NCCPR News and commentary round-up, week ending April 14, 2020

● ICYMI: Video is now available of the excellent American Bar Association webinar on how child welfare systems should respond to the coronavirus crisis. Speakers included the Associate Comissioner of the Children’s Bureau Jerry Milner and his Special Assistant, David Kelly. The ABA also has some excellent additional resources. It’s all available here.

● Sadly, many places are ignoring the federal guidance. One state child welfare agency in particular, has gone to extremes. It’s even trying to work around its own State Supreme Court to inflict emotional child abuse on a grand scale. What state would be so cruel? No, not Mississippi. No, not Texas.  It’s Vermont.  Read all about the proposed Vermont Anti-Hugging Law.

● To get a sense of just how much such laws and policies can hurt children, read the account of one parent, Michelle Chan, in Truthout.

● There’s been the usual run of hype and hysteria over how the sky is falling because there are fewer calls to child abuse hotlines. (Here’s why the sky really isn’t falling.) But there have been some notable exceptions both among journalists and child welfare officials:

--Uptown Radio, a production of students at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, took what is, sadly, an unusual approach to this issue: They looked at all sides.

--The child welfare agency in Butler County, Ohio is taking a more nuanced stance than most – and working hard to ensure that family preservation services continue.

--And California Gov. Gavin Newsom understands that the best “prevention program” for what child welfare agencies call “child abuse” is also the simplest: 1. Find the poor families most at risk of losing their children to foster care. 2. Send money.  And here’s more about the transformative power of cash.

● But, of course, the child welfare establishment is busy trying to cash in on the crisis by seeking billions for more of the same. This after already receiving a windfall in the first coronavirus relief bill.

In other news:

● From Yasmeen Khan of WNYC Public Radio in Gothamist: A story about another outstanding measure to prevent child neglect by preventing poverty. reforms to New York State’s blacklist of alleged child abusers.  The blacklist prevents those on it, who are mostly poor, from getting many jobs – including those most likely to be filled by poor people. As child advocate Joyce McMillan told Gothamist: “How does sentencing parents to poverty keep children safe?”

Child welfare and coronavirus: Vermont’s child welfare agency wants an anti-hugging law

A proposed Vermont law would deny this kind of comfort
to foster children.

UPDATE, APRIL 18, 2020: lawmakers appear to have backed away from the most extreme version of the Vermont Anti-Hugging Bill. Less draconian - but still harmful and unnecessary - language now is under consideration.  And, as Allison Green, legal director of the National Association of Counsel for Children points out in her excellent testimony, there is no need for any limits on visitation to be added to state law. No other state is known to have done so.

Said Green:

 COVID-19 is not, in and of itself, a danger that should keep families separated - no matter the duration of time. Child welfare practitioners have the skills, knowledge, and ongoing ethical duty to have meaningful, case-specific conversations, thoughtfully consider each family’s safety and needs, synthesize that information with up-to-date guidance from public health officials, and make recommendations accordingly.

● The child welfare agency in Bernie Sanders' home state proposes a Trump-like approach to family separation, just when children need their families most; it's a sick response to COVID-19 that dials up emotional child abuse. 

● Unfortunately, Vermont is not alone – just more obvious about it.

            Imagine for a moment that you are a small child.  Suddenly everyone you know and love has disappeared.  Where is Mommy?  Where is Daddy?  Where are my brothers and sisters? Even for a child who can speak, let alone an infant, comprehension is almost impossible – it’s an experience akin to a kidnapping.  There can be no real comfort other than once again experiencing the chance to look Mom or Dad in the eye, experience their touch and literally feel the family’s embrace.

            To take all that from a child can leave scars to the psyche that last a lifetime.

            Who would be so cruel?  There was what the Trump Administration did to children at the Mexican border, of course.  But surely that would never happen in open-minded, progressive Vermont.

            In fact, it’s about to happen – if a proposal before the Vermont Legislature becomes law. A legislative committee has scheduled a hearing on the bill today (Tuesday, April 14 – via Zoom).  

What should properly be called the Vermont Anti-Hugging Law would inflict emotional child abuse on a grand scale by imposing a wholesale ban on almost all in-person visits between children in foster care and their parents. The proposal runs contrary to guidance from the nation’s top child welfare officials.  And it is not necessary to stop the spread of COVID-19. 

