Assessing the Context of Permanency and Reunification in the Foster Care System

Publication Date

Nov 30, 2001

Executive Summary

In the 1990s, officials at the state and federal levels were concerned that despite state efforts and enactment of the 1980 Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act (AACWA), the number of children entering the child welfare system continued to rise, and children lingered in foster care for an extended period of time. The Congress responded to these concerns with the Adoption and Safe Families Act 1997 (ASFA). ASFA amended the 1980 Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act by refocusing efforts to promote safety and permanence for children in the foster care system. Of primary importance was addressing cases where children still lingered in the foster care system for an extended period of time or had returned to foster care after a previous placement because of an unsafe family situation. ASFA's intent is to promote permanent placements for children. To reach this end, the law included criteria to further define when efforts to preserve and reunify a family are required, outlined the court's discretion to make decisions on a child's permanency based on safety considerations, and provided financial incentives to states to increase the number of adoptions.

States' efforts to address the needs of children in foster care and to prevent further maltreatment are dominated by the concept of permanency. Children should be afforded living arrangements that are nurturing and long lasting. Foster care itself is not considered an appropriate permanency plan, so the intention in most cases is to move the child into other circumstances. There are many options: reunification with parents, placement with relatives, legal guardianship by relatives or others, independent living, adoption. Not all options are available for every child, but there is usually more than one, so decisions need to be made. Child welfare professionals prefer to return the child home safely whenever that is possible, so in most cases that is the alternative that is explored first. Usually at least some work is attempted with the birth parents (or other original caretakers) directed at making return home possible. If work with the parents proves unsuccessful, other alternatives are sought.

The research presented in this report is a compendium of six papers that, as a group, provide a description of current reunification efforts in the foster care system and assess the status of reunification in permanency policy and practice. The papers address six main components:

Identification and examination of reunification practice and services in 25 states,
An analysis of the patterns of reunification and reentry to track experiences of children in foster care,
An exploration of the role of race in reunification,
An examination of the reunification case decision making process,
A framework for thinking about permanency with a focus on the status of reunification within the permanency continuum, and
Consideration of the issues involved in evaluating programs for permanency and reunification.

This executive summary provides a brief abstract of each.

1. Permanency and Reunification Trends in 25 States

Permanency and Reunification Trends in 25 States provides an overview of the types of services and programs provided at the state and local levels to achieve safe reunification outcomes for children. Information on reunification efforts throughout the country that was previously collected for A Review of Family Preservation and Family Reunification Programs,was verified and updated.¹ The paper also profiles four reunification programs. These programs demonstrate innovative reunification efforts taking place in communities around the country, and offer examples of collaborative efforts among agencies and intensive reunification services that are helping families.

It is evident when looking at state structure and the delivery of services in the 25 states that the majority of child welfare services are administered at the state-level. However, many states reported an increasing amount of autonomy being passed to the county and local levels. In addition, this review illustrates a trend toward the use of privately contracted service providers. Although most state administrators reported that both the public agency and private contractors share service delivery to clients, in many cases, the public agency is focused on investigative and case planning and management, while private contractors are providing direct treatment services to children and families.

State policies enacted in the late 1990s and the enactment of ASFA have produced significant changes in child welfare policy with a strong emphasis on promoting safety, shortening timelines, expediting permanency, and looking to alternatives for reunification.

Discussions with state administrators demonstrate that ASFA is being taken seriously. Legislative changes to bring state policy and statutes into compliance have been instituted, and administrators are working at the state, county, and local levels to implement new policy and practice. All states have adopted ASFA requirements through legislation.

Instituting and adapting to shortened timelines was a dominant topic of our discussions with administrators. States seem to be focused on ways to abide by the timelines for permanency. As a result, states and their foster care staff recognize the need to make permanency decisions sooner and are looking for any and all tools at their disposal to help deal with the rush for permanency. Those mentioned most often by state administrators included concurrent planning, guardianship, and kinship support.

States reported that reunification is the first permanency option they consider for every child entering care. However, the implementation of the new timelines has given adoption considerable attention. Adoption is commanding a great deal of time and money in states, as illustrated by the number of states that mentioned new adoption initiatives. States are putting much effort into locating new adoptive homes for children, particularly for children who have been in the foster care system for a significant period of time.

Relatives also are receiving an enormous amount of attention. States recognize that relatives are an important resource for permanency for children. States are making an effort to locate relatives as soon as a child comes into care and make them part of the permanency process — providing foster care, participating in case decisionmaking, and even providing adoptive homes for children.

Child permanency is dependent on collaboration between agencies. Some states appear to be renewing their efforts to collaborate with other agencies, the courts, and policy makers to expedite permanency within the new timelines. This can be a very difficult task for overburdened child welfare agencies, particularly when dealing with strained court systems and a lack of appropriate community resources.

States seem to be trying to balance the need to expedite permanency with the desire to reunify families. State administrators report that reunification is still the primary goal for families in the child welfare system. However, as much as states want to preserve families through reunification, they also recognize that letting a child linger in the foster care system is not an adequate response to the needs of the child. State administrators report that they believe the expedited timelines instituted by federal and state law were necessary. Some administrators reported relief by staff, as timelines provided a rationale for terminating a parent's rights and seeking a permanency option other than reunification for children whose parents are not able to resolve issues that brought the child into care. But at the same time, administrators spoke about the concern that permanency would become equivalent to adoption, and reunification would become the exception rather than the norm for families.

State policy makers continue to look for programmatic tools to assist in achieving permanency for children in foster care. Looking at initiatives across states, relative and non-relative homes are being sought to provide permanency for children. Children who have spent years in the foster care system are now part of the "backlog" for whom permanent placements must be found. Some of these children are in their teens and do not want to be adopted. They will remain in state custody with a goal of emancipation or independent living. However, many other children will require a legally permanent relative placement or an adoptive home. As a result, states are spending a great deal of time and money to implement initiatives to find adoptive homes and encourage and support relatives who can provide homes for children.

Despite the apparent push toward adoption, foster care administrators are still optimistic about reunification as a priority and, overall, do not see an about-face on the issue of reunification. They declared a need for proper resources for education of staff and training tools to achieve progress in reunifying families under shortened timelines. Most believed that reunification will remain the first priority among permanency options for families and will maintain priority status through the development of methods to speed the progress of reunification with families.

1. This review was done as part of the Evaluation of Family Preservation and Reunification Services, under contract from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, ASPE.

2. Reunification From Foster Care in Nine States 1990-1997: Description and Interpretation

Reunification From Foster Care in Nine States: 1990-1997 presents analyses using the Multistate Foster Care Data Archive to describe the basic structure of the exit process from foster care. Children first entering foster care from 1990-1994 were tracked through administrative data for three years after entry. The proportion of children exiting to various living situations (e.g., reunified, in relative placement, adopted, in guardianship, etc.) were assessed by child characteristics, foster care experiences, and the combined influence of age at entry and duration in care on exit patterns. Trends over time and variability across states with respect to different types of exits are presented.

Reunification Analysis. There are similarities in reunification patterns across all states. This is seen most clearly in the timing of discharges from care — exits by family reunification tend to occur earlier in foster care episodes than do other types of exits. The likelihood of reunification also tends to be similarly related to the same child and case attributes across most states.

There is also extensive variability in reunification patterns across states. This is seen most clearly in the overall prevalence of reunification — as the proportion of foster care exits that are achieved via family reunification varies widely across the nine states.

The prevailing feature of the reunification process is that the likelihood of exit by reunification is highest at the beginning of a child's stay in foster care, and gradually decreases as time in care elapses. For all foster care episodes observed in these data, approximately 8 percent ended in reunification during the first month of care, about 30 percent during the first year in care, and about 40 percent during the first three years in care.

As a result, reunification tends to occur earlier (or for episodes of shorter duration) than other types of foster care exit. This pattern is consistent with two widely held tenets of child welfare practice: that foster care is intended to serve as a temporary intervention in a time of family crisis, and that family reunification is the preferred outcome of placement in alternative care arrangements. For a certain segment of the foster care population, relatively rapid reunification is achieved.

The likelihood of reunification is related to a number of variables describing both child and case characteristics:

Child characteristics. Children more likely to become reunified are those who entered care between the ages of 1 and 11 years, white and Hispanic children, and children from outside of the largest urban counties. Children less likely to be reunified include those who entered foster care as infants or teens, African-American children, and those from the largest urban counties. A child's gender had no relation to reunification.

Case characteristics. Children are more likely to be reunified when they are in their first foster care placement, when their episode involves only one residence (no moves), and for those states where it is measurable, when they are placed with non-relatives. Children are less likely to be reunified if they have reentered foster care, if their episode involves movement between residences, and if they are in kinship placements.

Trends. Under multivariate controls, the likelihood of reunification was decreasing steadily over time. The children who entered foster care in 1994 were 17 percent less likely to exit by reunification than those who entered during 1990.

States. For the most part, the direction of most of these relationships was consistent across states, although there was some variability in magnitudes. This suggests that the reunification process is similar in the different systems.

Reentry Analysis. Overall, 17 percent of the observed family reunifications resulted in the child re-entering foster care within one year of exit. Reentry to foster care is a significant signal that the reunification was not fully successful. A multivariate analysis was performed on the likelihood of reentry after an exit by reunification.

Higher reentry levels were observed for children who entered care during their teenage years, children who had been placed in congregate care arrangements during their stay in foster care, children whose initial spell in care was shorter in duration, children who had previously experienced a reentry to foster care, children from the non-urban counties, and for African-American children.

Lower reentry levels were observed for children who had entered as pre-teens, children who had been placed in family foster homes, children whose previous spell had been longer in duration, children who had experienced only one stay in foster care, children from large urban counties, and for Hispanic children.

The likelihood of reentry after reunification exits was increasing moderately over time.

Adoption Analysis. The age of the child at entry to foster care is the dominant factor in these models. Children who were placed in foster care as newborns (0-2 months of age) had a much greater likelihood of adoption than other children. (Approximately 3 times higher than children who entered at 3-12 months of age, 5 times higher than 1-2 years, etc.) This is a combination of the "attractiveness" of young children to potential adoptive parents and of the increased chance that the birth parents of newborns placed in foster care are at higher risk of losing their parental rights than parents of older children.

Other factors related to increased likelihood of adoption include: children from non-urban counties, white children, children in first foster placements, children in family foster arrangements, and children with longer duration in alternative care.

Factors related to a lower likelihood of adoption include: children from large urban counties, African-American children, children who have reentered foster care at least once, children in congregate care placements, and children with briefer duration of time in foster care.

A substantial increase in adoptions was noted over time, with children who entered foster care in 1993 being over 20 percent more likely to exit via adoption than the children who entered foster care in 1990.

3. The Role of Race in Parental Reunification

The Role of Race in Parental Reunification explores whether race is a strong predictor of reunification when combined with other child, family, or case history characteristics, and whether the main effect of race is reduced when controlling for other important predictors of reunification.

This paper provides information from a secondary analysis of data collected for the National Study of Preventive, Protective, and Reunification Services Delivered to Children and Their Families.² The paper addresses three questions. First, is race a strong predictor of reunification when combined with other important child, family, or case history characteristics? The analyses revealed that race is a strong predictor of reunification when combined with other important child, family, and case history characteristics. White children were more likely to be reunified than black children. Second, what other child, family, or case history characteristics are also strong predictors of reunification? The analysis reveals four important predictors of reunification in addition to race: age of entry, caretaker job skills, caretaker substance abuse problems, and caretaker services. In particular, age of entry was found to be significantly related to reunification. Rates of reunification rose directly with increases in the age that the children entered foster care. Third, are the main effects of race reduced when controlling for other important predictors? The analyses found that controlling for the other key predictors does not reduce the independent effects of race. In sum, it was concluded that race continues to play a major role in the reunification of children in addition to other child, family, and case history characteristics.

The analyses also found kinship placement to be inversely related to reunification: children who were placed with kin were less likely to be reunified than children placed with non-relatives. Moreover, this study found that kinship placement did not continue to be significantly related to reunification, when combined with race and the other predictors in the regression models. Thus, it was concluded that the higher kinship placements of black children do not explain their lower reunification rates relative to white children.

2. U. S. Children's Bureau. 1997. National Study of Protective, Preventive, and Reunification Services Delivered to Children and Their Families. Washington, D. C: U. S. Government Printing Office.

4. Casework Decision Making

Caseworker Decision Making examines the reunification decision making process and those factors that are considered by caseworkers and staff in determining whether to work towards reunification. Discussions were held with staff at three different child welfare agencies, to obtain an overview of their decision making processes. Emphasis was placed on understanding the impact of shortened timeframes on reunification decisions, who was involved in decision making, how concurrent planning was implemented, and how caseworkers handle the ongoing changes in emphasis on safety and permanency.

The workers reported having adequate staff and sufficient services available to address clients' needs. In addition, the agencies have well-defined decision-making procedures in place that involve input from colleagues, supervisors, service providers, attorneys, and other county staff. This well-defined process — whether or not followed through completely for every case — allows these workers to feel they have sufficient guidance and support to make fair decisions for children and their families. Consequently, the workers we talked with appeared confident about their decision-making capabilities, given the agencies' systems of checks and balances.

However, under ASFA, caseworkers must make decisions faster, while they continue to deal with children and families with difficult problems. The implementation of new time limits, coupled with the troubled families coming into the child welfare system, has created a paradox for caseworkers and administrators. On the one hand, caseworkers and administrators believe that the shortened time limits provided by ASFA are fair and proper in order to expedite permanency for children and avoid foster care drift. On the other hand, workers find it difficult to tackle the intransigent problems and situations of families coming into the foster care system within these shortened time limits. Workers continue to face the overwhelming troubles of children and families entering the foster care system without any new or improved ways to deal with the problems of these families, despite the need to either reunify families or find other permanent living arrangements for children more quickly.

Broadening permanency. The timeframes of ASFA require workers to consider all permanency options from the time the child enters care. Workers and administrators believe strongly in reunifying families and continue to make family reunification the initial goal of all families served by their agencies. However, the focus on keeping children and their parents together if at all possible has diminished under the new time limits. If a family cannot be reunited within 15 months so that the child can live safely at home, then it may be determined that the child must live permanently in an alternative safe and stable household.

