Successful Alternatives to Taking Children from their Parents

At the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, we often are asked what can be done to prevent the trauma of foster care by safely keeping children with their own families. There are many options, and we've listed some of them below.

None of the alternatives described below will work in every case or should be tried in every case. Contrary to the way advocates of placement prevention often are stereotyped, we do not believe in "family preservation at all costs" or that "every family can be saved." But these alternatives can keep many children, now needlessly taken from their parents, safely in their own homes.

1. Doing nothing. There are, in fact, cases in which the investigated family is entirely innocent and perfectly capable of taking good care of their children without any "help" from a child welfare agency. In such cases, the best thing the child protective services worker can do is apologize, shut the door, and go away.

2. Basic, concrete help. Sometimes it may take something as simple as emergency cash for a security deposit, a rent subsidy, or a place in a day care center (to avoid a "lack of supervision" charge) to keep a family together. Indeed, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development has a special program, called the Family Unification Program, in which Section 8 vouchers are reserved for families where housing is the issue keeping a family apart or threatening its breakup. Localities must apply for these subsidies. By doing so, they effectively acknowledge what they typically deny: that they do, in fact, tear apart families due to lack of housing.

3. Intensive Family Preservation Services programs. The first such program, Homebuilders, in Washington State, was established in the mid-1970s. The very term "family preservation" was invented specifically to apply to this type of program, and only this type of program, which has a better track record for safety than foster care. The basics concerning how these programs work - and what must be included for a program to be a real "family preservation" program -- are in NCCPR Issue Papers 9 and 10. Issue Paper10 lists studies proving the programs' effectiveness.

The largest replication of the program is in Michigan. The first director of the program, called Families First, was Susan Kelly. She now works for the Center for the Study of Social Policy. Families First has in press a book describing the program's history and outcomes and including several success stories.

CONTACTS:

Charlotte Booth, executive director, Homebuilders (253) 874-3630, cbooth@bsihomebuilders.org.

Susan Kelly, former director, Families First (734) 483-6671, susan.Kelly@cssp.org.

4. The Alabama "System of Care." This is the single most successful child welfare reform in the country. The Alabama reforms actually have reduced the foster care population while making children safer. The reforms are the result of a consent decree growing out of a lawsuit brought by the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law. The consent decree requires the state to rebuild its entire system from the bottom up, with an emphasis on keeping families together. The number of children taken from their homes has dropped dramatically, re-abuse of children left in their own homes has been cut in half since 1996, and an independent monitor appointed by the court has found that children are safer now than before the changes.

CONTACTS:

Ira Burnim, Legal Director, Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law (202) 467-5730, ext. 29. Mr. Burnim also is a member of the NCCPR Board of Directors. The Bazelon Center also has published a book about the Alabama reforms.

Paul Vincent, Child Welfare Policy and Practice Group, Montgomery, Ala. (334) 264-8300. Mr. Vincent ran the child protection system in Alabama when the lawsuit was filed. He worked closely with the plaintiffs to develop and implement the reform plan.

Ivor Groves, independent, court-appointed monitor (850) 422-8900.

5. Family to Family. This is a multi-faceted program developed by the Annie E. Casey Foundation (which also helps to fund NCCPR). One small element of the program, Team Decisionmaking  (which is similar to an approach called family group conferencing) often is confused with the entire program, which has many more elements. The program is described at the Casey website http://www.aecf.org/familytofamily. Also on the website is a comprehensive outside evaluation of the program.

CONTACT:

Gretchen Test, Annie E. Casey Foundation (410) 547-6600.

6. Community Partnerships for Child Protection. These partnerships, sponsored by the Center for the Study of Social Policy, are similar to the Family to Family projects. Among their key elements is an approach called "differential response," sometimes also known as "two-tiered response." This is an approach that both widens and narrows the net of intervention. Families considered relatively low risk are offered voluntary help. Previously, some of these cases would have been ignored entirely, while others would have subjected families to traumatic, coercive investigations and the threat of having their children taken away. Since Iowa switched to this approach, child abuse deaths have decreased.

CONTACT:

Marno Batterson (641) 792-5918 marno.batterson@cssp.org.

7. The turnaround in Pittsburgh. In the mid-1990s, the child welfare system in Pittsburgh and surrounding Allegheny County, Pa. was typically mediocre, or worse. Foster care placements were soaring and those in charge insisted every one of those placements was necessary. New leadership changed all that. Since 1997, the foster care population has been cut by 30 percent. When children must be placed, half stay with relatives and siblings are kept together 82 percent of the time.

They've done it by tripling the budget for primary prevention, more than doubling the budget for family preservation, embracing innovations like Family to Family and adding elements of their own, such as housing counselors in every child welfare office so families aren't destroyed because of housing problems. And as in Alabama, children are safer. Reabuse of children left in their own homes has declined.

CONTACT:

Karen Blumen, Alleghency County Department of Human Services, Office of Community Relations (412) 350-5707.

8. Changing financial incentives. While not a program per se, making this change spurs private child welfare agencies to come up with all sorts of innovations they previously had claimed were impossible.

This is clear from the experience in Illinois. Until recently, Illinois reimbursed private child welfare agencies the way all other states typically do: Though the agencies were told to seek permanence for children, they were paid for each day they kept a child in foster care. Thus, agencies were rewarded for letting children languish in foster care and punished for achieving permanence.

Now those incentives have been reversed, in part because of pressure from the Illinois Branch of the ACLU, which won a lawsuit against the state child welfare system. Today, private agencies in Illinois are paid for permanence. They are rewarded both for adoptions (which, in fact are often conversions of kinship placements to subsidized guardianships) and for returning children safely to their own homes. They are penalized for prolonged stays in foster care. As soon as the incentives changed, the "intractable" became tractable, the "dysfunctional" became functional, and the foster care population plummeted. The University of Illinois is monitoring the changes and has found no compromise of safety.

CONTACT:

Ben Wolf, Illinois Branch, ACLU, (312) 201-9760, ext. 420.