           

Other states and localities have done the same; the response to COVID-19 is the usual incoherent patchwork one expects from child welfare systems.  But Vermont – not Mississippi, not Texas – Vermont, is the first I know of to try to get this kind of institutionalized cruelty codified in state statute.

No Vermont legislator has put her or his name on the proposal yet.  But it’s pretty clear who wants it. Vermont Department of Children and Families Commissioner Ken Schatz told the House Human Services Committee that DCF previously tried – and failed – to get the state Supreme Court to impose such a ban.  Schatz said having the legislature impose the same ban he couldn’t get from the courts is “obviously something for you to consider” even though he made clear he was aware of federal guidance to the contrary.

            To understand the depths of this cruelty, it’s urgent to understand who comes into foster care.  Contrary to the common stereotype, most parents who lose their children to foster care are neither sadists, brutes nor hopeless addicts. Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with neglect.

            That helps explain why study after study has found that, in typical cases, children left in their own homes typically fare better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.  Yes, that also applies even when the issue is substance use.  

The not-so-progressive record of Vermont child welfare

            Whenever we try to take a swing at “bad parents” the blow almost always lands on the children. For decades, more than almost any other state, Vermont has come out swinging. 

            Vermont tears apart families at the third highest rate in America, a rate nearly triple the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in.   Vermont’s rate of removal is vastly higher than states that have been proven to be, relatively speaking, models for keeping children safe.  That’s partly because the more workers are overloaded investigating the cases of children who don’t need to be taken away, the less time they have to find children in real danger.

Vermont has been an extreme outlier since long before the current opioid crisis. So either Vermont is a cesspool of depravity with three times more child abuse than the rest of America, or Vermont is taking away far too many children.

            The reason the outcomes for foster children are so dismal is because the trauma of removal is so devastating.  Unlike what the Trump Administration did at the border, the people who work for Vermont DCF almost always mean well.  But that’s no comfort for children needlessly taken. They shed the same sorts of tears for the same sorts of reasons.

            In fact their only comfort is the chance to visit with their parents – to be held and to be   Visits need to be maintained to the maximum extent possible not because it’s what parents want, but because it’s what children need.

hugged.

            Yes, some case-by-case limits on in-person visits are necessary.  But, as the Children’s Bureau of the Department of Health and Human Services explains, visits are so important for children that courts should hold agencies like DCF accountable for maintaining them whenever possible and absolutely avoid blanket prohibitions of any kind – much less anti-hugging laws.

            As I’ve noted before, that can be done safely. Here’s the guidance Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, director of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama in Birmingham offered to The New York Times:

“Certainly, sick family should not visit,” said Dr. Marrazzo. “If you have vulnerable people in your family, or who are very old, then limit in-person contact.”

But if everyone in the family is young and healthy, then some careful interaction in small groups is probably OK. “The smaller the gathering, the healthier the people are to start with, the lower the risk of the situation is going to be,” she said.

 

            In contrast, Vermont DCF wants a ban on all visits unless it can be proven that this would “irreparably damage any reunification goal…” Proving this is nearly impossible in the best of times.  Now, of course, as is true in many places, most court hearings in Vermont have been suspended. And notice that, under this law, irreparable damage to the child’s mental health is not even a ground for maintaining visits. That clearly is of no concern to Vermont DCF.

In a column for Youth Today last month I noted that all over America there are people who can’t stay home during the pandemic. Some always knew their jobs carried risks, others were, in effect, drafted into the fight, such as the people who deliver mail and groceries. And then there are the people who simply volunteer — like those bringing meals to the elderly.

            DCF, on the other hand, wants to run away and effectively abandon the state’s most vulnerable children.  The response of the Vermont Department of Children and Families to COVID-19, like the response of many other child welfare systems, is sickening.

            When the Zoom meeting is over, Commissioner Schatz and the members of the Vermont House of Representatives Human Services Committee will log out and open the door to the basement, or the bedroom or wherever they go for such virtual meeetings.  Perhaps they'll let their own children in for a hug.  I hope they will think long and hard before voting to deny that comfort to the children of others.

Child welfare and coronavirus: Foster care’s COVID-19 windfall

Even as almost everyone else sacrifices, federal legislation gives a huge accidental boost to foster care funding.  But the child welfare establishment still isn’t satisfied. They want to scarf up billions more.  Some of what they’re asking for makes sense.  A lot does not.

