The Adoption and Safe Families Act or ASFA (1997) is focus of this policy analysis paper. The author provides a thorough policy analysis of ASFA and its negative affects on African American families. Policy history, statistics, and recommendations, is also discussed.
The Adoption and Safe Families Act or ASFA (1997) is focus of this policy analysis paper. The author provides a thorough policy analysis of ASFA and its negative affects on African American families. Policy history, statistics, and recommendations, is also discussed.
1.6 Improving Outcomes for Youth Aging Out of Foster Care
Speaker: Brenda Fonseca
Nearly 28,000 youth emancipated from foster care in 2010, and it is imperative that they have access to services, affordable housing options, education, and employment to prepare them to live independently. Communities that have extended foster care to older youth under the Fostering Connections Act and that are creatively using resources to increase housing opportunities will discuss their successes and lessons learned.
Beyond Quick Fixes: What Will It Really Take To Improve Child Welfare In Amer...Public Consulting Group
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Leadership of a child protection agency is critical in setting the agenda and maintaining focus,
particularly in challenging times. Often, a new leader of an agency will accept the position
during a period of turmoil. In most cases, there is little opportunity or time for successful
succession planning. The opportunity for a change of direction, regardless of how it comes
about, is often healthy for an administration. It provides an opportunity for change and
transformation.
Given the extremely complex nature of the child protection system, a new agency leader should
move forward with four initial steps: 1) Establish or re-affirm the agency’s vision and mission;
2) Get to know the organization: its culture, status, reputation, and operational capabilities as
well as the environment in which it operates; 3) Select the priorities and agency initiatives to
move forward; and 4) make a plan for doing so.
SET THE VISION AND MISSION
A new agency leader’s first step should be to define the organization’s vision and mission. If
these already exist, he or she should carefully evaluate them to make sure they align with the
agency’s many responsibilities as well as his or her own ideas for the direction of the
organization. Evaluating the agency’s structure and its ability to support and meet
responsibilities and initiatives is a critical step in setting the agency’s vision and mission.
KNOW THE ORGANIZATION
There are literally dozens and dozens of programs, policies, issues, practices, and opportunities
for an agency leader to consider. In order to develop priorities, leaders must first assess the
“as-is” state of their organization and the environment in which it functions. Important factors
to consider include:
•The political and economic climate
•Workforce Capacity, particularly the capacity and professionalization of caseworkers in the
organization
•Agency culture, traditions, and readiness for change
•Current technology and data capacity and issues
CHOOSE AGENCY PRIORITIES
Leadership has the responsibility to decide which programs, services, products, opportunities, or
philosophies the organization will focus on. Categorizing the options being considered as
critical, important, or supportive becomes an important task of leadership. Those that are
critical, must be the focus of the agency leader. The following are suggested critical priorities.
•Establish caseworkers’ case load standards
•Develop data and metric reporting
•Utilize predictive analytics
•Invest in technology
•Develop a practice model
•Improve media relations
•Invest in services that work
•Develop a process to respond to fatalities and tragic events
While there certainly are other considerations for designating priorities within a leader’s vision
and mission in determining those priorities to be critical, eventually a solid
1.6 Improving Outcomes for Youth Aging Out of Foster Care
Speaker: Brenda Fonseca
Nearly 28,000 youth emancipated from foster care in 2010, and it is imperative that they have access to services, affordable housing options, education, and employment to prepare them to live independently. Communities that have extended foster care to older youth under the Fostering Connections Act and that are creatively using resources to increase housing opportunities will discuss their successes and lessons learned.
Beyond Quick Fixes: What Will It Really Take To Improve Child Welfare In Amer...Public Consulting Group
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Leadership of a child protection agency is critical in setting the agenda and maintaining focus,
particularly in challenging times. Often, a new leader of an agency will accept the position
during a period of turmoil. In most cases, there is little opportunity or time for successful
succession planning. The opportunity for a change of direction, regardless of how it comes
about, is often healthy for an administration. It provides an opportunity for change and
transformation.
Given the extremely complex nature of the child protection system, a new agency leader should
move forward with four initial steps: 1) Establish or re-affirm the agency’s vision and mission;
2) Get to know the organization: its culture, status, reputation, and operational capabilities as
well as the environment in which it operates; 3) Select the priorities and agency initiatives to
move forward; and 4) make a plan for doing so.
SET THE VISION AND MISSION
A new agency leader’s first step should be to define the organization’s vision and mission. If
these already exist, he or she should carefully evaluate them to make sure they align with the
agency’s many responsibilities as well as his or her own ideas for the direction of the
organization. Evaluating the agency’s structure and its ability to support and meet
responsibilities and initiatives is a critical step in setting the agency’s vision and mission.
