More states get chance to experiment with child welfare systems
December 23, 2011
Through Protect Ohio, Richland County Children Services is one of 18 child protective service agencies in the state with permission from the federal government to use certain federal money for foster-care alternatives.
There are only six states in the country with this permission, but others are about to join the experiment. Others now using a federal waiver are California, Indiana, North Carolina, Oregon and Florida.
The Child and Family Services Improvement and Innovation Act, which President Obama signed this fall, will allow up to 10 states to use certain federal dollars for more community and home-based services. The overall goal of the demonstration projects must be to reduce the time children spend in foster care.
It has worked in Richland County, which has 41 children in custody today compared to 250 in 2002. With the waiver, Children Services here has found ways to keep kids safe in their own homes or find relatives (grandparents, aunts/incles, etc.) to provide Kinship care.
“We believe that about half of the 423,000 (U.S.) children in foster care today could go home to parents, relatives or to adoptive parents if these kind of intensive family preservation or reunification services are provided,” says Connie White Mills, a spokeswoman for a Florida non-profit agency that assists with child welfare.
A shift in approach
The federal government spends more than $12 billion a year to help states with child welfare, the Casey Family Programs estimated in a 2010 report. Most of those federal funds come through Title IV-E of the Social Security Act, the same law that sets out Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid policies.
But the child welfare section of the law is worded so that states can use those federal funds only to pay for keeping children in foster care or group residential services. The money can’t be used to keep a family together or to provide in-home therapy, although another part of the Social Security Act does let states use federal money to prevent child abuse and neglect.
The law that Obama signed in September brings back the Title IV-E waiver process and expands to 10 the number of states allowed to use it every year through 2014.
Any state that wants to take advantage of the law must make sure their projects remain “cost neutral,” meaning that the amount the federal government provides cannot be more than the state would have gotten without the waiver.
“This law will encourage more innovation and connect young people to the critical services they need,” says William C. Bell, president of the Casey Family Programs, which has committed to investing at least $1 billion in the next decade to help reduce the number of children in foster care 50 percent by 2020.
More tracking and reporting added
Not even the federal government is sure how many of the programs being tried under the waivers are actually working. Evidence regarding the impact of the existing six waiver programs “remains inconclusive,” according to a 2011 report from the U.S Department of Health and Human Services. The report says that states generally see the waiver demonstrations “to be critical facilitators, but not the drivers” of major child welfare reforms.
While states that get the waivers can spend the federal dollars in ways that they previously couldn’t, there are still strings attached to the money. In fact, some wonder if the reporting requirements necessary to obtain a waiver under the new law may be enough of a headache to scare off some states from applying.
To get a waiver, states have to agree to adopt at least two of an array of “child welfare program improvement policies” that the federal government lists, among them extending the age limit for foster care benefits to 21 from 18 and doing more to place siblings in the same foster home. States will also have to track how well children allowed to remain outside foster homes do, compared to those who go through the foster home process.
These new reporting and tracking requirements are crucial, says Rutledge Q. Hutson, director of child welfare policy for the Center for Law and Social Policy, an advocacy group. “We need to know what happens to the child,” she says.