UPDATE, JUNE 5, 2020: THINGS HAVE GOTTEN WORSE:

Most of what was good in the funding request discussed below was stripped out of the actual bill introduced by several Democratic Senators. Now there's $1.5 billion - all of it funneled through CAPTA.  And, of the $500 million that will be funneled through the worst part of CAPTA, Title I, much of it is specifically designated for child abuse investigations.

There's even a provision providing federal funds to make it easier for states to bypass the minimal due process protections for families in current state laws and force children into hidden foster care with no due process at all - as Oregon is doing now.

In a time of pandemic everyone has to sacrifice – except, of course, the foster care-industrial complex. Big Child Welfare already has reaped a big windfall, and they’re greedily scrounging for billions more.

The windfall may well have been an accident. Explaining how it happened requires another of those trips into the weeds.

The federal government throws billions of dollars at trapping children in foster care through an entitlement program called Title IV-E.  That funding stream has a variety of subsections.  For some of those subsections – including the good ones, such as paying for the cost of lawyers for children and parents – the federal government will simply reimburse the states for half the cost for every eligible child.  (Eligibility is an entire different patch of weeds – you can read about that here.)

But when it comes to IV-E funds for holding children in foster care, the reimbursement rate varies from state to state.  It ranges from 50 percent to more than 73 percent. 

Meet the FMAP

            The determination for each state is not based on anything directly to do with child welfare. States simply get the same percentage for foster care maintenance as they get for Medicaid, the health insurance program for poor people.  The calculation for each state is called the Federal Medicaid Assistance Percentage (FMAP).

           

When Congress passed the Families First Coronavirus Relief Act it raised the FMAP by 6.2 percentage points – not percent, percentage points.  That’s a good idea for Medicaid.  It’s a bad idea for foster care. Now a state that was getting back, say, 60 percent of foster care maintenance costs for every eligible child is getting 66.2 percent – nearly two-thirds of the cost.

            This exacerbates the financial incentive that sometimes exists to use foster care instead of safe proven alternatives that cost less in total dollars, but may cost a state more because it often has to pick up the entire tab.

            So the first thing Congress should do is roll back the FMAP rate increase for foster care, maintaining it only for Medicaid and for IV-E funding that can be used for prevention under the Family First Act.*  I’ll discuss what to do with the savings at the end of this post.

Beyond the FMAP windfall

            But, of course, even the FMAP windfall isn’t enough for the child welfare establishment. Led by the Children’s Defense Fund, which has one of the worst records in child welfare for getting child welfare finance wrong, Big Child Welfare is pushing for more than $3 billion over and above the windfall.  Some of that new spending would make sense. Some would go to good programs. But some would fund good programs in a bad way. And some of the funds would just mean more money for the child welfare surveillance state.

            Let’s start with the good parts. They propose $500 million $1 billion more for the Promoting Safe and Stable Families Program, which I discuss in detail at the end of this post.  There also is a call to spend $500 million to help foster youth “aging out” of the system. Granted, this is largely funding to try to undo some of the damage the system did to these young people in the first place, but we owe it to those youth to try. There also are proposals for small increases to programs to help kinship foster parents and to improve the functioning of juvenile courts.

Relying on CAPTA

            The bad parts have to do both with what is funded and how it’s funded.  Fully half the $3 billion would be funneled through the so-called Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act – an odious little law which this proposal would turn into an odious bigger law.

            CAPTA codifies everything wrong with America’s approach to child welfare. CAPTA encourages the failed system of mandatory reporting. CAPTA encourages the use of Court-Appointed Special Advocates, a program that studies have found to be a failure, and which entrenches racial and class bias in child welfare. CAPTA encourages blacklists of alleged child abusers that are far too easy to get on and far too hard to get off – causing enormous additional hardships for impoverished families. And CAPTA encourages laws and policies that terrorize pregnant women away from seeking prenatal care, and inflict needless foster care on children during precisely the time in their lives those need their families most – their infancy. 

            CAPTA’s only redeeming feature is that it speaks loudly but carries a small stick.  Because the amount it awards in grants is relatively small, there is relatively little incentive for states to do the harm that CAPTA demands (though many states gladly inflict such harm anyway).

            By proposing to funnel $1.5 billion in additional funds through CAPTA, CDF and other groups are increasing the temptation for states to do things like enact “Plan of Safe Care” provisions – classic Orwellian child welfare-speak for harassing pregnant women who do things such as smoke marijuana to ease the pain of labor or take legally-prescribed medication as part of treatment for opioid addiction.  Bolstering CAPTA also impedes efforts to, at long last, reconsider failed approaches such as mandatory reporting laws.

