeting, we spoke in depth about youth in probation. The Juvenile Probation Department (JPD) presented statistics and numbers of youth who were referred to the probation department and those resulting in a petition being filed in 2008. In 2008, the latest year they presented, there were 3446 youth referred to JPD but only 1607 actually had petitions filed against them. Once a youth’s petition is sustained – they are booked – meaning they are placed in probation with their families, in out of home (foster care) placements, or sent to a facility. The majority of youth do not get placed in juvenile hall, Log Cabin Ranch or more serious facilities.
The purpose of today’s discussion was to present initiatives currently underway and planned for the future that would encourage the least restrictive placements for youth on probation. Over the course of the last three years, JPD had several peer and expert evaluations and realized that least restrictive placements are the most rehabilitative for the youth and their families. Lower level placements also save money for San Francisco County, making this option beneficial for all parties.
However, in order to keep communities safe, while also encouraging accountability in youth – and showing them that indeed consequences exist – intentional decision making processes must be implemented. Therefore JPD is currently working with Child Welfare Services (CWS) to utilize and learn from programs that work. Because youth on probation and youth in foster care are paid for by the same government funding, they should always have access to the same services. Unfortunately, because of a fractured system, and various other psychological divisions between the youth, the departments, and the rationale that placed them in care, they may not receive equal services. Both JPD and CWS acknowledge that this disparity needs to be equalized and have multiple initiatives to support and rehabilitate youth and their families.
This meeting concluded the System Improvement Plan’s Core Team Meeting Series. Once the final recommendation is released, HEY will develop a simple summary to include as a HEY Trend in our newsletter and website.
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Posted in Featured Content, Local Foster Care Policy Updates, Trends To Watch | Tagged deliquency, jpd, log cabin ranch, placements, probation, san francisco, sip, system improvement plan, youth
By Dana Mandolesi on February 5, 2010
Wed, February 17 @ 11am:
Board of Supervisors Budget & Finance Committee Hearing on HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES Human Services Agency, Aging and Adult Services, Public Health, and Children Youth and Families
*This meeting will be held in the Board Chamber and will start at 11:00 am, but this item will be calendared towards the end of the agenda.
Departments will present the following information:
1) review of department’s major functions
2) new fees, charges, or revenues used to balance the budget
3) major changes to personnel, including deletion of positions,downgrades, and reorganization
4) contracting out proposals, if any
5) administrative reductions, including management and supervisory positions, and reductions to contracts
6) description and impact of service reductions
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Posted in Local Foster Care Policy Updates, Upcoming Events | Tagged budget, health and human services, san francisco
By Dana Mandolesi on February 4, 2010
[from Dana Mandolesi, HEY Project Manager]
As part of the requirements to receive federal funding for foster care and supportive services for families, Child Welfare Services (CWS) must complete a tri-annual System Improvement Plan (SIP). The SIP consists of a multi-tiered review and analysis of current practices and a commitment to implementing new evidence based practices and phasing out older initiatives that do not have proven successes in serving foster youth and their families.
As part of HEY’s work to help connect and convene systems, I attend the Core Team Meetings for the SIP. The Core Team is made mostly of people that work for CWS, but community partners, contracted agencies and other concerned community members are invited to attend. At today’s meeting, the Team focused on one specific issue that San Francisco needs to improve: timeliness to adoption and concurrent planning.
When trying to improve ‘Timeliness to Adoption’, CWS means they are trying to reduce how long a youth is in foster care before they are adopted. This is a difficult statistic, because San Francisco, like most places, primarily is interested in reunifying youth with their own parents – letting them go home. However, for some youth, reunification is not an option, and adoption is the second best choice. The problem arises when CWS focuses all their energy of reunifying a youth with their parents – but that reunification doesn’t work out. The youth is left in some type of foster care for all that time, and then the process has to start over to find a suitable adoptive family.
As a response to this problem, CWS wants to improve ‘concurrent planning’. Concurrent planning means planning for two case scenarios at the same time: possible reunification and possible adoption. This way if the youth cannot reunify with their parents, they can immediately transfer their focus to the already developed adoptive plan – and the youth can leave foster care much quicker.