To meet the permanency needs of children who cannot return home from foster care, agencies have turned to relative placement as the permanency option of choice when reunification is not possible. Permanency with relatives encompasses a variety of arrangements, including licensed foster care placements, unlicensed or informal placements, custody arrangements in lieu of foster care placement, legal guardianship (subsidized and unsubsidized), and adoption. In fact, one agency referred to relative placements as reunification and counted them as reunifications in their data.

Another agency used relatives as legal guardians (unsubsidized) to divert children from entering foster care. Relatives were located by CPS prior to placement and given legal custody of the child so that the case never entered the foster care unit. This is an obvious way to keep children from foster care placement and avoid the costs of having the child in care. However, diverting the child from foster care also diverted the child's parents from receiving most services through the child welfare system, thereby failing to make any attempt to solve the problems that required placement of the child out of the home.

Relatives' roles with respect to children in the child welfare system are diverse and debated. The increased use of relatives as permanent alternatives for children creates further reason to step back and clearly define the roles they play. Although placement in the family structure can be an ideal permanency placement for a child that can offer family continuity, from a child's point of view living with a relative can be very different from returning home to his or her birth parents. Alternatively, placement with a relative — formally or informally — may be the most permanent arrangement a child will experience. Policy for relative placements has been pieced together over time in response to changing needs. Issues surrounding the emotional and financial implications to birth parents, children, and relatives need to be considered comprehensively. Relatives are a valuable resource and a thoughtful and systematic approach to defining their expanding role is critical.

Watching the clock. The time limits instituted by ASFA require workers to make decisions on permanency when a child has been in care 15 of the past 22 months. It is clear that workers are mindful of the time they have to work with birth parents. Workers found that the time limits relieved them of some of the responsibility for deciding how many months — or years — services should be provided to parents while their children remain in foster care. Most workers said they believe the time limits are fair to birth parents and in the best interest of children. There were a few workers who mentioned conflicting feelings over struggling to reunify families within 15 months. The conflict of these workers is understandable as agencies move from allowing families an extended period of time to achieve reunification to an emphasis on watching the clock and expediting permanency.

Critical to making these difficult decisions in shorter time periods is having sufficient information to assess a family's strengths and weaknesses. However, workers reported that the assessment procedures they use have not changed since ASFA.

Concurrent planning, although implemented by the agencies prior to ASFA, is the primary tool used to comply with the new time requirements. Concurrent planning has changed the focus and approach of case planning and decision making. Agencies and workers use concurrent planning as a tool to convey clearly to parents early in the planning process that they have a limited amount of time to resolve the problems necessary for reunification or they may lose parental rights to their children. However, we found that, in practice, workers did not actively work toward an alternative permanency plan until they determined that reunification was unlikely. Moreover, some workers reported that they continued to try to reunify families even after the child's goal had been changed. Concurrent planning requires delicate balancing of coercion and encouragement. With the balancing act come tensions due to the inherent difficulties of working toward reunification while planning for the possibility of alternative permanency for the child and tension between the client and caseworker that sometimes occurs during the planning process. For these reasons, concurrent planning is dependent upon systematic training and supervision of casework practice. While some tensions were reported by workers, most embraced the concept because it allows them to establish consequences for parent noncompliance early in the relationship.

In search of new tools to assist in working with families, agencies reported using foster parent mentoring and family group planning as part of their foster care practices. Two of the agencies had recently begun implementing foster parent training on mentoring, and the third agency had an established foster parent mentoring program. However, agency staff revealed that these efforts, designed to enhance and support the reunification process, were not achieving that specific purpose in most cases.

All three agencies reported using some form of family conferencing or group planning as an enhancement to concurrent planning. This type of planning involves bringing together birth parents, relatives, close friends of the family, and sometimes even foster parents to participate in the case planning process and to ensure a safety network for the parents and children in support of reunification. However, this type of planning is usually successful only if the birth parents and children have relatives and close friends willing to participate in the reunification process. For families who lack this social support, the planning process includes little more than a meeting between the birth parents and caseworker. Also, relatives can act to aggravate birth parents if they are not supportive of reunification efforts. Workers discussed meeting with family groups for case planning but also said that they had cases without relative support. Discussions with some workers indicated that relatives were often included in the case planning to prepare them to care for the child. Some workers referred to these meetings as a time to put relatives on alert — telling them that if the birth parents did not comply with the reunification plan, the children would need another permanent home. Workers reported using the planning session more as a resource to find and prepare relatives as caretakers rather than to provide support for reunification.

Aside from foster parent mentoring and family group planning, it appears that these agencies are doing very little differently post-ASFA to enhance assessment or services to improve the likelihood of reunification within the shorter timeframe. With the need to achieve reunification more quickly, there is a need for tools to enhance efforts to reunify families within the timeframes.

5. Permanency: A Balancing Act

Permanency: A Balancing Act, presents a framework for thinking about permanency and explores the status of reunification within the permanency continuum. The paper provides an analysis of information gathered across the research components.

The overall goal of the child welfare system has always been to maintain safety and permanency for children. Historically, the path to this goal has been riddled with ambivalence. At any one time, society emphasizes either family or child. A true balance of these interests seems elusive and the result is a child welfare system constantly in tension. Any choice of emphasis results in new tension which must be managed. A comprehensive approach to addressing the needs of both children and their families remains to be found.

The current tension is the result of a shortened timeline for permanency decisions. Although the new schedule conforms to the child's "sense of time," (i.e., his or her developmental needs) it conflicts with the fact that parental change often takes longer than is permitted under the new deadlines. In turn, this has created a tension among permanency options. Reunification remains the initial goal for the majority of children entering foster care. Yet, the concept of permanency has broadened, with an emphasis on other options such as adoption, guardianship, and placement with relatives. The challenge becomes viewing the goal of permanency as a continuum rather than competing forces.

Balancing permanency and child safety in shortened time frames has resulted in a variety of responses throughout the service delivery system. Greater pressure is being placed on the courts to make permanency determinations in shorter timeframes. Since the implementation of PL 96-272 in 1980, which instituted 18-month court case reviews, there have been complaints of overburdened family courts and extensive delays in case reviews. The ASFA requirements of the 12-month court case review, permanency decisions by 15 months, and the increase in TPR cases, have put additional burdens on the court system.

New emphasis on relatives as a permanency option has created tensions between those who believe that relatives are the best way to keep children within the family unit and those who believe that "the apple does not fall far from the tree." Relatives are sought to keep children out of the system, as placements once a child has been put into the system, and as alternative options to reunification. Debate about the role relatives play is complicated by who is defining permanency and whether it is considered an emotional state of being, a legal status, or a fiscal issue. No matter the perspective, relatives are an increasingly used resource and the concerns over their role, the services needed to maintain a child in their custody, and the value placed upon them as resources need to be addressed.

The shortened timeframe of ASFA has shifted the focus from a presumption of reunification to a presumption of permanency, with reunification being a major option. As a result, there is greater emphasis on a parent's responsibility to change despite ASFA's implied expectations for reciprocal responsibilities of agencies and parents. A parent's personal responsibility is important for successful reunification, however, for family reunification to have a chance, the agency must uphold its responsibility to facilitate adequate services. Successful reunification requires addressing the problems of the parent, and that entails more than drawing up plans, setting appointments for treatment and visitation, and monitoring parents' progress. Greater success in reunifying families comes when agencies and their staff work to share the responsibility with parents. Staff need to assist and support parent treatment and visitation and provide adequate concrete and emotional support to bridge the gap between the parent problem and successful treatment.

This agency responsibility puts pressure on the service delivery system to develop targeted services to meet the needs of parents in a timely manner. Programs are varying the intensity of services, the length of time that services are provided, the point in a case when reunification services begin, and the extent to which post-reunification services are available to families. To target services effectively, information is needed on which services work best for which families and under which circumstances, focusing on accomplishing reunification in a time-limited period.

6. The Evaluation of Programs for Permanency and Reunification

The Evaluation of Programs for Permanency and Reunification expands upon the conceptual paper and reviews what must be learned to develop more effective programs for achieving permanency. It broadens the focus beyond the evaluation of particular programs to consider other empirical work that might inform policy making and program design. Based on information from state and local administrators and from site visits, the paper identifies possibilities for evaluation at various levels of rigor.

The core of all efforts to understand permanency and reunification in the current context is careful monitoring of system performance. Analysis of administrative data is central here, but should be augmented by special studies. Of particular importance are studies tracking children in various permanency arrangements, and collecting longitudinal information that goes beyond the data contained in administrative systems. In addition, studies are needed on topics that include:

How decisions are made by child welfare workers, administrators, and judges. This includes the use of risk assessment procedures and their effectiveness and a determination of how concurrent planning is working.
Evaluations of components of permanency and reunification practice, such as foster parent mentoring and family group conferencing.
Evaluations of family drug courts.
Evaluations of other approaches directed at substance abuse in families served by the child welfare system.
Evaluations of specific programs for permanency and reunification, in particular, wraparound programs and community oriented programs such as Family to Family.

These studies, if conducted in the most rigorous manner possible, will provide the solid evidence necessary to make policy and program decisions that will serve the best interests of children and families.

Summary

The priority of child welfare agencies is to provide safe and permanent environments for children. The best way to accomplish this goal is to balance the needs of children and their families. These needs often conflict, creating inherent tensions at all levels of the service delivery system. While the tensions can be frustrating and even confusing, it must be recognized that the tensions are intrinsic to the problems being addressed. The challenge is to learn to successfully manage the tensions and use them as a vehicle for positive change. New policies are creating environments that emphasize child safety. Yet, programmatic efforts are being developed to try to balance the needs of children and their families. It will be very important to track the effects of policy changes on child, family, and system outcomes. Some of the questions to be answered include: Will reunification rates drop significantly? If they do, will children be in other permanent arrangements or in legal limbo? Can concurrent planning be implemented effectively and if so, is it an effective approach for permanency? How will it impact reunification of families? And how are children faring under the many permanency options?

Chapter 1. Introduction

Improving the permanency of living arrangements for children in the child welfare system has been a central focus of federal and state policy for the past two decades. The Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (ASFA) creates faster timeframes for decision making and incentives for adoption to move children more quickly out of the foster care system and find them permanent living arrangements.

With the implementation of ASFA and its strong emphasis on expediting permanency, it is important to review reunification efforts and how reunification fits into the larger context of permanency. Specifically, information is needed about:

How reunification and permanency are being defined in child welfare;
How state and local child welfare staff think about reunification and its role in achieving permanency
The core characteristics of reunification efforts; and
The implications of service delivery and the future course of reunification in the permanency continuum.

Westat was asked by the Department of Health and Human Services to assess the context of permanency and reunification in the foster care system following ASFA. In response, Westat and Chapin Hall Center for Children provide an examination of reunification and permanency in the child welfare system.

The research conducted consisted of five main components: 1) developing a conceptual framework for thinking about permanency with a focus on reunification, 2) specifying issues to consider in evaluating programs for permanency and reunification, 3) documenting patterns of reunification and reentry to track experiences of children in foster care, 4) examining the reunification decision making process, and 5) identifying and examining reunification efforts.

To address these issues, this report presents a compendium of six papers that together provide a description of current reunification efforts in the foster care system and assess the status of reunification in permanency policy and practice.

The first paper, Permanency: A Balancing Act, presents a framework for thinking about permanency and explores the status of reunification within the permanency continuum. Reunification remains the initial goal for the majority of children entering foster care. Yet the concept of permanency has broadened, with an emphasis on other options such as adoption, guardianship, and placement with relatives. The challenge becomes viewing the goals as a continuum rather than competing forces. The paper draws on the literature and the work done on the other components of this study to describe the shifting tensions in defining permanency as a goal for children in the child welfare system. It also explores the status of reunification, the core characteristics of reunification efforts, and implications for service delivery.

Following the framework, Permanency and Reunification Trends in 25 States provides an overview of the types of efforts (services and programs) provided at the state and local levels to improve reunification of children. Information on reunification efforts throughout the country, that was previously collected for A Review of Family Preservation and Family Reunification Programs,was verified and updated.¹ A description of four reunification programs is also presented. These programs were visited to discuss the core characteristics of the reunification effort with staff.

The Evaluation of Programs for Permanency and Reunification expands upon the first paper and reviews what must be learned to develop more effective programs for achieving permanency. It considers programs designed to enhance the likelihood of reunification as well as programs focused on permanency more broadly. It also broadens the focus beyond the evaluation of particular programs to consider other empirical work that might inform policy making and program design. Based on information obtained through verifying information with states and local administrators and on site visits, the paper identifies possibilities for evaluation at various levels of rigor. Taking into consideration that reunification efforts often occur outside the context of specific programs and in the everyday work of both public and private providers, as well as the small size of reunification programs that do exist, various research alternatives are suggested.

The fourth paper, Reunification From Foster Care in Nine States, 1990-1997, presents analyses using the Multistate Foster Care Data Archive to describe the basic structure of the exit process from foster care. The pooled multi-state data set of new foster care entrants from 1990-1994 were tracked for three years after entry. The exit distributions (e.g., proportion of children reunified, in relative placement, adopted, in guardianship, etc.) are assessed by child characteristics, foster care experiences, and the combined influence of age at entry and duration in care on exit patterns. Trends over time and variability across states with respect to different types of exits are presented.

Secondary analyses based on data from the 1994 National Study of Protective, Preventive, and Reunification Services Delivered to Children and Their Families is the basis of the fourth paper The Role of Race in Parental Reunification. This paper explores whether race is a strong predictor of reunification when combined with other child, family, or case history characteristics, and whether the main effect of race is reduced when controlling for other important predictors of reunification. The analyses revealed that race is a strong predictor of reunification, and controlling for other key predictors (e.g., age of entry, caretaker job skills, caretaker substance abuse problem, and caretaker receipt of services) does not eliminate the independent effect of race on reunification.

The last paper, Caseworker Decision Making, examines the reunification decision making process and those factors that are considered by caseworkers and staff in determining whether to work towards reunification. Discussions were held with up to three staff at three different child welfare agencies, to obtain an overview of their decision making processes. Emphasis was placed on understanding the impact of shortened timeframes on reunification decisions, who was involved in decision making, how concurrent planning was implemented, and how caseworkers handle the ongoing changes in emphasis on safety and permanency.

These papers are presented to further the dialogue about policy and program initiatives that are being implemented to affect permanency decisions for children and families serviced by the child welfare system.

1. This review was done as part of the Evaluation of Family Preservation and Reunification Services, under contract from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, ASPE.