KNOW THE ORGANIZATION
There are literally dozens and dozens of programs, policies, issues, practices, and opportunities
for an agency leader to consider. In order to develop priorities, leaders must first assess the
“as-is” state of their organization and the environment in which it functions. Important factors
to consider include:
•The political and economic climate
•Workforce Capacity, particularly the capacity and professionalization of caseworkers in the
organization
•Agency culture, traditions, and readiness for change
•Current technology and data capacity and issues
CHOOSE AGENCY PRIORITIES
Leadership has the responsibility to decide which programs, services, products, opportunities, or
philosophies the organization will focus on. Categorizing the options being considered as
critical, important, or supportive becomes an important task of leadership. Those that are
critical, must be the focus of the agency leader. The following are suggested critical priorities.
•Establish caseworkers’ case load standards
•Develop data and metric reporting
•Utilize predictive analytics
•Invest in technology
•Develop a practice model
•Improve media relations
•Invest in services that work
•Develop a process to respond to fatalities and tragic events
While there certainly are other considerations for designating priorities within a leader’s vision
and mission in determining those priorities to be critical, eventually a solid
After reading the report on services in Georgia, write a short paper.docxADDY50
After reading the report on services in Georgia, write a short paper that provides a summary of what it says. Explain how a market analysis was accomplished, how this information was used to determine the outcome of existing services, and how it was used to design services. Then provide an opinion on how this information could be useful in advocating for expansion of services.
Executive Summary
This report details the results of a mixed-method community outreach effort conducted by the Georgia Health Policy Center (GHPC) as part of The Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta’s Champions for Children with Exceptional Needs Initiative (Champions).
The purpose of this outreach effort is (1) to provide a systematic examination of the existing gaps in service and support for families with medically fragile and special needs children in Georgia and (2) to compile a list of service delivery options gathered from the community outreach efforts that could be provided to families through the funding of an appropriate nonprofit or network of nonprofits across Georgia. The report will be shared with The Community Foundation and the Champions Advisory Committee to guide them in the distribution of at least $2.2 million that has been appropriated by the Georgia Legislature to meet the needs of this population.
Data collection for the Initiative used both quantitative and qualitative approaches to explore the experience of families with special needs and medically fragile children. The quantitative component included a Medicaid claims analysis of children eligible for the Katie Beckett Waiver program during Calendar Year 2005. The qualitative data collection methods for the community outreach effort included:
Three focus groups with parents of special needs and medically fragile children;
Sixteen Key Informant interviews with parents, advocates, representatives from local and
state-wide non-profit agencies and medical providers;
Two community forums structured to present data collected in the needs assessment and
outreach and gather suggestions/feedback from community members regarding possible service delivery models.
Medicaid Claims Analysis
Findings from the Medicaid claims analysis of children who received services through the Katie Beckett Waiver program in 2005 exemplify the needs of many medically-fragile children in Georgia. In Calendar Year 2005 (CY2005), there were 6,572 children enrolled in Medicaid through the Katie Beckett class of assistance. The descriptive analysis of the Katie Beckett enrollees found that:
95% (6,130) of the Katie Beckett children submitted at least one Medicaid claim during the year. The top two diagnoses, specific delays in development and psychoses with origin specific to childhood (infantile autism, disintegrative psychosis and schizophrenia) comprise 28% of all the outpatient claims.
The average Medicaid reimbursement per Katie Beckett recipient was $5,033 in CY2005. The services that Medicaid paid .
PCG Human Services White Paper - Cross-System Approaches That Promote Child W...Public Consulting Group
Child welfare agencies can successfully partner with Medicaid and managed care organizations to address the complex health and behavioral needs of children who experience maltreatment. If prevention and intervention efforts are applied early and effectively, these high-risk children and youth may avoid costly health conditions and experience improved health and psychological outcomes.
Child abuse and neglect is an important concern that negatively affects the physical and psychological well-being of a population that is already vulnerable. Increased preventive services to children in high-risk households can help states minimize the cost of health/medical services to deep-end youth, reduce the number of children with chronic medical conditions and can improve general well-being outcomes. Providing targeted prevention programs and interventions to these children of at-risk families have been shown to reduce the cost of providing intensive services to children with poor health outcomes later on.
Children who are investigated for maltreatment or enter the child welfare system have greater health needs. Children investigated by the welfare system have been found to have 1.5 times more chronic health conditions than the general population. After controlling for other risk factors, children with maltreatment reports have a 74-100% higher risk of hospital treatment. Over 28% of children involved with maltreatment investigations are diagnosed with chronic health conditions during the three years following the investigation.