During the Team meeting today, CWS talked about developing milestones to implementing many initiatives to support concurrent planning and successful reunifications. First, every program and initiative needs to have good and better data reporting, so the results are recorded appropriately. Second, San Francisco does have some programs that have shown to reduce time in foster care, and those need to be systematized and supported throughout all cases and workers in CWS. Third, initiatives and practices that have evidence to support their usefulness or success rates should be discontinued and replaced with practices that have been proven to improve outcomes for adoption and reunification.
Today, the Core Team talked about multiple existing initiatives that work to improve timeliness to adoption, and new evidence practices they are considering implementing. Among some current promising and successful strategies were:
- A program to recruit and train potential foster and adoptive families through the San Francisco Unified School District
- The development of materials and brochures about services for families pre- and post-adoption
- Training foster parents to be mentors for biological parents
- Reducing reassignment of Child Welfare Workers
Among some new programs that have proven success records in other places were:
The Core Team meets again in 2 weeks, and the topic will be ‘Reentries into Foster Care’. Stay tuned for an update.
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Posted in Featured Content, Local Foster Care Policy Updates, Trends To Watch | Tagged adoption, child welfare services, cws, data, evidence based practices, foster care, foster youth, reunification, san francisco, sip, system improvement plan
By Dana Mandolesi on January 29, 2010
By Dana Mandolesi, HEY Project Manager
Yesterday I attended a Core Team Meeting for the System Improvement Plan (SIP) for San Francisco’s Human Services Agency (HSA). According to law, each country must submit their data to a statewide system (http://cssr.berkeley.edu/ucb_childwelfare/), analyze the outcomes and then compare the data to federal measures. If San Francisco does not achieve the federal standards, those areas needing improvement will be addressed in the SIP.
The SIP is completed ever 3 years and has several phases of self and external peer assessment. The 2010 SIP is the second SIP San Francisco has developed. Counties have 3 years to improve outcomes in selected areas. During the 2009 assessment cycle, San Francisco identified 3-4 issues on which to focus.
• Child Welfare:
o Recurrence of Maltreatment
o Re-entires of Children into Foster Care
o Timeliness to Adoption
• Juvenile Probation
o Utilization of Least Restrictive Placement Options
During the meeting the team learned specifics about these measures and why they were chosen. HSA must prioritize safety over other factors, and need to keep budgets and creative solutions in mind as well. San Francisco is moving towards the implementation of evidence based practices, and considering eliminating older and non-data driven programs. They are looking to improve cross-systems communication and relationships, especially with the dependency courts.
During the meeting, the presenters discussed how the improvement of an issue might actually affect another data point negatively, causing a failure to meet standards. For instance, in order to adopt children as fast as possible, it is necessary to terminate parental rights. However, if a county terminates rights too early, the child can no longer legally reunify with their parents, making reunification measures worse for the county. Also, if parental rights are terminated without a committed adoptive family, or if the adoption fails, a child may be left a legal orphan, which is an unsavory position for both the county and the child. Another seemingly conflicting problem discussed was that while HSA values placement stability, they value permanence more. Therefore, when youth who have been in care over 24 months, HSA attempts to have them ‘step-down’ to less restrictive placements to prepare them gradually for reunification, adoption or other types of permanence. In these cases, an improvement in permanence indicators means a decline in placement stability statistics.
During the next meeting of the SIP Core Team, the focus will be on child welfare and timeliness to adoption. During this meeting, the team plans to discuss strategies to improve this measure, by reviewing current practices and initiatives and considering creative and evidence based solutions. Expect a SIP update next week.