Chapter 2. Permanency: A Balancing Act

1. An Historical Review

In the last few decades, foster care of children has come to be viewed as an evil. A necessary evil in some cases, but an evil nonetheless. When possible it should be avoided, since a child's birth family is viewed as the best place for the child except in extraordinary circumstances. When foster care cannot be avoided it is viewed as an arrangement that should be short term, even though it sometimes turns out to be otherwise.

So what is to be done when a child is removed from his or her family and placed in foster care? At present, answers to that question are dominated by the concept of permanency. Children should be afforded living arrangements that are nurturing and long lasting. Foster care itself is not thought of as an appropriate permanency plan, so the intention (not always accompanied by action) in most cases is to move the child into other circumstances. There are many options: reunification with parents, placement with relatives, legal guardianship by relatives or others, independent living, adoption. Not all options are available for every child, but there is usually more than one, so decisions need to be made. It is thought that the best option is to return the child home whenever that is possible, so in most cases that is the alternative that is explored first. Usually at least some work is attempted with the birth parents (or other original caretakers) directed at making return home possible. When work with the parents proves unsuccessful, we turn to other alternatives.

In this paper we develop a framework for thinking about permanency. We place particular emphasis on reunification and on the decision processes that are involved in choosing reunification or other alternatives. We begin with a brief review of the social history of child welfare in the last century and consider the legislative initiatives in various periods of that history (with particular emphasis on federal legislation). We describe the current status of permanency and reunification efforts in the states based on information gathered from several sources, and conclude with a discussion of implications of our investigation and an identification of central policy and practice issues.

1.1 The Social History of Child Welfare

The last century has seen the development of an extensive (and expensive) child welfare system in this country -- a system dominated by government (mostly state and local governments), and a service delivery system dominated by private social service agencies. The system's primary focus is on abuse and neglect of children, having been given responsibility for society's response to child maltreatment. In the last fifty years, in addition to permanency, three other concepts have dominated thinking about child welfare: the best interests of the child, reasonable efforts, and least restrictive alternative. Of these, perhaps the most central is best interests. That we should act in the best interests of children seems unassailable. The question is what constitutes the best interest of an individual child.

The answer to that question has depended on shifting views as to the origins of abuse and neglect and on the importance of the natural family in a child's development. It is generally recognized that many factors enter into child maltreatment, including parental pathology, ignorance, and other failings; disorders of relationships within the family; the social condition of the family, most notably poverty and poor housing; and broader social conditions. The extent to which maltreatment is attributed to something inside the parents, and the extent to which that something is seen as moral failing, has been one of the most significant influences on responses to child maltreatment. Joined to that issue are beliefs about the extent to which people can change and whether some external intervention can bring about that change. On the one hand, some people believe that child maltreatment arises out of personal failings that are quite unlikely to change. Others believe blaming parents is inappropriate and ineffective because in most maltreatment there is a substantial component of cause that is not the "fault" of the parents, and that people, families, and relationships can change.

Views on the importance of the birth family to the child are also central. Early in the last century, those concerned with abused and neglected children recognized the importance of the child's own family. The White House Conference on Children in 1909 said that "home life is the highest and finest product of civilization" and children should not be deprived of home life "except for urgent and compelling reasons" (Proceedings of the Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, 1909). This notion was strengthened by the idea of the parent-child bond, developed in detail by Bowlby (1952, 1969-73, 1988). It is believed that there is a special bond between child and mother that comes out of their biological relationship and is unlike other human relationships. Beyond the special bond, many advocates in child welfare believe that families inherently want to do right by their children.

But the special bond is sometimes violated and sometimes children are harmed by their parents. So are the child's best interests served by removing the child from the parents or by leaving him or her with them? The decision must balance interests in the child's safety with interests in maintaining familial bonds (Goldstein et al., 1996). If a child is removed, it is hoped that the removal will be temporary, that the problems in the family can be relieved enough to return the child home soon (or later). The reunification decision invokes the same balancing: the interest in restoring familial bonds with that of avoiding future harm to the child.¹ In deciding on whether or not to return a child home, the crucial issues are how much must the parents change and how long do we wait for that change to take place before considering other alternatives?

The history of the child welfare system has been characterized by cycles in which emphasis on these two values, maintenance of the family and safety of the child has shifted back and forth. Neither of these values are ever totally repudiated, but at any one time one appears to be dominant. And each value has advocates at any one time. Shifts in the balancing of these values are precipitated by events, changes in the political landscape, and sometimes by changes in expert opinion.

Following Bowlby's work in the early 1950s, concern with the effects of the child welfare system on children began to build. In the late 50s, the publication of Maas and Engler's Children in Need of Parents (1959) had a considerable impact on the field. This study of the situation of children in foster care in several communities showed that children often stayed in care for long periods of time, often did not visit with their natural parents, and often developed behavioral problems. The findings suggested that these children had been abandoned by their parents and neglected by the system. The results could be taken as evidence of the need for reform of the foster care system, or as evidence for the desirability of limiting foster care placement, or both.

The 1960s saw a rediscovery of child abuse with the discovery of the "battered child syndrome." Advances in xerography led to identification of injuries that were unlikely to have had accidental origin (Kempe et al., 1962; Nelson, 1984). States established child welfare agencies to investigate reports of maltreatment and take action when needed. States also enacted laws requiring professionals to report to the state agencies suspicions of abuse or neglect. The dominant concern of the child welfare system with maltreatment was established.

Due largely to increased public awareness, the number of reports of maltreatment and the number of children in substitute care grew enormously during the 1970s and 80s. The number of staff and the budgets of child welfare departments also grew, leading to concerns about costs on the part of state legislatures and the federal government. Worries about increased costs of foster care, the effects of foster care on children, and beliefs that at least some foster care placements were unnecessary led to a swinging back of the pendulum of public concern.²Thus was born, in the late 1970s, the "family preservation" movement, the development of policies and programs intended to prevent the placement of children in foster care. Programs designed to work with parents to avoid placement or facilitate the return home of children in foster care had been around for a long time,³ but a new model for such work, developed by David Haapala and Jill Kinney in the early 1970s, was thought to be particularly promising (Kinney et al., 1991). Called "Homebuilders," the model called for very short term, intensive, crisis-oriented work based on cognitive-behavioral principles. Other models for family preservation were also promulgated. Early evaluations of family preservation programs, particularly Homebuilders, seemed to indicate remarkable success. Few of the families receiving such services experienced the placement of a child. As a result of such evaluations and the skilled work of advocates, led by foundations such as the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, many states began to develop family preservation programs by the late 1980s. By the early 90s, most states were experimenting with family preservation and both the programs and philosophy of family preservation were well established as cornerstones of reform of the child welfare system.

But the early 1990s also saw the beginnings of a backlash against family preservation. Despite efforts to keep children from entering foster care, between 1987 and 1996 the number of children in the child welfare system placed in out-of-home care increased by 89.5 percent.⁴Deaths or serious harm to children living at home, whose families had previously been involved with the child welfare system were prominently displayed in the media of a number of cities. These incidents were attributed to the policy of family preservation and critics suggested that the interests of families were being allowed to supercede the best interests of children. Legislatures began to write laws affirming that safety of children must come first in making child welfare decisions. A new round of evaluations, this time more carefully designed than earlier ones, began to cast doubt on the effectiveness of family preservation in maintaining families. The research was used by critics, often inappropriately, to bolster their attacks.

By the mid-1990s interest also began to be focused on the "back end" of the system. Lengths of time in foster care had been rising and children were often moved from one placement to another, with consequent disruption of relationships critical to their development. Thus, it was thought that more work should be done with families so that more children could be returned home more quickly. The contrary view was that families should not be given unlimited opportunities to prove themselves capable of safe parenting, the child's sense of time should take precedence. Interest in alternatives such as adoption and relative guardianship grew.

At present the pendulum has swung back. Public understanding of the meaning of best interests of the child again places emphasis on the safety of the child, rather than maintenance of the birth parent and child as a family unit, both in decisions about what should be done in newly discovered cases of maltreatment and in decisions about how to proceed once a child has been placed in substitute care. Alternatives such as adoption, guardianship, and placement with relatives and non-relatives are given more weight and lengths of time before deciding on permanent plans have been reduced. More children are being adopted and fewer are returning home.⁵

1. The motivation for keeping a child in his or her home and returning a removed child is sometimes put in terms of maintenance of family integrity. This view stresses the value our culture places on the privacy of the family and the right of families to determine how they want to raise their children.

2. There was also concern at the time that the financing of the child welfare system contributed to the increase in foster care. The federal government, through provisions of the Social Security act, provides open-ended partial financing of foster care costs of the states. At the time, federal support for prevention of maltreatment or for services to avoid placement was much less available.

3. For example, the St. Paul Family Centered project of the 1950s (Wood and Geismar, 1989).

4. Child Welfare League of America Stat Book (1999) CWLA Press, Washington, D.C. citing American Public Welfare Association's,Characteristics of Children in Substitute and Adoptive Care: (1993). A Statistical Summary of the VCIS National Child Welfare Data Base. (1998) Washington, D.C., Child Welfare League of America.

5. See Reunification From Foster Care in Nine States: 1990-1997, Description and Interpretation, in this reunification series.

1.2 Federal Legislation

It is important to put federal legislation into a proper perspective in the history of the child welfare system in the United States. Legislation largely followed trends that were already underway, rather than creating those trends, so it is a mistake to trace history solely in terms of legislation. Furthermore, child welfare is a state responsibility (often delegated to counties), so in fact there are more than fifty separate child welfare systems in this country. Child welfare laws, customary ways of dealing with family problems, characteristics of caseloads, and salience of various social problems all vary considerably from one jurisdiction to another. All of the innovations in the child welfare system in the past century began in the states, some were later embraced by the federal government. Nonetheless, federal legislation confirmed trends and contributed to them, so a complete picture of the history of child welfare must include it.

The Social Security Act. The Social Security act of 1935 included, in Title IV-B, grants to the states for child welfare services. Most of these funds were initially used for foster care but more recently they have been used for other services. In 1961, as part of the Aid to Dependent Children program, under Title IV-A of the Act, funds were provided to the states for costs of foster care for children eligible for assistance under ADC in an attempt to address barriers to placing children in foster care when their own homes were unsafe. Funding is open ended, provided under a matching grant formula. In 1980 the program was transferred to Title IV-E of the Act.

Funding for foster care under these provisions has constituted, and continues to constitute, the major contribution of the federal government to the child welfare system in this country. The openendedness of the funding has been thought by many to be a significant disincentive to reforms that might de-emphasize foster care, whether through family preservation or alternatives to foster care such as adoption.⁶

The Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA, PL 93-247). CAPTA was enacted in 1974, as a result of the heightened awareness of child abuse in the 1960s. Although states had already begun to pass mandatory reporting laws, CAPTA encouraged such laws, provided for the development of standards for responding to reports, and required maintaining records of reports. CAPTA established the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect and provided funds to the states that adhere to the Act's provisions. The Act contributed to the development of the state child protective agencies that now constitute the core of the child welfare system.

The Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act (PL 96-272). Passed in 1980, this Act was a triumph of the advocates of family preservation. It required that states (as a condition of receiving federal funds for foster care expenses) exercise "reasonable efforts" to prevent the placement of children whenever possible and to encourage the return home of children removed from their parents. The Act represented an unusual melding of interests: both those concerned with the burgeoning costs of foster care to federal and state governments and those interested in affirming the importance of family life supported it. Following its passage, states continued to develop family preservation programs and the family preservation philosophy of not removing children unless absolutely necessary took hold. However, it is generally accepted that the Act was never fully implemented. The Act did not include funding for family preservation or reunification programs (there were no carrots in the Act, only the stick of reduced funding if federal guidelines were not followed) and the vague term "reasonable efforts" was never adequately defined so that it was unclear whether the intent of the Act was being followed in individual cases.

The Family Preservation and Support Provisions of the 1993 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act. This Act provided funds to the states for family preservation and family support (child maltreatment prevention) programs.⁷ This enactment finally put federal funds behind the requirements of PL 96-272. States were required to use at least some of the funds for each of the subcategories of programs, family preservation and family support. However, there is evidence that most of the funds were allocated to family support. The Act came at the time the family preservation movement was beginning to wane.

The Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA). ASFA was enacted in 1997, with the waning of family preservation now well under way. It shifted federal guidance away from family preservation to again emphasize the safety of the child, a trend already evident in many jurisdictions. The Act reauthorized funding for family preservation and family support but added reunification and adoption services to the list of activities that could be supported by the funds. Other provisions of the Act limited the length of time most children could be in foster care before an alternative other than return home was pursued, encouraged "concurrent planning" (planning for both return home and other alternatives at the same time), and encouraged states to increase the number of adoptions. The Act confirmed the swing of the pendulum back to emphasis on the safety of the child.

Income Support Programs. Welfare programs have long had substantial effects on child welfare and indirectly on the child welfare system. Aid to Dependent Children (later Aid to Families of Dependent Children), enacted as part of the original Social Security Act, provided financial support for destitute children and is thought to have prevented the involvement of the child welfare system in many families. The welfare reform of 1996 (PL 104-193) eliminated AFDC, replacing it with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. In the process, the federal entitlement to welfare assistance was replaced by block grants to states. Adults who receive assistance must engage in activities that will lead to work and the length of time on welfare is limited in most cases to a lifetime total of five years.

6. States have used some funds from the Social Services Block Grant (Title XX of the Social Security Act, passed in 1975) for child welfare, including prevention and family preservation programs.

7. Despite the intention of the Act, most family support programs do not explicitly include maltreatment and prevention/reduction among their goals and do not target children at significant risk of maltreatment.

2. Current Status of Permanency and Reunification

The current child welfare system is characterized by an emphasis on the safety of the child. Lengths of time before deciding on permanent plans have been reduced, and more weight is being given to permanency options such as adoption and relative placements. The current emphasis on safety and expedited permanency for children has led to new state legislation and regulation. The provisions include holding permanency hearings sooner, practicing concurrent planning, and establishing a more expedited track to filing termination of parental rights (TPR) when reunification is inappropriate. Discussions with state and local child welfare staff about permanency elicit responses about the legal responsibilities of the state to provide safety for the child, limiting the child's time in foster care by expediting the process of the child returning home or being placed in a permanent home outside the child welfare system. Emphasis is on the safety, health, and well-being of a child; and the importance of finding a solution to meet the physical and emotional needs of the child.