            There are, however, ways to salvage the additional spending by channeling it into better alternatives.

Title by title

            CAPTA has two titles. Title I is the more troublesome.  The demands to do all the cruddy stuff CAPTA requires apply to getting money under Title I. 

            As for what states can get, what is so striking about the programs eligible for funding is what a hot mess this whole title has become.  It’s an incoherent jumble of projects that appears to have been cobbled together based on who could get the sympathetic ear of a powerful member of Congress for their pet program.

           

There’s a huge list of topics eligible for “research” grants.  Most of them are likely to accomplish nothing except help social work professors get tenure.  At least one is so narrow it reads as though it were written just to accommodate someone’s specific proposal.

            This title also includes grants for various services. There are a couple of good ones, but also a lot of the  usual “help” that primarily helps the helpers and can actually make things worse for families. 

            CDF wants to pour $500 million more into this title alone.  That would be a big mistake. Most of that money almost certainly would go to a combination of pointless research and further bloating the child welfare surveillance state.  If the only choices are spending $500 million on Title I of CAPTA or not spending the money at all, the less detrimental alternative is not to spend the money at all.  I will suggest other options below.

            CDF wants to spend another $1 billion on Title II of CAPTA. That is less problematic. States can get Title II funding without having to comply with all the awful requirements to harm families that are required to get Title I funds.  And the types of programs eligible for this funding include some that are marginally useful and, it appears, none that does actual damage.  So Title II passes what I call the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy test: It’s mostly harmless.

            But the act of pumping more money into any part of CAPTA bolsters its prominence and the influence of its ugly mandates. So it’s still a bad idea to funnel money through CAPTA.

Better ways to spend $2 billion

            There are ways to use $2 billion that really will help prevent child abuse.  The best approach of all would be to just send cash.

            Over and over we’re reading about how supposedly, because COVID-19 will plunge more people into poverty, they will take it out on their children.  And that, of course, is on top of the massive confusion of poverty with neglect even in normal times.

            Given the extent to which the problem is poverty, you don’t suppose the solution might be – money?  As a matter of fact, yes. 

Study after study has shown us the transformative power of cash, especially when social workers don’t get in the way.  So the best use of an extra $2 billion would be in the form of a fund targeted toward families considered most at risk of what the system calls “abuse” or “neglect.” Those funds could be used to provide emergency cash for things like child care, housing, and other basic necessities.    This kind of approach, known as flex-funds, is at the heart of the pioneering reforms that helped transform child welfare in Alabama.

            Since Congress is not likely to go for that, the second best option would be, again, to put the money into the federal government’s only funding stream that is, mostly, geared to prevention and family preservation, not punishment and surveillance: the Promoting Safe and Stable Families Act (PSSF) which is part of a funding stream known as Title-IVB.

            Those funds can be used for family support, family preservation, reunification and adoption.  But no, adoption can’t scarf up the whole pie; at least 20 percent of funds must be spent in each category – and, in fact, states have, on average divided the funding fairly evenly across the four categories.

            Most notably, in the most difficult cases, where cash alone is not enough, both PSSF money and Family First money can be spent on the Homebuilders Intensive Family Preservation Services program.

The clearinghouse for determining if programs are sufficiently “evidence based” to get funding under Family First has given its highest rating Homebuilders.  Two other clearinghouses also have given the program high ratings. These NCCPR Issue Papers explain what Homebuilders is and the mass of evidence that it works

The very term “family preservation” was coined to apply to this program, which dates all the way back to 1974. It had the potential to transform child welfare.  For that very reason it was marginalized, thanks to a smear campaign by the child welfare establishment. Needless to say there is no mention of Homebuilders in CAPTA.

Still another good use for $2 billion would be a fund for drug treatment, with an emphasis on programs in which parents and children can live together, including in-home treatment.

Aside from simple payments of cash, it’s hard to imagine a better use for $2 billion in new child welfare spending than Homebuilders and drug treatment.

A chance to do better

The massive dislocations caused by COVID-19 are an almost unimaginable tragedy.  But this also is a chance to reimagine child welfare and make it better.

During an American Bar Association Webinar last week, Jerry Milner, who runs the Children’s Bureau in the Department of Health and Human Services, said that after the crisis is over “We’re not going to go back to normal – that’s good. Our normal wasn’t working.”  Said his Special Assistant, David Kelly: “This crisis is an opportunity to awaken collective compassion and better see ourselves in the families and young people we work with ... It's a defining moment; we can seize it."