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Posted in Local Foster Care Policy Updates, Trends To Watch | Tagged child welfare, foster care, hsa, human services agency, policy, probation, san francisco, sip, system improvement plan
By Sara Razavi on January 27, 2010
Thanks to our many partners including HSN and Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth we continue to receive the most up-to-date information about local budget planning. For those working on behalf of, or directly with, foster youth we urge you to review Human Services Agency Department FY10-11 Budget Presentation found at this link http://sfhsa.org/1610.htm (in case you don’t have time to review, below is a short summary):
Summary of HSA FY10-11 Budget Presentation:
The HSA FY10-11 Budget report states that the city is facing a $466 million shortfall in FY10-FY11 (July 1, 2010-June 30, 2011).
The mayor has instructed each department to cut 30% from their General Fund allocations spending.
20% of this is in actual cuts and 10% is cuts as contingency planning. Together this equals 30% cuts in total.
For HSA this equals $28.5 million
HSA is the department which oversees Family & Children Services (FCS) division which implements child welfare services in San Francisco. FCS is expected to absorb 5% of HSA cuts which equals close to $1.4 million
Each division of HSA including FCS is following the same “Budget Reduction Plan” which includes the following principles:
- Focusing on programs with general fund spending
- Not planning cross-the-board cuts to programs
- Looking at aid and non-aid budgets
- Seeking reductions in CBO contracts
- Developing plans to increase federal and state revenues
- Searching for internal efficiencies
This plan is not unlike what the department had proposed during the last round of cuts and simply means doing less with less. Since the focus of the cuts will be on programs whose primary funding source is general fund dollars this limits the impact on foster care reimbursement rates which are drawn from federal dollars, however, the cuts still deeply affect local families and children before foster care because local dollars are generally used for preventative measures which support local families prior to the full-scale involvement of child welfare services. Though the department has committed to not cutting programs “cross-the-board” that is no assurance for keeping programs which may be so understaffed they are ineffective. For example over the last 18 months alone FCS has lost 67 staff positions and an additional 5 eligibility workers which equals a total of 72 positions which were formerly designated to improved outcomes for local foster youth. Some of the lost 72 positions were part of a division “Reorg” and reductions may have actually been part of improved efficiencies, however, with more and more looses in positions and services, the outcomes for youth will inevitably be affected.
Please continue to keep involved in this process by:
a) Remaining linked to groups providing summaries and updates (i.e. HSN, Coleman, and for Foster Care specific, HEY)
b) Attend information meetings including:
- The department will present a more specific cuts plan to the Commission on January 28 and February 10
- Budgets will be submitted to Controller’s Office February 22
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Posted in Local Foster Care Policy Updates, Trends To Watch | Tagged budget, Coleman Advocates, cuts, general fund cuts, human services network, san francisco
By Dana Mandolesi on January 19, 2010
[from Angela Chan of the Asian Law Caucus , provided at a Juvenile Justice Providers Association (JJPA) meeting]
1. What does the policy change do?
The policy change recognizes that principles of rehabilitation and family reunification
govern the juvenile justice system. The policy therefore only allows youth to be referred to
ICE after a juvenile court finds that a youth committed an alleged felony. In contrast, the
prior policy violated due process because it required that youth be reported to ICE for
deportation right after arrest before the youth even had his/her day in court.
Click on the title of the full article on heysf.org, or download the pdf.
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Posted in Local Foster Care Policy Updates | Tagged asian law caucus, due process, ICE, immigrant, jjpa, policy, san francisco, undocumented, youth
By admin on December 22, 2009
[Budget updates from the San Francisco Human Services Network, written by Debbi Lerman 12/18/09]
Mayor Newsom’s mid-year cuts are finally public. The Mayor said that the $45 million in mid-year cuts will also lower next year’s $522 million deficit by $25 million, and that he plans to propose additional cuts and revenue ideas every six to eight weeks beginning in January. I am posting all info as I receive it to HSN’s FY 2010-11 Budget Central webpage. Info on next year’s budget is at the top of the page, and mid-year cut info is at the bottom.
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Posted in Local Foster Care Policy Updates
By admin on December 14, 2009
[from Chelsea Boilard, Coleman Budget Advocates 12/14/09]
Last Thursday, DCYF Director Maria Su gave a presentation at the Citizen’s Advisory Council meeting on the state of DCYF’s budget. She said that Mayor Newsom had asked departments to submit proposed mid-year cuts of 3.9% (amounting to $1 million for DCYF), and that while they found more than half of that amount in cost-savings that would not impact direct services, an additional $400,000 could come from family support services (still to be confirmed by the Mayor). Since the Mayor’s instructions said to bypass department commissions, proposed cuts from other departments are not yet public or available.
