Arizona has a three-pronged plan to put fewer kids in shelters and group homes — but child welfare experts say it doesn’t go far enough.
The Arizona Department of Child Safety wants to do three things:
- Train families who have successfully navigated the child welfare system to mentor others currently in the system.
- Help parents and children in struggling families deal with the effects of trauma in their lives.
- Teach “motivational interviewing” techniques to help child welfare workers encourage and better engage with troubled families.
Those are all excellent ideas, said Tracey Feild, director of child welfare strategy with the Annie E. Casey Foundation, but they don’t directly address the many children and teens living without any family support.
“All of these strategies include really important skills and are very valuable, but I don’t think any of them specifically target reductions in group care,” she said.
The state’s recently submitted proposals are part of an ongoing effort to gain more flexibility with federal funding, which would be used to help shrink shelter and group home numbers. Last August, the Department of Child Safety asked the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for a waiver on how it spends money on foster children. The request was granted, contingent on the state setting up a plan to reduce congregate care numbers.
High Arizona number
Arizona continues to have a high number of kids in congregate care. Pima County is at more than twice the national average, with 553 teens and children living in shelters and group homes as of March 31, DCS records show. Statewide, there were 2,521 on that day.
That’s an increase from June 2014, when there were 537 kids and teens in congregate care here, and about 2,100 statewide.
During 2013, DCS records show 50 percent of those in congregate care were ages 13 to 17, while 30 percent were ages 6 to 12 and 20 percent were ages newborn to 5. About 53 percent lived in a shelter, and 45 percent were in group homes. The rest were in therapeutic group homes or residential treatment programs.
Pima County leads the state in group placement, with 31 percent of children taken into custody for the first time winding up in group care. In Maricopa County, the rate is close to 20 percent, and in Pinal County, it’s about 12 percent, records show.
Nationally, the average number of displaced children in group care is 15 percent, the Casey Foundation reports, and some states are as low as 5-7 percent.
Congregate care, in addition to being a poor remedy for children and teens in crisis, is also expensive: DCS pays an average of $123 per day for each group home placement, while the cost per day in a licensed foster family is about $23 per day for the 17,000 children in out-of-home care statewide.
Feild said using congregate care money earlier in the process could help more families stay intact.
“If you could switch that money to the front end, you probably wouldn’t have to spend more than you are spending now and would be providing much better services for Arizona’s kids and their families,” she said.
Foundation’s ideas
The Casey Foundation’s latest report, “Every Kid Needs a Family,” outlines three recommendations for reducing congregate care numbers: provide more clinical services to families in danger of removals, focus more funding and attention on building foster and kinship family networks, and create more placement decision-making teams to better determine whether a child needs to be removed in the first place.
Children in group care “miss out on routines like dinner around the table, having friends over after school or having private space to study or daydream,” said Dana Wolfe Naimark, president of Arizona’s Children’s Action Alliance.
These children and teens are also at greater risk of being abused, and studies show they are at higher risk for delinquency as well as over-reliance on psychotropic medication.
Arizona’s plan has not yet been approved. DHS representatives will visit Arizona in August, said DCS spokesman Doug Nick.
Nick said the interventions DCS is proposing are based on national research and would be used to both keep more children at home and better assist children and their families after a removal.
“This is going to be an ongoing process for a good while,” he said, adding that DCS welcomes feedback from other organizations like the Annie E. Casey Foundation, as well as from Arizona child welfare organizations. “We definitely want to be collaborative, and we encourage their input.”
Other states have created ways to find and license kinship families faster, within 24-48 hours. That helps more children avoid staying at a group home or shelter, said Beth Rosenberg, director of child welfare and juvenile justice policy with the Children’s Action Alliance.
“We have many, many kids in relative placements, but they are not licensed as foster parents and so don’t get as much help,” she said. “We also bring many kids into care who wouldn’t need to be in care if they had supportive services in their own homes.”