 It is a testament to the lack of courage, imagination and vision from the child welfare establishment that they have no interest in seizing the moment to make the system better.  All they can think of are ways to make the same lousy system even bigger.

*-According to CDF, Family First funding only gets a 50 percent match. It won’t be reimbursed at the FMAP rate until 2027 – one more illustration of the real priorities in American child welfare.

NCCPR in Youth Today: COVID-19 Surfaces Child Welfare’s Ugly Biases About Race, Class

“The Coronavirus Could Cause a Child Abuse Epidemic”

—Headline on opinion column, New York Times

“We must not allow a public health pandemic to become an abuse pandemic.”

—Globe & Mail columnist in Toronto

“We cannot let a health pandemic become a child abuse pandemic!”

—Sheriff in Texas on Twitter

 “I’ve read some articles where it said this a coronavirus pandemic. I also read it could become a child abuse pandemic.”

—Georgia director of a child advocacy center

Well, yes. By now, just about everyone must have read some version of the hype and hysteria around the fact that, thanks to COVID-19, fewer mostly white, middle-class “eyes” will be on children who are overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately nonwhite.

What this kind of hysteria really shows us is the extent to which racial and class biases permeate child welfare and our perceptions of the families caught up in the child welfare system. That claims of a “pandemic” of abuse are amplified in news coverage with no thought to what people making those claims are really saying should give us pause, too.

Read the full column in Youth Today

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, April 6 – 8, 2020

With so much news, I’m adding a second round-up this week: 

● First and foremost, I hope everyone reads this clarion call from top federal child welfare officials. The message from Children’s Bureau Associate Commissioner Jerry Milner and his Special Assistant, David Kelly: NO, you should not ban all visits, NO, you should not delay reunification hearings, YES you must still make reasonable efforts to keep families together. Or as they put it: "We cannot allow the coronavirus to serve as a modern-day orphan train that leads to the redistribution of other people’s children.”  (And wait ‘till you read what they wrote about the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act!)

● Milner and Kelly will be among the participants in an American Bar Association webinar today (Thursday, April 9) at 11:00 am Eastern on how child welfare should respond to COVID-19.

● In California, it looks like the courts have gotten the message.  The Chronicle of Social Change reports that the state’s Judicial Council has issued guidelines requiring some reunification hearings to go forward and prohibiting blanket bans on visiting.

● But they have not gotten the message in places such as metropolitan Seattle.  In an excellent column for the Seattle Times, Naomi Ishisaka quotes attorney S. Annie Chung:

A vast majority … of the families that are in the dependency system are actually struggling with the effects of poverty and structural racism.  These families are struggling, but they’re not bad parents. They don’t have less love or less of a bond with their children.

Ishisaka concludes:

Poverty should not be punished with the lasting psychological and emotional damage of family separation. In the meantime, a one-size-fits-all visitation policy will not work.

● And speaking of structural racism: In story after story, “experts,” journalists and headline writers suggest that as soon as white middle-class professionals don’t constantly have their “eyes” on overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite children, those children’s parents will unleash their savagery upon those children – because, you know, “they” are not quite as civilized as “we” are.  One district attorney even suggested the parents were like “violent gorilla[s].” I write in Youth Today about how COVID-19 surfaces child welfare’s ugly biases about race and class

● And finally: April Lee is Peer Parent Advocate in the Family Advocacy Unit (FAU) of Community Legal Services of Philadelphia.  She’s also a poet, who does readings throughout Philadelphia.  Here’s a poem she wrote about families separated by foster care in a time of pandemic – and the lawyers fighting to bring them together.

Child welfare and COVID-19: “Millions of voices are going unheard"

“No Pandemic or Epidemic can stop a Parent for wanting to hold their Child, or a Child wanting to be held by his or her Parent.”

April Lee is Peer Parent Advocate in the Family Advocacy Unit (FAU) of Community Legal Services of Philadelphia.  She’s also a poet, who does readings throughout Philadelphia.  She wrote this for the lawyers in the FAU. Those lawyers – and Ms. Lee - fight to keep families together in the place that tears them apart at the highest rate among America’s top five cities. 

She wrote it for the lawyers. But everyone should read it:

Advocacy has changed in the face of this Pandemic; so has, Life itself. I believe that our Job is more Crucial than ever. Millions of voices are going unheard.