That’s only for this fiscal year, and experience with this administration should lead us to anticipate further mid-year cuts before June. Next fiscal year, the city is forecasting a $522 million deficit, and Mayor Newsom has instructed city departments to cut 30% of their general fund budgets (a year after his instructions to cut by 25%). For DCYF alone, that amounts to $11 million in reductions, including both General Fund and Children’s Fund reductions (and if property taxes continue to decline, that could increase). We have heard from multiple department heads that last year’s reductions already left city departments with bare bones and the $522 million question: What else can we cut?
But maybe that isn’t the right question.
How many years have struggling families, seniors, immigrants, homeless, people of color and low-income residents had the city budget balanced on their backs, at their expense? For how long has big business gotten incentives from City Hall while critical services for the working class of San Francisco– those who make the city’s economy run– are whittled away? When are our communities going to take a stand, and say, “Basta! Enough is enough!” and hold decision-makers (at the local and state levels) accountable to truly providing for all of the City’s residents?
We have a Mayor who refuses to engage in real conversation about progressive revenue, and tens of millions in property tax appeals, 80% of which are commercial properties. In a city which has prioritized the needs of downtown over its children and struggling families for years, there is no time like the present to take a stand. We are now hearing calls for hundreds and thousands of San Francisco residents to stand up, exhausted by years of being dismissed and discounted, but energized by the knowledge that they are not alone in their frustration and also not alone in their hope for a better city.
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Posted in Local Foster Care Policy Updates | Tagged budget, san francisco
By admin on December 14, 2009
[from Debbi Lerman, San Francisco Human Services Network, 12/14/09]
The Mayor’s complete list of mid-year reductions is expected to be released this week. The Mayor’s Budget Office asked departments to submit their proposals to cut general fund by 3.9% on December 4, but those lists were not made public. However, the Public Health Department list came out today, and the Health Commission will hold a hearing at 4 pm on Tuesday, December 15.
I’ve received no information yet from the Human Services Agency. DCYF said that over half of the proposed mid-year cut consists of internal cost-savings and unspent contract funds that will not affect direct services, but about $400,000 would come from family support services (if the Mayor approves the plan). The Department on the Status of Women said they protected direct services. The Juvenile Probation mid-year cut proposal is posted, but contains only general information. Most of the cuts were to administrative and probation positions.
The Department of Public Health’s mid-year target was $13.2 million, but they were unable to achieve the full reduction. The Mayor approved a lower reduction of $7.4 million. These cuts will also reduce their FY 2010-11 budget by $9.2 million. The DPH budget website has both a summary and the write – ups on each specific cut. Most cuts would take effect in February or March.
The list includes several cuts to substance abuse services, including reducing city funding to backfill state cuts for drug MediCal and Prop 36. The city also plans to close two substance abuse residential facilities as of March 1, using the pending results of the Community Behavorial Health RFP to select the lowest-scoring facilities. The city would also provide only a partial backfill of state HIV prevention reductions, a cut that will eliminate or reduce a number of community-based programs. DPH also projects savings in unexpended contract funds, to be achieved by limiting contract modifications.
Other reductions include some changes in SFGH and LHH staffing (though with minimal layoffs), some programs that can be funded through non-general fund sources, and discontinuing the city’s backfill for the UC Regents Trauma Recovery Center.
Once the Board receives the Mayor’s mid-year cut list this week, they will have 45 days to review it and hold hearings. They may accept some cuts, or substitute equivalent cuts (which do not have to be in the same department). Because the DPH cuts are going to the Board for approval rather than the Health Commission, the Board will also have the required Beilensen hearing during the 45-day review period.
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Posted in Local Foster Care Policy Updates | Tagged budget, dph, human services agency, san francisco