Child welfare staff are left to safely expedite the best permanency solution for a child within time limits, while facing the reality of family problems. With a focus on child safety and away from the family unit, there seems to be less emphasis on services to resolve parental problems necessary to maintain the family. Caseworkers must cope with difficult and chronic family problems, and often lack resources and services to adequately address family needs. Yet they must achieve the goals of safety and permanency for a child, and make decisions on where the child will be placed within the timelines set by law. As a result, time is at the forefront of permanency decisions made by caseworkers. Gone are the days when extended periods were granted to assist parents in resolving their problems in order to reunify the family. Instead, workers are pressed to expedite a family assessment and case plan for the family. However, with large caseload sizes, workers have less time to spend with families. Parents can be difficult to engage after a child is removed from the home, particularly when drug or mental health problems are an issue. If parents are apathetic and unresponsive to initial attempts for treatment, workers have little time to spend providing personal support or handholding. If parents are not able to meet case plan goals to rectify problems that brought their child into care within 15 months, they risk losing parental rights to their child. Unfortunately, substance abuse and mental health problems are not easily resolved in short time periods.

So given the time limitations to resolve permanency where does this leave reunification in the permanency continuum? The Adoption and Safe Families Act upheld requirements that reasonable efforts be made to preserve and reunify families. However, at the same time, ASFA instituted a major change in the reasonable efforts requirement by making the safety and health of the child the paramount consideration in decisions to return a child home. ASFA specifies it is not reasonable to reunify children with their parents when: 1) a court determines that a parent has committed murder or voluntary manslaughter of one child, 2) a parent commits serious bodily injury to a child, 3) a parent has subjected the child to aggravated circumstances as defined by state law, or 4) parental rights to a sibling have been involuntarily terminated. In other cases, reasonable efforts must be made within specified time limits.

Despite the changes in regulation, child welfare administrators and staff reported overwhelmingly that reunification is always the first permanency option considered for families, with very few exceptions. However, the questions remain -- to what extent is reunification seen as feasible within the time limits, and as a result, is reunification receiving true commitment by service providers? Are reunification services adequate given the new time limitations?

Many states and localities are working to institute new programs to better serve children and parents working towards reunification within the time constraints.⁽⁸⁾ But in many agencies around the country, the reality is that staff work with constrained resources, and as a result, child well-being and permanency take priority over the focus on successfully treating parents and reunifying families.

There appears to be a broadening of the traditional notion of reunification in some states and localities. Several states and localities count permanent placement with a relative as reunification (sometimes called family reunification). It is not clear whether this trend is something new in response to shortened time requirements for permanency, or a longstanding practice for some states or localities.

Emphasis on other permanency options. With the increasing pressures to expedite permanency, states and localities are considering a number of alternative permanency options. Permanency options reported by states now include adoption, relative placement, guardianship placement, and independent living.

Many states and localities now practice some type of concurrent planning on cases. Concurrent planning is the process of planning two strategies for permanency for a child from the start of a case. This process involves a primary plan, usually a goal of reunification, and at the same time the worker plans an alternative permanency goal for the child (e.g., permanent relative placement, guardianship, or adoption) in case the primary goal is not achieved within the set timelines. Workers seek out commitments by relatives and other possible caregivers early in case the parent does not resolve his or her problems within the time limit and termination of parental rights is necessary. Planning alternative options earlier appears to be popular although in many jurisdictions this process does not take shape until after a determination has been made by the worker and supervisor that the family will not reunify. Workers mention that concurrent planning can create tension between themselves and parents, and they also find their "dual role" of simultaneously supporting family reunification and planning alternative permanency conflicting. For these reasons, and also because workers have little time for dual planning, workers may provide some preliminary planning on alternatives (contact relatives or close friends of the family) but true planning for an alternative placement is often left until it is determined reunification for a family is not feasible.

States are increasingly turning to relatives as a permanency option. In fact, relatives seem to be the main avenue to permanency when reunification is not possible. A majority of state administrators reported an increase in the use of temporary and permanent relative placements over the past few years. Relative placement may be more popular as an option because children placed with relatives are exempt from the ASFA timelines, although some state law time limitations apply to relative placements.

Placing children with relatives when a parent is unable to care for the child has been practiced among families for generations. But in the past many of these arrangements were informal kin placements outside the child welfare system. Once in the foster care system, states and localities use relatives in a variety of ways to create permanency for children including as licensed foster care placements, informal placements, legal guardians (subsidized and unsubsidized), adoption, and some local communities recognize placement with a relative as reunification. In some cases, the process of finding relative caregivers begins at the time it is suspected that a child may enter the foster care system. Identifying and relying on kin for placements early can divert children from foster care, but at the same time may also lessen the use of services necessary to alleviate problems between birth parents and their children, leaving little chance for reunification.

States prefer transferring legal custody of children in kin placements to relatives so that the child is no longer in state custody. This decreases expenditures by reducing both foster care and administrative costs. Moreover, states believe that legal custody by kin provides a more stable permanent placement for a child and reduces the chance that the child will return to foster care. To this end, many states have implemented a more stringent policy, requiring relatives to take legal custody or adopt children, if they are to remain in the relative's care. Such policies are intended to provide a more permanent home for the child and reduce the chance that the child will re-enter the foster care system. However, this policy may not be effective for permanency because relatives may not be willing to legally take a relative's child or become involved in the termination of parental rights due to the delicate nature of family relationships. Kin may also be unwilling to endure the burdensome process of adoption or may be unable to care for a child without financial support. States are working to relieve relative burdens by using mediation and financial support to address relatives' needs. Many states have recently developed guardianship programs and initiatives (subsidized and unsubsidized) to address these concerns. In addition, many states have simplified procedures for guardianship and kinship assistance, and have implemented new programs specifically to support grandparents as guardians. However, despite states' current implementation of programs to alleviate the burden placed on relatives, it is important to recognize that the changing roles of relatives have changed the child welfare system. If the trend continues, service structure, and particularly reunification services, may be affected as states and localities move to address the service needs of children and their relative caretakers.

With implementation of new timelines for permanency, adoption has been given a great deal of attention as a permanency option. Under ASFA, termination of parental rights usually takes place after a child is in foster care 15 of the most recent 22 months. Since ASFA, there has been an increase in the number of children freed for adoption in many states.

Voluntary TPR can be difficult to obtain from birth parents and more states and localities are using mediation counseling to resolve issues between parents and the agency to make the process easier for parents and their children. The voluntary relinquishment of rights is sometimes facilitated by good relationships that have developed between the foster parents and birth parents, and some agencies reported that such relationships are more often cited as leading to open adoptions, allowing the birth parents to maintain some contact with their children. However, the process can be difficult in involuntary TPR cases. With involuntary TPR, workers must document parents' lack of progress in a case and present it at a court hearing, and parents may have legal representation at these hearings and may bring witnesses to support their opposition.

ASFA established a number of incentives to states for placing children in adoptive homes, including financial assistance for states, local communities, and courts that reach targets for increased numbers of adoptions. ASFA also requires states to use cross-jurisdictional resources for adoptive and permanent placements and denies federal assistance to a state that impedes the placement of a child for adoption outside the jurisdiction.

Adoption is commanding a great deal of worker time and public money. There is a good deal of discussion about the expansion of adoption and how that has prompted the need for adoption expertise, increased adoptive services and larger adoption units, and budget changes to addressthese adoption needs. States have found it difficult to find an adequate pool of adoptive parents to meet the needs of children freed for adoption. Changes are ongoing in states focusing on recruiting an increased number of adoptive parents (to meet the increasing numbers of children waiting), using foster families as adoptive homes, broadening the geographic area for adoption home consideration, and promoting adoption through web sites. Despite these efforts, states will likely end up lacking an adequate number of adoptive homes for children in state custody, resulting in an increased number of "legal orphans" -- children whose partents' rights have been terminated but for whom no adoptive family has been identified.

Guardianship has also become a popular permanency option. Guardianship placement can mean many different things -- placement with relatives or non-relatives, subsidized or unsubsidized placement. Guardianship provides states an additional avenue to move children out of state custody. Many states have implemented some type of guardianship option and others have plans to institute guardianship soon. States are quickly realizing the benefits of guardians and are using state funds (or using federal waiver money) to institute financial support to promote guardianship placements.

8. See Section 3 of this paper for more information on reunification efforts.

3. Programmatic Initiatives

While these alternative permanency options are receiving much attention, reunifying foster care children with their families is still the initial goal of almost every case coming into the system. Routinely, caseworkers follow basic elements of standard reunification practice including:

Meet with birth parents to establish a service plan that outlines the steps they need to take for the child to return home;
Provide or refer parents to services to meet goals of the service plan;
Supervise visitation between parents and children;
Monitor and evaluate parents' progress in remedying the problems that brought the child into care; and
Based on parents' progress, make recommendations to the court to either return the child home or pursue an alternate permanency option.

In the majority of cases, these steps are still effective in returning the majority of children to their parents in a short time frame. Yet, these techniques fail other children who can languish in the system.

Some agencies have implemented intensive reunification programs within their foster care units. These programs follow these same steps but give the workers smaller caseloads and flexible funding to provide additional services to the birth family to return children home more quickly. In addition to these "regular" reunification procedures, many states and counties have adopted special reunification efforts to facilitate reunification. Balancing reunification and expedited permanency has led to the development of a number of new initiatives. These initiatives can be categorized into three broad categories: 1) tools to expedite reunification, 2) specialized reunification programs, and 3) system reform efforts.

3.1 Tools to Expedite Reunification

Interviews with state administrators suggest that the following tools are gaining popularity to facilitate and speed reunification within traditional child welfare agencies.

Family Conferencing. Family conferencing, which is also known as family group decision making, was the most commonly identified new practice that states were using to enhance reunification efforts. Family conferencing was originally developed in New Zealand in response to concerns of indigenous people that Eurocentric expert-driven models were undermining their families and tribes.⁽⁹⁾ The family conferencing model recognizes the strengths of families and their ability to help design solutions to child and caregiver problems. This model focuses on the extended family to make plans to ensure the safety of children at risk of abuse. As used in the United States, family conferencing involves inviting extended family members, friends, and members of the family's support network such as ministers or priests, to attend a meeting at the time of initial placement to discuss the problems that have brought a child into care and what needs to be accomplished for the child to return to a safe home environment. Rather than having the caseworker serve as the expert to determine what the family needs to do, the family is encouraged to come up with plans for what needs to be done. In practice, family conferencing programs vary in the extent to which families are empowered to come up with their own solutions. In some localities, family conferencing is a means to inform families about the permanency planning process, what is expected from the family, and what the repercussions will be if problems are not remedied in a timely fashion (i.e., the termination of parental rights). In other areas, family members are expected to participate fully in the design of the intervention and service plan to provide an environment where the child can one day return home. Ideally, family conferences are used throughout the service process to evaluate progress and make new plans as necessary. Supporters of family conferencing believe that it is effective because it identifies additional supportive resources for the parent and child, helps to break down the sometimes adversarial relationship between child welfare staff and family so that all are working toward a common goal, and serves to give the family notice of the consequences of inaction on the part of the parent.

Intensive Visitation. Intensive visitation programs try to increase safe and healthy contact between parent and child to maintain a strong bond and keep the parent focused on the goal of the child's return home. In response to research identifying visitation as one of the most important factors in reunifying families, Pennsylvania created a statewide manual on visitation. The manual provides practice guidelines to counties on how to make sure parents maintain contact with their child. The process is primarily focused on systematically changing visitation policy at an agency's administrative level, and then instituting administrative oversight (at the county level) of workers. In Tennessee, the state contracted with a private provider to provide therapeutic or intensive visitation between parents and children.

Foster Parent Mentoring. Foster parent mentoring is used to develop a helping relationship between the foster parent and the birth parent so that the foster parent serves as a source of support and learning for the birth parent. Under ideal circumstances, a mentoring foster parent has regular contact with the birth parent, allows visitation in his or her home, models good parenting behavior, and serves as a means of social support for the birth parent while the child is in care and even after the child returns home. Caseworkers we interviewed felt that when foster parents were willing to work with birth parents there were positive results in terms of greater visitation and the birth parents viewing the foster parents and agency as less of a threat.

While these tools are used to help facilitate reunification, they may also facilitate a permanency plan other than reunification. Workers told us that, at times, a consequence of foster parent mentoring was the birth parent's decision to voluntarily relinquish parental rights and consent to adoption of the child by the foster parents as the birth parent felt the child would be better off with the foster parents. Similarly, one state administrator told us family conferencing can help parents realize much earlier in the process that they are not going to be able to parent their child and this expedites permanency for the child.

9. Pennell, J., & Burford, G. (2000 March/April). Family Group Decision Making: Protecting Women and Children. Child Welfare, LXXIX (2), 131-158.

3.2 Special Reunification Programs

Beyond these reunification tools that are implemented in many foster care agencies, many states and counties have developed special reunification programs. These specialized programs are designed to serve families or children with particular needs, or for programs designed as an alternate approach to traditional reunification practices in foster care systems. Some of these are structured as managed care or performance contract efforts. Some emphasize concurrent planning. Others are community oriented efforts while still others make use of other approaches such as "wrap-around services" (intensive efforts to provide extensive community supports for the family) and court-based services. The concepts of permanency, time limits for making decisions, and use of community resources pervade these programs. The importance of ongoing contact between children and their parents is generally recognized, so visitation is a part of all programs directed at return home, although it is handled in various ways in different programs. In other respects, there is great variation in the ways common goals are pursued.

Specialized or innovative reunification programs can be classified into four categories:

Programs for substance abusing parents;
Programs for children with severe problems;
Community-based programs; or
Family preservation model intensive in-home services.

Programs for Substance Abusing Parents. Programs for substance abusing parents focus on working with a population recognized as one of the most difficult to reunify, particularly under the constraints of the ASFA timelines. Long-term substance abuse is a difficult behavior to eradicate. Even when parents are motivated to change, repeated relapse is common before they are ultimately free of drugs. Two types of programs developed to combat substance abuse among parents are drug courts and residential treatment programs.

