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.
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 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 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