2 0 1 6 S t a t e Fa c t S h e e t sChild Care in America.docxvickeryr87
2 0 1 6 S t a t e Fa c t S h e e t s
Child Care in America:
Every week in the United States, child care providers care for nearly 11
million children younger than age 5 whose parents are working. On
average, these children spend 36 hours a week in child care, and one
quarter (nearly 3 million) are in multiple child care arrangements due to
the traditional and nontraditional working hours of their parents.1
Research has continually illustrated the importance of quality early
experiences in achieving good health, especially within the most
vulnerable populations. Families, child care providers and state and
federal policymakers share responsibility for the safety and wellbeing
of children while they are in child care settings. Basic state
requirements and oversight help lay the foundation necessary to
protect children and promote their healthy development while in child
care.
The Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) program
serves approximately 1.45 million children annually in communities
across the country. CCDBG is the primary federal grant program that
provides child care assistance for families and funds child care quality
initiatives. Funds are administered to states in formula block grants,
and states use the grants to subsidize child care for low-income
working families.
In November 2014, President Barack Obama signed S.1086, the Child
Care and Development Block Grant Act of 2014 into law. The new law
includes several measures focused on quality, including requiring
states to:
Promote quality child care by increasing activities to improve
the care, enhancing states’ ability to train providers and develop
safer and more effective child care services.
Strengthen health and safety requirements in child care
programs and providers.
Improve access to child care by expanding eligibility for
participating families and helping families connect with quality
programs that meet their needs by enhancing consumer
education, providing greater options for quality child care and
working to ensure continuity of care, essential for both the well-
being and stability of a child.2
With the new federal child care measures set to take effect, states are
rapidly building, evaluating, and changing their early care and
education quality focused systems (Quality Rating and Improvement
System (QRIS), professional development, licensing and standards).
Implementation of the new regulations must align with these efforts for
sustainability and maximum impact.
Over the past several years, Child Care Aware® of America has
surveyed and conducted focus groups with parents of young children,
grandparents, national child advocacy organizations, and state and
local Child Care Resource and Referral (CCR&R) agencies. Those
conversations underscored that child care is an essential building block
1 U.S.
Running Head CALWORKS FAMILY BENEFIT PROGRAM1CALWORKS FAMILY.docxhealdkathaleen
Running Head: CALWORKS FAMILY BENEFIT PROGRAM1
CALWORKS FAMILY BENEFIT PROGRAM 14
CalWORKs Family Benefit Program
Name
Institution
Date
Abstract
CalWORKs family benefits program refers to a public welfare scheme that offers financial help and services to families that meet the eligibility criteria and which have children in their homes. It is based in California state in the United States of America. The program caters to the entire population of the families within the state that meets the eligibility criteria for welfare. The primary population that is targeted by the program includes families that live under the federal poverty level while they have children in the homes. The main purpose of the program is to extend the assistance of different kinds to such families ranging from financial help, employment programs, housing needs, food, and medical services among others (Mojica, 2017).
The program is affected by different policies, some of which facilitate its activities while others hamper effective operations of the program. The bottom-line of the policies is program funding. The program is jointly funded by all government levels from the federal government to the state government of California as well as the county governments within California. The paper is mainly oriented towards studying the policies that guide CalWORKs. This includes its deficiencies and some policy suggestions that would further improve the efficiency of the program.
CalWORKs Family Benefit Program
Introduction
CalWORKs refers to a welfare program whose main purpose is providing financial help and facilities to needy families within California. The program runs in all counties within California whereby it is headed by county welfare departments at local levels. The help provided may be short-term or continual. Short term help occurs whereby the family in need requires no or fewer amounts of money, housing, food, utilities, clothes or healthcare services. A family that applies and qualifies for continuous help receives some amount of money every month such as house rent, food and other basic expenses (Pizzolato, Olson & Monje-Paulson, 2017).
There are requirements that the family applying for the assistance needs to attain for the to be eligible to receive the help. The most important of them is that the involved persons must be citizens of the United States of America, permanent resident, or legal noncitizen and precisely from the state of California. Additionally, they must fall under the low or very low-income earning category. They should be either unemployed, about to get unemployed or under-employed. The program also extends help to expectant persons, those with children below eighteen years of age and even those that are eighteen years old but are the heads of their families (Gutiérrez, 2016). This paper aims at describing the issues that affect policy formulation and implementation as far as the operations of the program are concerned.
Statement ...
Similar to PCG Human Services Child Welfare Finance Reform White Paper (20)
Running Head CALWORKS FAMILY BENEFIT PROGRAM1CALWORKS FAMILY.docx
PCG Human Services Child Welfare Finance Reform White Paper
1. CHILD WELFARE FINANCE REFORM:
PAYING FOR WHAT WORKS
By Judge James Payne, Public Consulting Group, Inc.