Drug courts represent an approach to treatment of drug abusers that includes sanctions enforced by the court. One such program is the Drug Court Recovery Project in San Diego County, California. When a custody petition is entered and the caseworker has identified substance abuse as a contributing factor to the abuse or neglect of the child, the parent is referred for inpatient or outpatient substance abuse treatment and regular drug testing. Parents' failure to comply with treatment may result in the court exercising a number of sanctions including 3-5 days in custody and/or a monetary penalty for contempt of court, and upon the third failure to comply a referral is made to the Dependency Drug Court Program. Participation in the program is voluntary and subject to the approval of the court judge. In this program, parents continue to receive treatment for substance abuse, but must make frequent court appearances to report their progress to the judge during phases of the program. Phase 1 of the Dependency Drug court requires a court appearance once a week for 90 days; phase 2 requires a court appearance once every two weeks for 90 days; and phase 3 requires a court appearance once a month for 90 days. The Dependency Drug Court hopes to encourage compliance through the heightened supervision of the court and through peer support. Parents receive praise for compliance and are given tokens for the number of days of sobriety maintained. Failure to comply results in sanctions of up to 5 days in custody or dismissal from participation and evaluation for TPR.

Another specialized approach to working with substance abusing parents is the development of residential treatment programs for drug dependent women and their children. Mothers Making a Change (MMAC) in Cobb and Douglas Counties in Georgia is a comprehensive program that includes community outreach, early intervention, family preservation and support services, and substance abuse treatment services. MMAC's services are based on a non-threatening treatment model that is family-centered, community-based, and encompasses a holistic approach to treatment. MMAC recognizes that substance abuse is usually one of many family problems, and addresses not only the addiction but education, health, housing, and employment in a holistic fashion. The program recognizes that to keep a parent and child together requires resolving the problems of the parent. Therefore, services are mother and family focused rather than child focused. The hallmark of the MMAC program is a residential substance abuse treatment service. Clients receive intensive services to conquer addiction for 90 days in the Ready to Work program at the Cobb County facility. In the second phase of the program women are transferred to the Douglas County facility, (a complex of apartments rented by the program) where they spend 9 months receiving services focused on anger management, child development, parental skills, nutrition, and education. Most women are reunified with their children during this phase. In the final phase, clients receive 6 months of aftercare focused on support to minimize the risk of relapse and on finding employment.

Programs for Children with Severe Problems. While the drug courts and residential substance abuse prevention programs target parents whose problems make them among the most difficult to reunify, other innovative programs target children whose severe problems make reunification difficult. Children with severe mental health problems who end up in the child welfare system are difficult to reunify as their parents' problems with parenting are exacerbated by the children's serious mental health needs. Finding a way to reunify children who have been institutionalized due to their mental illness is a real challenge. Wraparound services were mentioned by several states as an effective way to reunify emotionally disturbed children with their parents. Wraparound services refers to an approach whereby an extensive array of services are individualized and "wrapped around" the family unit to support their strengths and meet all their needs with respect to personal and community safety, education, emotional and physical health, family life recreation and legal issues.

Wraparound services are used by the Santa Clara County California Department of Family and Children's Services for emotionally disturbed children who have been placed -- or are at risk of being placed -- in their highest level of care residential placement facilities. Through the efforts of two wraparound programs in the county, children and their families are provided with an individualized array of program services to maintain the child in a more normalized setting outside of an institution. The program uses a team approach with a variety of specialists within the agency working with parents to make decisions about what services the family needs to keep the child within the home. A crisis line is available with program specialists on call 24 hours a day to go to the family's home to intervene as necessary. At times, as many as 12 staff members may be assigned to work with one family. Although these intensive wraparound programs are costly in terms of resources, workers report the services are successful in returning children to their homes who would otherwise stay institutionalized until they reached the age of majority.

Community Based Models. Across the country, community based models for providing foster care and reunifying families have become more prevalent. The Annie E. Casey Foundation's Family to Family Initiative is one of the more widely used community-based models. This model seeks to reform foster care systems so that 1) there is better screening of cases to determine if out-of-home placement is necessary, 2) children in institutional settings are returned to their communities, 3) foster families are used as team members to facilitate family reunification, and 4) family-centered neighborhood-based services are developed to strengthen the communities from which foster children come.

Community-based reunification programs try to recruit foster families to serve children in the communities where the children reside so that there are no unnecessary disruptions of school and peer friendships. The Lucas County Ohio Community Development Department adopted the Family to Family model to help facilitate reunification. Six neighborhood community centers have been given subcontracts from the department to provide space for family visitation, parenting classes, and family conferences. The families find the community centers more convenient and less intimidating than the Department's downtown offices. In addition to providing space for Department use, the community centers themselves are multi-service agencies that provide recreation, family counseling, health services, and after-school programs. Community advocates from the Department are linked with families shortly before a child is to return home. Their job is to provide intensive in-home services to parents and children to prepare them for the transition and to stabilize the reunified family. The community advocates introduce families to the community centers so that the community centers can serve as a resource for families once services by the community advocate end. The goal of the program is to use the community centers as a resource that troubled families can draw upon to prevent abuse and neglect and another out-of-home placement.

Family Preservation Intensive In-Home Services. A fourth widespread approach to specialized reunification services are programs that use the family preservation model of short-term intensive in-home services. Caseworkers assigned to these cases have small caseloads of 2 to 5 families, are available to the families 24 hours a day, seven days per week and go to the home to provide services to the families. Typically the families start to receive services a few weeks before the child is to return home and the services last for 8 to 12 weeks until the family is stable and the child has been reintegrated into the family. The amount of service is intensive with families typically receiving between 10 and 20 hours of services per week, depending on the families' needs.

A variation of this family preservation model is the Natural Parent Support Program which operates in central New Jersey. Like family preservation programs, the program provides home-based services to families whose children are soon to be returned home. The services are typically less intensive than family preservation services and workers work with families in their homes an average of 5 to 7 hours per week. However, families receive services for 6 months, a much longer period of time than families are usually served by family preservation programs.

The services are family-focused with an emphasis on trying to support the parents' ability to be successful parents through behavior modeling, mentoring, advocacy for school and other services, and family counseling. The program also provides concrete services such as transportation to appointments, child care, and help finding housing and employment. Workers have caseloads of five to seven families. This program occupies an important niche between family preservation programs which provide more intensive services but can only serve a few families as caseloads are limited to 2 or 3 families per worker and traditional reunification services where caseworkers have much larger caseloads and provide families with much more limited attention.

While the special reunification programs described represent different approaches to reunification and serve different populations, these programs, with the exception of the drug courts, share several elements in common. First, they are predominantly family-focused rather than child-focused or parent-focused. They stress working with the entire family to provide the support and resources necessary for the family to function effectively as a unit. Second, they develop a well delineated case plan with the parents that identifies what is necessary to return and keep children in the home. Also, there is an emphasis on active work with the parents to make sure that the goals of the case plan are met. Reunification services provided within the context of standard social service practice typically put much more of the onus on the parents to comply with the case plan and, given the size of their caseloads, can rarely provide the intensive one-on-one attention that is evidenced in these specialized programs. Third, these programs are comprehensive efforts to address a range of issues that effect the parent's ability to be a good parent. They focus on much more than remedying the problems that brought the child into the system but on making sure families are stable with respect to housing, employment, and networks of support. Fourth, services are individualized and customized to meet the unique needs of the families. Finally, these reunification programs start their intensive reunification efforts once a decision has been made to return the child. These programs help parents and children prepare for and then make the transition to home and then expend considerable time and resources to stabilize the family so that the child can remain home permanently.

3.3 Systems Reform

Today there are a number of ideas for reforming the child welfare system that compete for attention. We appear to have a rich menu of possibilities but little agreement on what to try next. Some of the current ideas include:¹⁰

Divided Systems. Some jurisdictions are focusing on the front end of the system and experimenting with differential responses to reports of maltreatment. Two separate processing streams are available for reports, one investigative and law enforcement oriented and the other oriented toward assessment and support of the family. The first system is available in very serious circumstances when it appears the criminal justice system should be invoked. But it is thought that most cases of maltreatment can be handled in the second system which avoids determination of blame and instead focuses on how the family might be helped to attain better functioning. Cases in the second stream avoid the "investigation" that is usually the initial response to a report of maltreatment. A differential response system is being tried in Missouri and in a few other jurisdictions.

Alterations in Financial Structure and Performance Responsibility. This approach is based on the belief that problems in the functioning of the child welfare system are the result of suboptimal relationships among responsible organizations, particularly the relationships between the public child welfare agencies and the private agencies that provide much of the service under contract with the public agencies. Hence, the approach focuses on restructuring those contracts. One motivation for this restructuring is the belief that the financing of foster care (based on open-ended federal appropriations) encourages placement in the first place and discourages termination of placement once the child is in care. Hence, we should alter the incentive structure for agencies responsible for providing foster care to encourage quicker termination of that care. This can be accomplished through managed care contracts, modeled after managed care arrangements in medical care, in which flat-rate payments are made for service to a group of children or families for a period of time, instead of payments for particular services provided. An example of such contracts is the agreement by a private agency to serve a group of children in foster care for a fixed sum. The incentive structure is thus changed through a rearrangement of the financial risks the parties undertake. If a child is in foster care for a shorter period of time than expected, the agency "makes money" while if the child is in care a longer time, the agency loses money. The incentive is to reduce the time a child is in placement. An early example of a child welfare, managed care program is HomeRebuilders in New York City.¹¹

A second motivation for altering organizational relationships is the observation that traditional contracts with agencies specify the services to be delivered, rather than the outcomes to be achieved. This leads to performance contracting, in which payment and contract renewal is based on the achievement of goals defined in terms of outcomes, such as terminating placements for a certain proportion of cases covered by the contract. Illinois, together with some other jurisdictions, employs performance contracting in some of its contracts.

However, as in medical managed care, when financial incentives drive the system of care, quality of service may suffer, so mechanisms for assuring quality are often added to managed care and performance contracting. Unfortunately, in arenas such as child welfare, the measurement of quality of service is often problematic, and so it is unclear whether quality assurance programs will succeed.

10. Other system reform practices not discussed here include strategies to redesign and restructure the foster care system such as those initiatives ongoing in Oregon, North Carolina, and Ohio.

11. See the HomeRebuilders Evaluation on the World Wide Web at http://aspe.hhs.gov/hsp/NYC-HomeRebuilders99/index.htm

4. Implications

The current tension is the result of shortened timelines for permanency decisions. Although it is in line with the child's "sense of time,"(i.e., his or her developmental needs) it conflicts with the fact that parental change often takes longer than is permitted under the new deadlines. In turn, this has created a tension among permanency options. Reunification remains the initial goal for the majority of children entering foster care. Yet, the concept of permanency has broadened, with an emphasis on other options such as adoption, guardianship, and placement with relatives. The challenge becomes viewing the goals as a continuum rather than competing forces.

New time limits give workers permission to remove a child from foster care by finding an alternative permanent home at 15 months, if reunification is unlikely. Concurrent planning is the primary tool used to comply with the new time requirements. Concurrent planning has changed the focus and approach of case planning and decision making. It requires caseworkers to make a primary plan, usually a goal of reunification, and at the same time make plans for an alternative form of permanency. There are inherent tensions in the approach, starting with the conflict it creates around a principle of casework -- that social workers are trained to have full confidence in a client and focus on a client's ability to change. Reunification efforts require total commitment and should not be approached with the expectation of failure. Instead, a worker develops a plan for the purpose of inciting client change, while at the same time the worker develops an alternative permanency plan in case client change does not occur. There is some shaping of the concept in the field. In some locales, emphasis is placed on concurrent planning involving relatives and foster parents, and not on stranger adoptions as an alternative plan. Perhaps this makes the concurrent planning concept more acceptable. Also, many workers initially identify a "back-up" plan but do not actively pursue it until they have determined that reunification is unlikely.

New emphasis on relatives as a permanency option has created tensions between those who believe that relatives are the best way to keep children within the family unit and those who believe that "the apple does not fall far from the tree." Relatives are sought to keep children out of the system, as placements once a child has been put into the system, and as alternative options to reunification. Debate about the role relatives play is complicated by who is defining permanency and whether it is considered an emotional state of being, a legal status, or a fiscal issue. No matter the perspective, relatives are an increasingly used resource and the debate over their role, the services needed to maintain a child in their custody, and the value placed upon them as resources needs to be addressed.

The shortened timeframes of ASFA have shifted from a presumption of reunification to a presumption of permanency, with reunification being a major option. As a result, there is greater emphasis on a parent's responsibility to change despite ASFA's implied expectations for reciprocal responsibilities of agencies and parents. Personal responsibility from the parent is important for successful reunification, however for family reunification to have a chance, the agency must uphold its responsibility to facilitate adequate services. Successful reunification requires addressing the problems of the parent, and that entails more than drawing up plans, setting appointments for treatment and visitation, and checking in with the parent to verify progress. Greater success in reunifying families comes when agencies and their staff work to share the responsibility with parents by assisting and supporting parent treatment and visitation, and providing adequate concrete and emotional support to bridge the gap between the parent problem and successful treatment.

The priority of child welfare agencies is to provide safe and permanent environments for children. The best way to accomplish this goal is to balance the needs of children and their families. The needs often conflict, creating inherent tensions at all levels of the service delivery system. While the tensions can be frustrating and even confusing, it must be recognized that the tensions are intrinsic to the problems being addressed. The challenge is to learn to successfully manage the tensions and use them as a vehicle for positive change. New policies are creating environments that emphasize child safety. Yet, programmatic efforts are being developed to try to balance the needs of children and their families. It will be very important to track the effects of policy changes on child, family, and system outcomes. Some of the questions to be answered include: Will reunification rates drop significantly? If they do, will children be in other permanent arrangements or in legal limbo? Can concurrent planning be implemented effectively and if so, is it an effective approach for permanency? How will it impact reunification of families? And how are children faring under the many permanency options?

References

Bowlby, John (1952). Maternal Care and Mental Health. Geneva: World Health Organizations

Bowlby, John (1969-1973). Attachment and Loss. London: Hogarth.

Bowlby, John (1988). A Secure Base: Parent-child Attachment and Healthy Human Development. New York: Basic Books.

Child Welfare League of America. Stat Book (1999). CWLA Press, Washington, D.C.

Excerpts in Robert H. Bremmer, Ed., Children and Youth in America, Vol. 2, Cambridge, MA: Harvard university Press, 1979.

Goldstein, Joseph, Albert Solnit, and Anna Freud. (1996) The Best Interests of the Child: The Least Detrimental Alternative. New York: Free Press.

