By admin on February 8, 2010
Mental health of current and former recipients of foster care: A review of recent studies in the United States
This paper presents data about the emotional, behavioral and substance abuse disorders of youth in foster care and former recipients of foster care in the U.S. The prevalence rates of these groups are compared to those of youth and young adults in the U.S. general population. The implications of these data for policy and program design are discussed.
Pecora, P. J., White, C.R., Jackson, L. J. & Wiggins, T. (2009). Mental health of current and former recipients of foster care: A review of recent studies in the United States. Child and Family Social Work, 14, 132-146. Link: http://bit.ly/jw47a, from wiley.com. (Please note that you may need to access this article through an academic institution to view it free of charge).
Posted in Foster Care Library | Tagged foster care, mental health
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.
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 admin on February 1, 2010
[note from Amy Lemley, of the John Burton Foundation for Children Without Homes 1/28/09]
AB 12 passed in the Assembly yesterday with a final vote of 72 to 0! The bill had strong bipartisan support, with both Democrats and Republicans speaking on the floor about how AB 12 will better support youth in their transition from foster care.
Of considerable help was yesterday’s Los Angeles Times, which ran an editorial urging the Legislature to pass AB 12. This is the second editorial by the paper in support of extending foster care to age 21. It states, “With a $20-billion budget gap, California needs every penny it can get from the federal government, and now that the child welfare money actually can be spent on helping youth rather than supporting outmoded programs, the state must grab it. Too often, rules limit the usefulness of federal money. Not this time. AB 12 allows the state to multiply the power of its dollars many times over. Lawmakers should not miss the rare chance to simultaneously save money and help Californians in need.”
To read the full editorial in the LA Times, follow this LINK.
Thank you to everyone who has worked to get AB 12 this far. After our request for letters last week, I received confirmation from over 100 people that they had written to their member of Assembly, urging them to vote for AB 12. Your voices were clearly heard.
From here, AB 12 moves with bipartisan support into the State Senate, where it will next be heard in the Senate Human Services Committee and if passed, onto the Senate Appropriations Committee. If our efforts are successful, it will then move onto Governor Schwarzenegger for his signature.
Thank you again for your deep commitment to children and youth in California’s foster care system.
Posted in Featured Content, State Foster Care Policy Updates | Tagged AB 12, assembly, budget, california, federal money, foster care
By admin on February 1, 2010
[from Kidsdata Monthly, Lucile Packard Foundation for Children's Health 1/26/09]
Just Added to Kidsdata.org: Child Safety Data for All 58 California Counties
Kidsdata.org’s statewide expansion continues this week with the addition offoster care,child abuse, anddomestic violence data — 25 indicators in all – for all counties across California. Data on many other topics will be phased in over the next several months . Coming up next: Data from the California Healthy Kids Survey and data on children with disabilities.
Highlights from These New Data:
Posted in Foster Care Library | Tagged abuse, data, foster care, neglect
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.
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 admin on January 21, 2010
[from Reuters.com By Steve Gorman 1/12/10]
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The latest budget plan from California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger would force 200,000 children off low-cost medical insurance, end in-home care for 350,000 infirm and elderly citizens and slash income assistance to hundreds of thousands more.
And that’s the best-case scenario under Schwarzenegger’s prescription for filling the state’s $19.9 billion deficit.
HEY comment: HEY specifically advocates for transitional age current and former foster youth, and is working with partners against these and other cuts. The depth of how many foster care and transitional age youth services is not fully expressed in this article. There are multiple cuts to foster care services, group homes, country funded social workers, and to former foster youth housing programs. However, this article helps to express the breadth of the affect of these budget cuts by showing the many populations hurt by these cuts.
[from Reuters.com By Steve Gorman 1/12/10]
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The latest budget plan from California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger would force 200,000 children off low-cost medical insurance, end in-home care for 350,000 infirm and elderly citizens and slash income assistance to hundreds of thousands more.
And that’s the best-case scenario under Schwarzenegger’s prescription for filling the state’s $19.9 billion deficit.
Refusing to consider broad tax hikes, he is relying mostly on $8.5 billion in reduced expenditures including drastic cuts to health and social spending that has long made California one of the leading U.S. states in providing help to the needy.
Posted in State Foster Care Policy Updates | Tagged budget, california, foster care, funding, medicaid, medicare, welfare cuts
By admin on January 21, 2010
[from the University of California Berkeley, UCB-CWS/CMS UPDATES -- 1/11/2010]
Updates have been made for the Child Welfare Services Content Management System that is sponsored by the University of California Berkeley. Researchers at UCB collect all the data that is entered by Child Welfare Workers across the state of California and enter it into a content management system. The information is publicly available, so anyone can pull up data sets, cross reference data, and compare information about many different features of foster youth. For instance, you can learn about how many foster youth are in your country, their ages and what percentages of them are in different types of placements.
Anyone can visit the website at http://cssr.berkeley.edu/ucb_childwelfare/
Our CWS outcomes spreadsheets and the Composite Viewer have now been updated with data from the Quarter 2, 2009 extract from CWS/CMS.
Please visit our website to examine updated analyses, and to download a copy of your county’s quarterly CWS outcomes spreadsheet.
http://cssr.berkeley.edu/ucb_childwelfare/
Posted in Foster Care Library | Tagged bay area, california, csw/cms, cws, data, foster care, foster care data
By Dana Mandolesi on January 19, 2010
[from The New York Times, January 15th, 2010, By GERRY SHIH]
In the summer of 2008, a 13-year-old boy from San Francisco emerged from a government van and scanned his new surroundings. Five handsome houses, a small school and an old gymnasium stood on 11 rural acres in the Central Valley that bordered an almond orchard.
Beyond the last house was a soothing panorama of unbounded farmland, interrupted only by old Highway 99 and the big rigs that rumbled across the horizon.
For more than two decades, this has been the setting that greeted more than 2,400 wards of the state as they arrive at the Excell Center ranch, a group home for foster boys with histories of violence or mental disabilities. It is situated just outside Turlock, 40 miles southeast of Stockton.
That the Excell Center, which now houses 52 youths from ages 10 to 18, has survived the die-off of foster homes is partly a matter of real-estate economics: it costs less to house people in the heart of the Central Valley than it does in urban areas, and it costs less to pay workers to take care of them.
The other underlying economic reality, recently confirmed by a panel of federal judges, is that for 18 years, the state’s reimbursement for foster care has fallen woefully short of its minimum goals. The combination of the two means foster care in the Bay Area has been hit harder than anywhere else in the state.
In a tale all too familiar in cash-strapped California, the foster care system has been coming apart from inadequate state financing for at least 20 years, officials at the county level say. In the past two months, a succession of key court decisions in favor of care providers lifted hopes that the judicial rulings might finally turn things around, but the lawsuits have simultaneously shed light on a system that has been cut to the bone.
Visit heysf.org to read the full article
Posted in State Foster Care Policy Updates | Tagged berkeley, budget, california, child welfare, foster care, san francisco
By admin on December 19, 2008
STATE POLICY
Changes on the Horizon: The Recommendations of the Blue Ribbon Commission on Children in Foster Care
On December 10th, 2008, HEY staff attended the public forum, Changes on the Horizon: The Recommendations of the Blue Ribbon Commission on Children in Foster Care (BRC) & the Impacts of New Federal Legislation.”
The forum was hosted by State [...]
Posted in Foster Care Updates, State Foster Care Policy Updates | Tagged AB 12, AB 6893, blue ribbon commission, foster care, HEY, Jim Beall