A response to “When Child Welfare Works: A Working Paper” by the
Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative
Summary: Recently, the Annie E. Casey Foundation and Jim Casey Youth
Opportunities Initiative released an innovative and groundbreaking proposal
for federal finance reform. Over the last several years, child welfare experts
and advocates have been addressing the philosophy and process by which the
federal government helps fund the child welfare system at the state and local
level. Concerns have primarily addressed federal finance reform by suggesting
a vast overhaul of how child welfare services are funded on the front-end to
better align to the principles by which the federal government has encouraged
the improvement of state and local systems.
The Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative
(hereinafter referred to as “Casey”) presented their proposals on October 23,
2013 in Washington DC. The document containing their proposals is titled,
“When Child Welfare Works: A Working Paper – A Proposal to Finance Best
Practices” (hereinafter referred to as “Working Paper”). This proposal deserves
the utmost consideration by child welfare professionals and advocates, elected
officials, budget personnel, and anyone interested in improving the care and
services for children who are at risk of being or who have been abused or
neglected. PCG examined the Casey report and its recommendations. In
this paper, we review the merits and implications of each recommendation
to promote discussion of the system’s future. Because of the extraordinary
importance that this Working Paper has to the child protection and child welfare
community, PCG has provided an extensive report and analysis here to facilitate
continued discussion and consideration of the implications of this proposal.
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7. CHILD WELFARE FINANCE REFORM: PAYING FOR WHAT WORKS
• Medicaid. Medicaid remains an essential support for agencies
addressing the needs of abused and neglected children. It not
only provides many of the services for mental health care or
treatment for children and family members, but it also provides
services for programs such as Early and Periodic Screening,
Diagnostic, and Treatment that are not uniformly provided or
implemented because of the variation in state plans. Medicaid
agencies, in partnership with the state and local child
protection agencies should be required to submit a plan for
how the needs of children, birth parents, and foster families
will be met and how family-based care can be encouraged.
• Reinvestment of Federal Penalties. Rather than penalize
states or local agencies when services fail to meet standards,
Casey recommends that those funds not be forfeited and
instead be used and monitored by the federal authorities
to ensure that improvements are made through a Program
Improvement Plan.
Changes to Department of Health and Human Services
Reporting. Casey recommends that DHHS provide a more
detailed and specific accounting of state expenditures of Title
IV-B Part 1 to promote a better understanding of what is being
done to support a high-quality workforce for the agencies. In
addition, Casey recommends that DHHS provide more detailed
reports on key indicators of family foster homes, caseloads, and
caseworker retention.
This recommendation is particularly important because it
addresses the issue of documentation of caseworker support
and workload. Some states record caseworker turnover on
different criteria which may not include caseworkers who move
to a different region or area, caseworkers who advance to the
supervisor level, or caseworkers who leave the agency for reasons
such as going back to school or a spouse has been transferred
to another state. The issue of turnover actually has more to do
with the fact that relationships are built between caseworkers
and children and families; anything that disrupts that continuity
creates confusion and conflict often delays permanency or
changes the very direction of service delivery.
However, many believe the issue of caseload size is far more
important. From the first round of the CFSR, the federal
government came to the conclusion that two things matter for
safety and permanency of a child and family involved in the
system: caseworker visits to children and caseworker visits to
families. Both are significantly impacted by high caseloads. While
148 State Street, Tenth Floor
Boston, Massachusetts 02109
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Copyright Public Consulting Group, Inc.
there is no uniformly established national standard, there are
recommendations from some organizations. Most prominently,
the Child Welfare League of America recommends caseloads
of 12 families for investigations or assessments, 17 children for
ongoing cases, and 14 cases for a mixed caseload. When workload
within each category increases, caseloads get too high, which
diminishes caseworkers’ capacity to fulfill the responsibilities of
policy and practice. Reporting these numbers would become a
critical part of system improvement and accountability.
Finally, Casey recommends that DHHS require disproportionality
reporting. While there has been much documented progress
on the issue of disproportionality, the reports provided
generally do not provide sufficient information to demonstrate
disproportionality across the continuum of child welfare services
which include investigation, substantiation, removal from home,
placement into group care, reunification, adoption, and aging
out. The recommendation is that states be required to report
on any plan to address the issues of disproportionality and the
progress made in eliminating these disparities.
CONCLUSION
Major child welfare financing reform is expected in the future.
Hopefully, Title IV-E waivers will provide lessons that can inform
the system as a whole. Any reforms, including those highlighted
here, will require changes both to case practice and administrative
processes, which will ripple through the system from state and local
agencies to private providers and ultimately to children and families.
Child welfare agencies have already demonstrated their capacity
for change. Foster care placements have declined sharply in
recent years, and many agencies have accepted the challenge
of developing and implementing demonstration projects that
allow them to waive certain Title IV-E reimbursement federal
requirements in exchange for implementing innovative programs
that improve outcomes for children and families. Child welfare
agencies must stay apprised of financing reform developments,
share and discuss the implications of reform, and continue to
prepare for more change.