Kempe, C.H., Frederic N. Silverman, Brandt T. Steele, William Droegemuller, and Henry R. Silver (1962). The Battered Child Syndrome. JAMA 181(1): 17-24.

Kinney, Jill M., David Haapala, and Charlotte Booth. (1991). Keeping Families Together: The Homebuilders Model. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter.

Maas, Henry S. and Richard Engler, Jr. (1959) Children in Need of Parents. New York: Columbia University Press.

Nelson, Barbara J. (1984) Making an Issue of Child Abuse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Pennell, J., & Burford, G. (2000 March/April). Family Group Decision Making: Protecting Women and Children. Child Welfare, LXXIX (2), 131-158.

Wood, Katherine M. and Ludwig L. Geismar. (1989). Families at Risk: Treating the Multiproblem Family. New York: Human Sciences Press.

Chapter 3. Permanency and Reunification Trends in 25 States

1. Introduction

In 1994, as part of the Evaluation of Family Preservation and Reunification Services, Westat interviewed state- and county-level administrators from 25 states about the status of reunification in their states and then profiled reunification programs in those states for possible inclusion in the Evaluation of Family Preservation and Reunification Services.¹

In the 1990s, the number of children in the child welfare system placed in out-of-home care continued to increase. Officials at the state and federal levels were concerned that, despite state efforts and enactment of the 1980 Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act (AACWA), the numbers of children entering the child welfare system continued to rise, and children still lingered in the foster care system for an extended period of time. Additionally, cases of child deaths highlighted by the media fueled critics who believed that preserving and reunifying families was not necessarily an effective way to establish permanen, safe, and stable homes for many children in foster care.

In response, states began enacting legislation and requirements in the 1990s that emphasized child safety and expedited permanency. The provisions included holding permanency hearings sooner for children in state care, practicing concurrent planning, and implementing a more expedited track to filing termination of parental rights (TPRs) for abandoned children or unresponsive parents.

Beginning in spring of 2000, Westat and Chapin Hall Center for Children met with public and private child welfare staff at the state and county levels to discuss issues surrounding permanency for children and reunification policy and practice. Of particular interest was information about the states' policy and practices, how states are adapting to the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) requirements, and what changes in policy and practice have taken place in states and localities since ASFA implementation. This report presents an overview of the information on permanency and reunification in child welfare, based on our discussions with state administrators.

Adoption and Safe Families Act

ASFA, Public Law 105-89, was enacted in November 1997. ASFA amended the 1980 Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act by refocusing efforts to promote safety and permanence for children in the foster care system. Of primary importance was addressing cases where children still lingered in the foster care system for an extended period of time or had returned to foster care after a previous placement because of an unsafe family situation.

ASFA includes criteria to define when efforts to preserve and reunify a family are not required and outlines the court's discretion to make decisions on a child's permanency based on safety considerations. ASFA also limits the amount of time a child can be in the foster care system prior to being placed in a permanent home. Moreover, ASFA requires permanency hearings be held for children no later than 12 months after they enter foster care (6 months earlier than the prior law). The Act also requires, in most cases, that TPR be initiated for any child who has been in state custody for 15 out of the most recent 22 months. ASFA provides financial incentives to states to increase the number of adoptions.

Once enacted, ASFA requirements were effective immediately. The passing of state legislation to comply with ASFA took place in states across the country in 1998 and 1999. By early 1999, all 50 states and the District of Columbia had passed legislation in response to ASFA.²The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) conducted numerous briefings and training sessions for states and localities on the implementation of ASFA, and DHHS issued final regulations on the Act on January 25, 2000.

ASFA prompted policy and practice changes in state and local child welfare systems across the country. It is important to examine how states perceive permanency post-ASFA and the role reunification plays in the continuum of options to find safety and permanency for children.

1. For information on the 1994 report, see A Review of Family Preservation and Family Reunification Programs, for the National Evaluation of Family Services, Contract No HHS-100-94-0020, May 30, 1995. See http://aspe.hhs.gov/hsp/cyp/fpprogs.htm

2. Children's Defense Fund Action Council Issue Basics, Adoption and Safe Families Act. Retrieved on January 8, 2001 from the World Wide Web: http://www.cdfactioncouncil.org/ASFA.htm.

2. State-level Information and Trends

The first section of this report summarizes information and trends on permanency and reunification in 25 states. Westat and Chapin Hall Center for Children staff spoke to state administrators in 25 states to update information on permanency and reunification policy and practices. Topics discussed included: state system structure, permanency options in the state, state viewpoints on permanency and reunification, service provider structure, changes in the state prompted by ASFA, current child welfare initiatives, and future options for permanency and reunification for families. For a list of all the states included in the report and additional information on individual states, see Appendix A.

State administrators were asked to describe their child welfare system structure to provide context for further state information on permanency and reunification. Data provided by the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) Annual Foster Care Database and Child Welfare League of America (CWLA) Yearbook provide an illustration of the number of children in out-of-home care in their states. Estimates indicate that those states contacted for information represented a good cross-section of states across the country regarding the number of children out-of-home.

Table 3-1.
Number of Children in Out-of-Home Care
	Number of Children in Out-of-Home Placement^(a)
	Less than 5,000 children in care	5,000-9,999 children in care	10,000 - 14,999 children in care	15,000 - 20,000 children in care	Over 20,000 children in care
Number of States Contacted	4	10	4	3	4

a. Data from the AFCARS Annual Foster Care Database, FY 1998 and from the 1999 CWLA Child Abuse and Neglect Stat Book.

Individual state data on the number of children in out-of-home placement are presented in Appendix A.

Administrators were also asked about the structure of the child welfare system. The 25 states were divided between state-administered systems and those that are state supervised but county administered. Of the 25 states, 15 had state-administered child welfare systems, while 10 had county- administered systems.

Within the two general types of administrative structures, there were a variety of sub-structures within states, ranging from systems with strong state management over service delivery to systems where states give autonomy in service delivery to the local level. Many states reported an increasing amount of autonomy being passed to the county and local levels. However, even with the trend of devolution, states tend to maintain control of child welfare through policy and funding and assure compliance with state and federal regulations and requirements.

2.1 Service Delivery

Administrators discussed service delivery arrangements in their states. The responses indicate a trend toward the use of private contractors to deliver direct services to clients. In no state are all reunification services provided by the public agency. The majority of state administrators (56%) reported using both public and private providers to deliver reunification services to families in their state.

There are many different types of public and private service delivery arrangements. In public-private shared arrangements, it is common for states to maintain investigation and case management services for children in state custody, while private contractors provide direct treatment services to children and families. While some public agencies may share in providing direct services to clients, others may contract with private agencies to deliver all direct treatment services to clients. In a couple of states, administrators reported that private contracts were primarily used for high-cost foster care services such as therapeutic, residential, or group home services for children but not for other foster care services.

Nine administrators (36%) reported that child welfare services were primarily privatized or planned to be so within a short time. In other words, the state or local division of the public agency provided oversight on cases, but services to clients were contracted to private agencies. Two administrators responded that all services were provided solely by the public agency, although both of those administrators discussed exceptions in individual counties where private providers are also used. Overall, it is clear that most all of the states are using private agencies to provide some portion of services to clients.

2.2 Permanency

When discussing permanency with state administrators, a variety of issues arose surrounding acclimating to new federal and state timelines for child permanency. Overall, administrators seemed very attentive to the legal timelines and the requirements for expedited permanency. They discussed the timing of permanency in their states, including schedules for dispositional hearings, and the complex process of working through issues and finding tools to expedite permanency. Administrators talked about the effects of ASFA on state law, and several administrators made a point of mentioning that they adhered to ASFA definitions for permanency. But we also found that some states had moved to shortened timelines prior to ASFA. One state administrator commented that her state was in the process of working through issues to get beyond the present belief permeating child welfare that permanency for a child equals adoption. Administrators also remarked on issues of least restrictive, permanent environments for children, and about the importance of meeting a child's physical and emotional needs for lifelong attachment and a permanent home.

Administrators mentioned efforts to expedite permanency, including concurrent planning, guardianship, and adoption. Concurrent planning is the process of planning two strategies for permanency for a child from the start of a case - a primary plan which usually involves a goal of reunification and working with and providing services to the family to achieve this goal and, at the same time, planning and working toward an alternative permanency goal for the child (e.g., permanent relative placement, guardianship, or adoption) in case the primary plan is not achieved within the timeline set. Establishing and simplifying guardianship policy was discussed as a way to find permanent homes for children. Guardianship is a legal means for an adult to assume parental responsibility and authority for a child without severing parental rights of the birth parents. One administrator said the guardianship policy in her state was originally designed for adults needing guardians but that the state was planning to simplify the process by eliminating reporting and fee requirements that made the process cumbersome to families. Administrators also mentioned that adoption is getting more attention, and many states are making a substantial effort to bolster adoption efforts, particularly since new timelines have been in effect.

States were asked about the types of permanency options available for children and the priority they established for those options. Every state responded that reunification with the child's birth parents or with the custodian from which the child was taken was the first permanency option.

Table 3-2.
Permanency Options
Prioritizing Permanency Options	Yes	No
Ranked reunification first among permanency options^(a)	23	0
Ranked adoption second among permanency options^(a)	15	8
Reported a relative placement option	22	2^(b)
Ranked relative placement second, giving preference over adoption^(a)	7	16
Reported a guardianship option (subsidized or unsubsidized)	13	10
Reported a long-term or permanent foster care option	20	3

a. N=23; Colorado and Georgia did not give order preference.
b. Missouri and Wisconsin do not currently have formal relative placement options; however Missouri has multiple initiatives in the state to encourage relative placement.

The majority of states (65%) ranked "adoption" as the second permanency option, and "relative placement" (including legal custody, guardianship, or some other type of arrangement) usually ranked third (7 of 23 states ranked relative placement above adoption in importance). States' preferences for adoption over relative placement seemed to reflect their concern that relative placements may not be permanent for the child and the need to find legal permanency for a child so that he or she can exit the foster care system. Some states specifically stated a preference for relative adoption or a guardianship (if available in the state) because this secured permanency for the child and discharge from the foster care system. Twenty-two states (92%) had some type of relative placement option for children, and 13 states (56%) had a guardianship option.

2.1.1 Relative Placements

States mentioned a variety of ways they are using relatives to create permanency for children, including kin placements, guardianship, and adoption. In an attempt to address the need to find an increasing number of permanent homes for children, states are turning often to relatives.

Sixty-eight percent of the states (13) reported an increase in the use of temporary and/or permanent relative placements over the past few years.³

Six states reported maintaining steady rates or no change in the rate of relative placements, but some of those States also said it has always been common to have children placed with relatives. No states reported a decrease in the use of relative placements. Many state administrators who reported an increase in relative placements also reported more upfront work in locating relatives for placement, due to the time limits of federal and state legislation.

Administrators showed a preference toward permanent relative placements. Once a child is placed with a relative, according to ASFA regulations, the state may choose whether to exempt the child from ASFA timelines. However, many states have implemented the stringent position to require legal permanency for a child with a relative, in an effort to find permanency for children and move them out of the foster care system. Without legal placement, the child remains in state custody. This burdens the state's system financially and also leaves the status of the child unresolved; without legal custody to a third party or TPR, a parent may choose to take the relative to court at a later time to regain custody of the child. A few administrators stated a preference for relative placements that involved adoption or a guardianship placement because, in their states, these were considered legally permanent where the child exits the foster care system and has a better chance of uninterrupted permanency. However, legal custody or placement with a relative can be difficult to accomplish since some kin may not be willing to go through the burdensome legal process of adoption or legal custody or may be unable to care for the child without financial support.

About one-half of the states (13) responded that they had some type of guardianship option for children (with relatives and non-relatives), although only three specifically mentioned that guardianships were subsidized. However, states seem to understand the concerns of relative caretakers and know that support is important in order to place a child permanently. Eighteen states (72%) reported some type of new initiative underway in their state to assist relative placement.⁴ Particularly popular were plans for guardianship assistance (n=14) and also various initiatives for kin care assistance (n=5). Moreover, two states also reported support initiatives specifically for grandparent caretakers. With states struggling to find innovative and diverse ways to obtain safe and permanent placements for children, it is clear that states are focused on encouraging and supporting relatives as caregivers when children must be placed outside the home.

3. N = 19; 7 states reported no information on this subject. Some states that reported no change in the use of temporary or permanent relative placements discussed efforts underway to increase the number of relative placements.

4. Two states in the group had Title IV-E child welfare waivers for subsidized/assisted guardianship. The others seemed to be utilizing state funds for their initiatives.

2.1.2 Reunification

ASFA and corresponding state legislation have placed a significant emphasis on expediting permanency for children in foster care placement. This emphasis has prompted discussions about the role of reunification in the permanency continuum across states. Reunification can be difficult to achieve within a limited timeline. With this in mind, we discussed with administrators if there had been changes in the definition or traditional concept of reunification - to return a child to the birth parents or to the original custodian from whom the child was taken. In particular, has there been a change in the role of birth parents (custodial and non-custodial) and kin in reunification. States were asked if their definitions of reunification had been expanded beyond the traditional definition to a broader definition that included extended relatives. In other words, have states broadened their concept of reunification to include kin?

Most states maintained the traditional definition of reunification - to return the child to his or her birthparents or household of origin.⁵However, five states reported that placement of a child with either a birth parent or a family relative was considered "reunification," or what some called "family reunification" in the state. A strong common point among these states was a large increase in placing children with relatives, particularly over the past few years, and their success in creating permanent living arrangements with relatives. An administrator from one of the five states pointed out that often the children have closer relationships with relatives than with their birth parents, based on the family situation. This inclusion of relatives as "reunification" seems to indicate the importance placed on maintaining the child within his/her extended family structure and the success of these permanent arrangements.

5. Three state administrators did not provide a definition during discussions.

2.1.3 Changes prompted by ASFA

Most administrators we spoke with described significant changes in their states as a result of ASFA, although a few administrators mentioned that their state had enacted similar legislation prior to ASFA and reported few changes after enactment of the federal law. Administrators described legislative changes to bring their policy, procedures, and reporting structure into compliance with ASFA and working at the county and local levels to implement new provisions. A number of people also told us that their states had passed legislation instituting timelines and had established policy and practices to facilitate faster permanency, such as concurrent planning, prior to the passage of ASFA.