It is Great People like You; that are bringing truth to the ears, that are able to hear. It is You, that brings focus to a picture, in front of those who cannot see. These truths are often simple ones.

Truth: That no Pandemic or Epidemic can stop a Parent for wanting to hold their Child, or a Child wanting to be held by his or her Parent.

Truth: That Six Degrees of Separation, feels like 1000 miles of lost and pain; and  that " Six Degrees Of Separation", can create years of distance, making it hard to close the gap. The Gap: Created by people who have never known the hopeless feeling that stems from being  truly separated.

My Hat comes off, to every one of YOU who are building a Bridge for families to come together; even though they are apart.

It is people like you that reminds me that " the struggle continue yet, Victory is certain".

                                                                                              I APPLAUD YOU, FAU

NCCPR News and commentary round-up, week ending April 5, 2020

● FIRST UP A REMINDER: On Thursday, April 9 at 11:00am Eastern, Jerry Milner, the federal government’s point person for child welfare, will be among the panelists on an American Bar Association webinar about child welfare’s response to COVID-19.  Other panelists are Milner’s special assistant David Kelly, Kathleen Creamer of Community Legal Services of Philadelphia and Judge Ernestine Gray, aka The child welfare judge who actually follows the law.

● Milner  sent out this great letter to courts and child welfare agencies urging them not to impose blanket bans on court hearings to reunify families and wholesale bans on visits between foster children and their parents. Unfortunately, many child welfare agencies are ignoring this guidance and one is outright lying about what the guidance says. Can you guess which one?

● Most local news stories about child welfare and COVID-19 have one obsession: The false claim that with schools closed children are at risk of falling victim to what some have called “A pandemic of child abuse.”  Last week I noted some commendable exceptions.  Now, there are a few more: 

The websites of both ABC News and NBC News looked at the enormous harm being done to families by those court delays and cancellation of visits. (And you can read more here about the case at the center of ABC’s story.) Locally there were stories from The Day in New London, CT, the online news site BillyPenn (which is how I found out the Philadelphia child welfare agency is lying about federal guidance – oops, gave it away!) and WHYY Public Radio, also in Philadelphia.

● There is an excellent commentary in the Houston Chronicle on not confusing poverty with neglect during this time of exceptional need – and it’s from the CEO of Texas Court-Appointed Special Advocates (CASA).  Yes, I’m serious about this.

● Also from Texas, Andrew Brown, director of the Center for Families and Children at the Texas Public Policy Foundation has a column in the San Antonio Express News on how courts should respond to the current crisis.

● Once the pandemic is over a lot of people will be looking for jobs.  Thanks to years of effort by family advocates and family defenders, that will be a little less difficult for some impoverished parents in New York State. 

Under a new law it will be a little harder to be placed on the state’s massive blacklist of people who allegedly abused or neglected their children, and a little easier to get taken off when the listing is unjust – as it often is. In other words, during this “Child Abuse Prevention Month,” New York is helping prevent what child welfare agencies often define as child abuse by helping impoverished families provide food, clothing and shelter for their children. The Chronicle of Social Change has a story about the new law. 

● And speaking of Child Abuse Prevention Month, I’ve reposted NCCPR’s annual reminder not to succumb to the hype and hysteria that so often accompanies it – a reminder that has extra relevance this year.

In other news

● Long after the pandemic is over, we may find that the most important child welfare news last week had nothing to do with COVID-19.  I have long criticized the Family First Act as overhyped and not likely to do much good.  That’s because only a narrow range of services can be funded under the act and they have to meet extremely strict criteria proving they are “evidence based.”  (If the same criteria were applied to foster care and residential treatment neither would get a dime of federal funding.)

Last week, one of the most important and most effective programs in child welfare qualified. The clearinghouse for determining if programs are sufficiently “evidence based” to get funding under the law has given its highest rating to the Homebuilders Intensive Family Preservation Services (IFPS) program.  These NCCPR Issue Papers explain what Homebuilders is and the mass of evidence that it works

The very term “family preservation” was coined to apply to this program, which dates all the way back to 1974. It had the potential to transform child welfare.  For that very reason it was marginalized, thanks to a smear campaign by the child welfare establishment.  Homebuilders and drug treatment are almost the only programs Family First will fund that might actually do some good.  So I hope advocates will press states to put the bulk of Family First funding into those programs.