Administrators reported a new impetus for permanency and meeting the new timelines. Many discussed moving backlog cases out of the foster care system by changing the goals to adoption and proceeding with TPR. As a result, there was a good deal of discussion about the expansion of adoption and how that has prompted the need for adoption expertise, increasing adoptive services and the size of adoption units, and budget changes to address adoption needs. Administrators reported changes ongoing in their states to focus on obtaining an increased number of adoptive parents (to meet the needs of TPR cases), efforts to use foster families as adoptive homes, broadening the geographic area for adoptive home consideration, and promoting adoption through state web sites.

Recognizing the need to make permanency decisions sooner, some administrators reported programmatic and administrative changes utilized to expedite permanency. A number of administrators spoke about changes to engage relatives in cases sooner, particularly in the case-planning process, and also reported a significant increase in the use of guardianship and kinship care arrangements as permanent and temporary placements for children.

Administrators mentioned the use of concurrent planning as a tool for permanency planning. Often, a child is placed with relatives in anticipation of custody or adoption at a later date, or the child is placed with foster parents who are prepared to take a child into their home on a permanent basis (often referred to as Fost-Adopt homes). Agency staff prefer these types of arrangements because it limits the number of placements the child must undergo prior to permanency. Some administrators noted that their states had begun concurrent planning on cases prior to ASFA, but that there has been a greater acceptance of the practice since ASFA implementation. Administrators also reported expanding the responsibilities of foster parents to have them work with birth parents for reunification purposes. In this role, foster parents can act as mentors to birth parents. However, this relationship can act also as an impetus for birth parents to give up rights to their child, believing that the foster parents would provide a better life for their child.

Administrators also said that ASFA has compelled their agencies to coordinate and collaborate with other agencies to expedite permanency for children, specifically discussing their work with service providers and the courts. One administrator believed that ASFA, by expediting permanency for children drifting in the system, placed an increased caseload burden on the courts. Another administrator said that the court had gotten quicker at expediting cases through the system.

There were a few brief comments about changes in services as well. Most comments on services seemed to focus on adapting family-driven services to meet expedited permanency requirements. One administrator mentioned that ASFA's push for permanency had compelled more intensive services to families in the state; another referred to training of staff to do a good family assessment early so that they could adequately address needs and services for families and expedite permanency. However, one administrator did say that in her opinion, ASFA had compelled her state to change from services being family-driven to child-driven.

2.1.4 State Initiatives

State administrators were asked if there were any new initiatives being implemented in the state to promote permanency for an update on new policy in the states. Twenty-two administrators reported some type of new initiative in their states, ranging from those dealing with services to prevent child placement to those implemented to assist in mediating termination of parental rights. Initiatives most often reported by administrators were concentrated in the areas of adoption, guardianship, and kinship care. Appendix B provides a glossary of terms to assist in understanding initiatives listed in the table below.

Nine administrators reported initiatives dealing with the recruitment of adoptive parents or post-adoptive services. Also, nine administrators mentioned some type of guardianship project starting or ongoing in their state. Guardianship initiatives ranged from simplifying the guardianship process to offering subsidized guardianship. Included among the nine were two states with Title IV-E Waivers for guardianship.

Table 3-3.
State Initiatives
State Initiative	Number of States Reporting
Adoption	9
Guardianship	9
Kinship or relative caregiver support	7
Concurrent planning	4
Foster care recruitment	3
Family group decisionmaking	2
Family to Family Initiative	2
Managed care	2
TPR mediation	2
Birth parent support for reunification	1
Performance-based foster care reimbursement	1
Permanency planning coordinator	1
Permanent placement program for children	1
Preventive services	1
Foster care caseload reduction	1
Substance abuse provider partnerships	1
Visitation	1

In addition to the high number of adoption and guardianship initiatives, kinship care initiatives were also highly reported. Seven state administrators reported some type of kinship support measure instituted to support relative caregivers, including specific measures to support grandparent caretakers. Other initiatives mentioned included concurrent planning (N=4), foster care recruitment (N=3), TPR mediation (N=2), family group decisionmaking (N=2), and managed care initiatives (N=2).

State administrators were also asked about special or innovative reunification efforts ongoing in their state. Many administrators discussed ongoing reunification efforts, some instituted as part of their statewide reunification services to families, other efforts were specialized programs offered for reunification clients with particular problems (i.e., substance abuse or children in therapeutic foster care). After review of the efforts described by administrators, further discussions were conducted with program administrators for 12 reunification programs in states across the country. Appendix C provides brief descriptions of the 12 reunification programs we reviewed for further research.

After further review of the 12 programs, four programs that appeared to be innovative and unique in the nature of services provided to clients were chosen for further study. Reports on these reunification programs are provided in Appendix D.

3. Conclusions

Looking at state structure and the delivery of services in the 25 states, we see that the majority of child welfare services are administered at the state-level, although many states reported an increasing amount of autonomy being passed to the county and local levels. In addition, our review of information on delivery of services illustrates a trend toward the use of privately contracted service providers. Although most state administrators told us that both the public agency and private contractors share service delivery to clients, in many cases, the public agency is focused on investigative and case planning and management, while private contractors are providing direct treatment services to children and families.

State policies enacted in the late 1990s and the enactment of ASFA have made for significant changes in child welfare policy with a strong emphasis on promoting safety, shortening timelines and expediting permanency, and looking to alternatives for reunification.

Our discussions with state administrators demonstrate that ASFA is being taken seriously. Implementation of the law is taking place. Legislative changes to bring state policy and statutes into compliance have been instituted, and administrators are working at the state, county, and local levels to implement new policy and practice. All states have adopted ASFA requirements through legislation.

States say that reunification is the first permanency option they consider for every child entering care. However, the implementation of the new timelines has given adoption a great deal of attention. Adoption is commanding a great deal of time and money in states, as illustrated by the number of states that mentioned new adoption initiatives. States are putting much effort into locating new adoptive homes for children, particularly for children who have been in the foster care system for a significant period of time (i.e., backlog cases).

Relatives also are receiving an enormous amount of attention. States recognize that relatives are an important resource for permanency for children. States are making an effort to locate relatives as soon as a child comes into care and make them part of the permanency process - providing foster care, participating in case decisionmaking, and even providing adoptive homes for children.

Child permanency is dependent on collaboration between agencies. Some states appear to be renewing their efforts to collaborate with other agencies, recognizing the benefits of cooperation and collaboration with other agencies, the courts, and policy makers to expedite permanency within the new timelines. However, the burden for cooperation continues to lie with the child welfare agencies, which forces them to take the lead. This can be a very difficult task for overburdened agencies, particularly when dealing with overburdened court systems and lack of appropriate community resources.

States seem to be trying to balance the need to expedite permanency with the need to reunify families. State administrators report that reunification is still the primary goal for families in the child welfare system. However, as much as states want to preserve families through reunification, they also admit that letting a child linger in the foster care system is not an adequate response to the needs of the child. State administrators report that they believe the expedited timelines instituted by federal and state law were necessary. Some administrators reported relief by staff as timelines provided rationale for terminating a parent's right and seeking a permanency option other than reunification for children who have been in the system for an extended period and whose parents were not able to resolve issues that brought the child into care. But at the same time, administrators spoke about the concern that permanency would become equivalent to adoption, and reunification would become the exception rather than the norm for families.

While administrators and child welfare staff grapple with the issues of reunification and expedited permanency, state policy makers continue to look for tools to adequately address finding permanency for children in foster care. By looking at initiatives across states, relative and non-relative homes are being sought to provide permanency for children. Children who have spent years in the foster care system are now part of the "back log" for which permanent placements must be found. Some of these children are in their teens and do not want to be adopted. They will remain in state custody with a goal of emancipation or independent living. However, the rest of the children will require a legally permanent relative placement or an adoptive home. As a result, states are spending a great deal of time and funding to implement initiatives to find adoptive homes and encourage and support relatives who can provide homes for children. State policy seems to emphasize adoption, which indicates that states may find adoption more feasible than locating relative placements. The fact that states receive a monetary incentive for final adoptions is a factor in the equation to further consider.

Despite the apparent push toward adoption, foster care administrators are still optimistic about reunification as a priority and, overall, do not see an about-turn on the issue of reunification. They declared a need for proper resources for education of staff and training tools to achieve progress in reunifying families under shortened timelines. However, despite these needs, most believed that reunification will remain the first priority among permanency options for families and will maintain priority status through the development of methods to speed the progress of reunification with families (i.e., assessment and engaging family). Appendix D provides an in-depth look at four reunification programs. These programs demonstrate innovative reunification efforts taking place in communities around the country, and offer examples of collaborative efforts among agencies and intensive reunification services that are helping families.

References

Chapin Hall Center for Children, University of Chicago. Adoption, Foster Care, and Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) Annual Database.

Children's Defense Fund. Issue Basics, Adoption and Safe Families Act. Retrieved on January 8, 2001 from the World Wide Web:http://www.cdfactioncouncil.org/ASFA.htm.

Child Welfare League of America. Child Abuse and Neglect: A Look at the States. CWLA Press, Washington, D.C. 1999.

Westat, James Bell Associates, Inc., and The Chapin Hall Center for Children. A Review of Family Preservation and Family Reunification Programs. The National Evaluation of Family Services. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. Washington, D.C., 1995.

Appendices

Appendix A. State Matrix (6)

State	Organizational Structure	Foster Care Population	Permanency Options (in order of preference)	Reunification Defined	Provider Type	Changes After ASFA and Recent Permanency Initiatives	Reunification Programs Recommended for Review
Alabama	State-administered system. There are separate state-level units for foster care, independent living program, therapeutic foster care, family preservation and reunification.	Estimated number of children in foster care: 5,200	1) Returning home to parent 2) Relative custody 3) Adoption 4) Long term foster care	Reunification is defined as return child to a parent, but could also be considered return to a relative.	Reunification services are provided by both private and public providers.	Changes: ASFA has served as an impetus to address foster care issues and focus efforts on getting children home or in a permanent placement sooner. Initiatives: May start offering guardianship in the future.	Expedited substance abuse services.
Arizona	State-administered system. The State is divided into 6 districts that cover all 15 counties in the State.	Estimated number of children in foster care: 5,600	1) Return to parent 2) Adoption 3) Adoption by relative 4) Guardianship (subsidized or non-subsidized) 5) Permanent guardianship 6) Long-term foster care 7) Independent living	Reunification is considered as return to parent or original guardian from whom the child was taken.	Some direct reunification services are provided through the public providers but about 70% of services are provided by private providers.	Changes: Upon removal there is a petition filed and court hearing for all parties; Parents are held more accountable with shortened timeframes. Initiatives: Subsidized guardianship; instituting a central office foster home recruiter position; instituting a Permanency Planning Coordinator to focus on statewide permanency for children.	None.
California	State-supervised, County-administered child welfare system.	Estimated number of children in foster care: 112,800	1) Reunification 2) Adoption 3) Guardianship* *relative guardianship is preferred to non-relative adoption. Non-relative guardianship is least preferred. Preferential consideration is given to relatives for both placement and permanency.	Reunification is defined as reunifying the child with parents from whose care the child was removed. California does include relatives in all aspects of case planning.	Reunification services are provided by both public and private providers.	Changes: Only minor modifications were required to meet ASFA safety requirements and reunification provisions. The State incorporated all ASFA requirements into AB2773; Concurrent planning was in practice prior to ASFA. Initiatives: KinGap and the 1997 Governor's Adoption Initiative.	California does not have statewide specific reunification programs; reunification is generally covered by a unit serving child welfare services. Programs: 1) Santa Clara County's use of the Family Group Decision-Making model in reunification maintenance programs. 2) Santa Clara and San Mateo counties' wraparound initiative in reunification services.
Colorado	State-supervised, county-administered child welfare system, through 63 counties statewide.	Estimated number of children in foster care: 8,000	Not in any preference order: Reunification with family; In Kind (kinship care); Adoption; Independent living services.	Reunification is defined as return from place of removal.	Reunification services are provided by both public and private providers, although services are considered privatized.	Changes: The State is promoting the retention of foster parents and obtaining adoptive homes. ASFA pushed the State to rework the contract with Mental Health due to the capitated rate for Medicaid Working to expand their expertise in adoption with an increase in adoptive services. Initiatives: None provided.	None.
Connecticut	State-administered child welfare system. The State is made up of 5 regional offices and 9 sub-offices.	Estimated number of children in foster care: 6,700	1) Reunification 2) Adoption 3) Relative placement 4) Permanent foster care 5) Independent living Connecticut also has subsidized guardianship.	Reunification is defined as return to parent from whom the child was taken.	Reunification services are provided by both public and private service providers.	Changes: The State adopted ASFA legal mandates and reporting structure required by federal government. Initiatives: Concurrent planning. Subsidized guardianship.	None.
Florida	State-administered system that is slowly switching to a community-based, privatized system. Some counties are privatized, others are just starting to move toward privatization.	Estimated number of children in foster care: 26,300	1) Reunification 2) Adoption 3) Custody to relative 4) Custody to foster parent 5) Independent living 6) Long-term foster care	Reunification is defined as returning the child to any family member (i.e., parent, aunt, grandmother, etc).	Reunification services are provided by both public and private services providers, but some counties are using only private providers.	Changes: ASFA has made an enormous change towards emphasizing safety. Initiatives: Current initiatives include simplifying the guardianship procedures; adding staff for recruitment and retention of foster parents; reduction in caseloads; and a relative caregiver program.	1) Pensacola, FL, program servicing first-time children in foster care. 2) Jacksonville, FL, program that serves adolescent children.
Georgia	State-supervised, county-administered system. 159 counties and 14 field coordinators who directly supervise the county directors.	Estimated number of children in foster care: 9,900	Options not ranked. While reunification is still a priority, stronger emphasis is being put on adoption to prevent children from lingering in care.	Reunification is defined as return to the family members that the child was living with or person who was the child's prior custodian.	Reunification services are primarily provided by private providers. Public agency workers act as case managers who make the referrals to services.	Changes: Under ASFA, the state has moved a lot of children with goals of reunification to adoption. Using concurrent planning, using foster families for adoptive families, expanding use of foster parents to work with birth parents. Developed staff training on doing a good family assessment early. Training in family conferencing. Initiatives: First Placement, Best Placement (7 statewide sites). Family-to-Family implemented in 5 counties. Looking at ways to provide more support for relative caregivers.	1) Mothers making a Change: a substance abuse treatment program for foster care families. 2) Healthy Grandparents.
Iowa	State-administered system. The State is made up of 5 regions and numerous areas.	Estimated number of children in foster care: 4,200	1) Keeping children in home 2) Reunification 3) Adoption 4) Subsidized guardianship 5) Kinship placement or family custody	Reunification is defined as being with the child's biological parents or household of origin.	Services are almost always provided through private providers. The public agency oversees and manages but very seldom provides direct services.	Changes: Most requirements per ASFA were made through similar state revisions prior to ASFA. The state updated its case monitoring system so workers receive reminders on the timeframe of cases. State made arrangements to widen the geographical area on adoption and set up an adoption web site. Initiatives: New mediation-work initiative that helps parties work out differences during TPR. Small grant initiative to provide support for grandparents as caregivers.	Woodbury County's use of Casey Family-to-Family elements in their foster care services.
Kentucky	State-supervised, locally administered system. Day-to-day oversight of contracts are done by local staff.	Estimated number of children in foster care: 3,500	1) Return home 2) Adoption 3) Placement with relative 4) Planned permanent living arrangement (long term foster care) The State places an emphasis on kinship care and placing children with relatives.	No definition given.	Reunification services are provided by private providers.	Changes: ASFA has affected all aspects of child services. As a result they have gone from a family-driven system to a child-driven system. Regional managers are judged by contract outcomes based on the 7 ASFA outcomes. Initiatives: Working with Edna McConnell Clark Foundation to develop safety nets with community services. Preparing to work with Casey on Family-to-Family.	1) Bluegrass Comprehensive Care Mental Health Resources. 2) Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children.
Massachusetts	State-administered system. The State has a central office and is divided into 6 regional offices and 29 area offices.	Estimated number of children in foster care: 13,000	1) Return home 2) Adoption 3) Subsidized guardianship 4) Kinship placement	The state defines as a child returned to the parents or to the persons from whom the child was removed.	Reunification services are provided by both public and private providers.	Changes: ASFA has pushed them to require agencies to decide on permanency sooner and engage relatives sooner. The state passed the Massachusetts Adoption Bill, incorporating the permanency hearing, parent notification, and other aspects of ASFA. Initiatives: The State is piloting a permanency mediation initiative focused on the TPR process.	Family Reunification Network in the Boston Region.
Michigan	State-administered system.	Estimated number of children in foster care: 15,700	1) Return home 2) Adoption* 3) Guardianship 4) Long-term foster care* the current state climate supports putting more resources into adoption than reunification and other options. Michigan does a limited number of guardianships. **LTFC is used as an option for some older teens.	Reunification is defined as return to parent, and also includes relative placements.	Nearly all reunification services are provided by private providers.	Changes: Michigan statutes addressing ASFA-type changes preceded ASFA. Initiatives: Foster care permanency reimbursement pilot in Wayne County that uses a performance-based system. Title IV-E Waiver implemented last October. Implemented family group decision making pilot in 7 counties.	None
Minnesota	County-administered, state-supervised system	Estimated number of children in foster care: 8,600	1) Return home 2) Adoption 3) Relative given legal custody 4) Long-term foster care Transfer of legal custody to a relative is the same as legal guardianship, which does not include TPR.	Return to the home in which the child was removed. Returning child to non-custodial parent may also be considered reunification, but placing a child with another relative would be placement with relative, not reunification.	Services are primarily delivered by contracted private agencies. Public agency provides investigation, case planning, and attend court hearings.	The state has broken down its budget differently due to adoption promotion and support. Change in budget has provided impetus for permanency project that might otherwise not have been funded.	Olmstead County social services reunification programs.
Missouri	State-administered system. The State has 115 field offices in 114 counties and the City of St. Louis.	Estimated number of children in foster care: 12,500	1) Return home 2) Adoption 3) Independent living 4) Long term foster care	Reunification is defined as return child home to parent or family of origin.	Reunification services are provided by both public and private providers.	Changes: The biggest change has been the timeliness of TPR and adoption through the courts. There has been an enhancement of the use of guardianship and kinship care and a heavy emphasis in the use of these placement options. The State passed the 1998 Juvenile Court Dispositional Hearing to a Permanency Hearing which adopted ASFA criteria for case review processes. Initiatives: Kincare. Subsidized guardianship. Grandparents as guardians.	Family Reunion Services Programs in St. Louis and Kansas City.
New Hampshire	State-administered system managing 12 districts. Districts are staffed with state workers. Reunification services are delivered at the district level.	Estimated number of children in foster care: 1,600	1) Reunification 2) Adoption 3) Guardianship with relative 4) Guardianship with non-relative, long-term foster care.	Reunification is defined as return to parent(s).	Reunification services are provided by both public and private providers.	Changes: State has identified backlog cases which need TPR and that number has increased. In response, state has enlarged its adoption unit and staff to meet the needs of TPR cases. Initiatives: State has hired a new adoption recruiter.	None.
New Jersey	State-administered system. Each of the state's 21 counties has a district office from which direct services are provided.	Estimated number of children in foster care: 9,200	1) Return to birth parent 2) Family placement 3) Adoption 4) Legal guardianship 5) Independent living and long-term foster care The option of long term foster care is currently being reconsidered as an option.	Reunification is defined as "family reunification" and includes all family, not just birth parents.	Reunification services are primarily provided by private providers, but the system is publicly run.	Changes: ASFA sensitized the state for the need to increase collaboration between child welfare, the courts, and other agencies to be organized and work together toward expediting permanency. Initiatives: Fost-Adopt program is new statewide initiative modeled after the federal Adoption Opportunity Act. Family Group Conferencing is being implemented by the State. Birthparent Support Program providing support to parents in the foster care system. Contracting out services to increase visitation in foster care.	1) Birth Parent Support Program. 2) Court Mediation Program in Essex County.
New York	State-supervised, county-administered child welfare system. The state has 58 local districts from which services are delivered.	Estimated number of children in foster care: 53,600	1) Reunification 2) Adoption 3) Independent living 4) Adult custodial care	Reunification is defined as return to the person who has legal rights as a child's parent or guardian.	Reunification services are provided by both public and private providers.	Changes: The State places more emphasis on child safety and faster permanency. The state is also more willing to consider the use of concurrent planning, although it is not presently used for cases. Initiatives: Adoption initiatives taking place in NYC to curtail children being released for adoption but not adopted.	1) Anadoga County's Dunbar Center. 2) Family Resolution Program - Genessee County, NY. 3) Monroe County DSS.
North Carolina	State-supervised, county- administered system. There are 100 counties and each has a county department of social service office and county board responsible for administrating child welfare services.	Estimated number of children in foster care: 11,300	1) Reunification 2) Adoption 3) Guardianship with a relative 4) Guardianship with non-relative 5) Custody with a relative 6) Emancipation	Reunification is defined as the return of the child to the parent from whom the child was removed.	Reunification services are provided by both public and private providers.	Changes: None provided. Initiatives: Title IV-E state waiver. Families for Kids - Second Generation.	1) Families for Kids Program in Buncombe County. 2) Families for Kids Program in Cleveland County.
Ohio	Ohio is a state-supervised, county-administered system. The state has 88 counties and each county child welfare system runs independently.	Estimated number of children in foster care: 18,800	1) Reunification 2) Legal guardianship/ placement with a relative 3) Adoption 4) Other planned permanent living arrangement	Reunification is defined as return home to the parent or person the child was living with before going into custody.	Reunification services are provided by public and private providers, depending on the county.	Changes: State is working with counties to define ASFA provisions such as compelling reasons. State law was changed to meet ASFA mandates. There is more emphasis on permanency decisions. Initiatives: Public Children Services Association guide to effective partnerships between substance abuse and child welfare.	1) Lucas County Community Advocacy and Parenting Programs. 2) Trumble County Reunification Services.
Oregon	State-administered system. Each county has an agency branch office to service children and families. Oregon's Services to Children and Families Agency handles CPS, foster care and adoption cases only; a separate state agency deals with family preservation.	Estimated number of children in foster care: 7,300	1) Reunification 2) Adoption 3) Guardianship 4) Permanent foster or long-term foster care	Reunification is defined as return to the family, including birth parents or grandparents.	Reunification services are provided through both public and private providers.	Changes: Significant policy changes moving toward the practice changes for reunification and permanency plans for children. Most changes took place prior to ASFA. Court burdened due to unfunded nature of ASFA. Initiatives: Title IV-E assisted guardianship program. Services bolstered to support post-adoption population.	None.
Pennsylvania	State-supervised, county-administered system. Pennsylvania has a very strong county system, made up of 67 counties. There are also 4 regions, each with a regional office that conducts licensing of the agencies.	Estimated number of children in foster care: 23,000	1) Reunification 2) Kinship placement 3) Adoption 4) Independent living/long-term foster care	Reunification is defined as return to the home the child came from.	Approximately 200 private service providers operate in the state. Services are provided through these private agencies.	Changes: ASFA has compelled the state to provide more intensive services and coordinate with providers of substance abuse services to families. Initiatives: The state is looking into legal custodianship, including a subsidized component. Statewide Adoption Network.	None.
Tennessee	State-administered system with 12 regions, serving 95 counties. Each region has an administrator that reports to the state.	Estimated number of children in foster care: 9,100	1) Return to parent or caregiver 2) Placement with relative 3) Adoption 4) Emancipation or permanent foster care	Reunification is defined as return to the person the child was removed from.	Reunification services are primarily provided by private agencies.	Changes: Focused on ensuring reunification and permanency within ASFA timeframes. Worked with CWLA to develop a 3-year plan to help reduce caseload and workload, develop training curriculum, and enhance concurrent planning policy. Initiatives: Independent adoption contracts to expedite adoptions among other processes for adoption. Kinship care initiative to enable relatives to care for children without state custody. Managed Care Initiative.	Child and family services program for therapeutic visitation.
Texas	State-administered system. The state is divided into 11 regions, each having its own county structure that mirrors the state's.	Estimated number of children in foster care: 17,100	1) Family reunification 2) Permanent placement with relative or close family friend 3) Adoption by non-relative 4) Alternative long-term care 5) Adult living	Reunification is defined as returning the child home to the parents.	Reunification services are provided through both public and private providers.	Changes: None provided. Initiatives: None provided.	None recommended.
Utah	State-administered system, with 7 regions throughout the state. The regions have some autonomy but state supervises and approves.	Estimated number of children in foster care: 2,500	1) Return home 2) Kinship care 3) Adoption 4) Guardianship 5) Long-term foster care and independent living	No information provided.	Reunification services are primarily provided through public providers, although some private providers are used.	Changes: Court system has gotten quicker in expediting cases. Initiatives: Concurrent planning.	None.
Washington	State-administered system, divided into 6 regions with an administrator in each region.	Estimated number of children in foster care: 9,000	1) Return home 2) Adoption 3) Permanent custody 4) Guardianship	Reunification is defined as returning the child to persons from whom he or she was taken at the time of placement.	Reunification services are provided by private providers under contract.	Changes: Shortened the timeline for permanency decisions. Initiatives: Concurrent planning. Reviewing plans for strengthening kinship care. Remove barriers to guardianship	None.
Wisconsin	County-administered system, through the 71 counties in the state. The only exception is that in 1998 the state assumed responsibility for child welfare in Milwaukee as a result of an ACLU lawsuit.	Estimated number of children in foster care: 10,000	1) Reunification with the family 2) Adoption 3) Sustaining care (long-term foster care)	No information provided.	Reunification services are provided through public providers (the county agency). In Milwaukee, both public and private agencies provide reunification services.	Changes: ASFA has forced services to become more intense due to time limitations. State bill passed in response to ASFA. Initiatives: State is conducting a statewide intensive foster and adoptive parent recruitment campaign. Concurrent planning.	None recommended.

6. Data for the State Matrix come from discussions with state administrators except for information on the foster care population in each state. Foster care data come from the Adoption and Foster Care and Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) annual database, FY 1998. Data from the 1999 Child Welfare League of America (CWLA) Yearbook, State Agency Survey (1998) was used when AFCARS data was unavailable. Most CWLA data is for the year 1996. Foster care figures are rounded to the nearest 100.

Appendix B. Glossary of Terms

Concurrent planning

The process of planning two strategies for permanency for a child from the start of a case - a primary plan which usually involves a goal of reunification and working with and providing services to the family to achieve this goal, and at the same time, planning and working toward an alternative permanency goal for the child (e.g., permanent relative placement, guardianship, or adoption) in case the primary plan is not achieved.

Family group decision making

a case planning method that brings together a family in which abuse and neglect took place, with their relatives, friends, and other supports, to develop a plan to stop the maltreatment.

Family to Family

A foster care reform initiative developed by the Casey Family Services that includes a wide variety of strategies and approaches to serve families and children and promote family reunification. The initiative's framework is focused on a family-centered approach that is tailored to meet individual needs, while being community-based, and sensitive to cultural differences. States or localities apply for grants through the Annie E. Casey Foundation to support restructure of foster care according to the guidelines of the initiative.

Guardianship

A legal means for an adult to assume parental responsibility and authority for a child without severing parental rights of the birth parents. Subsidized guardianship provides a subsidy to the guardian.

Kinship care

The practice of a blood relative assuming parental responsibility for a child. Kinship care arrangements are often informal (outside the child welfare system) but have been and continue to be used by states for temporary or permanent living arrangements for children who cannot live with their birth parents. Subsidy for the relatives is generally not provided unless relatives are licensed foster parents. Relatives may also apply for TANF assistance.

Managed care

A strategy utilized by states to control the costs of child welfare services. Traditionally, the state pays service delivery agencies a per capita rate (set amount of funding) for cases rather than a fee-for-service funding structure (where agencies submit bills and are reimbursed on the basis of the number and type of services they provide). Under managed care, the service delivery agencies assume a risk that the costs to provide services for families and children will not exceed their funding. The strategy provides an incentive for agencies to serve the child and family promptly and have the child exit the system, thereby achieving both cost savings and expedited permanency for the child. States maintain the legal custody and responsibility for the safety and well-being of children. There are a number of variations in managed care adapted by states and localities.

Performance-based contracting

Contracting methods intended to ensure that required performance quality levels (i.e., number of children exiting foster care, number of families reunified, etc) are achieved and that payment is related to the degree that services performed meet contract standards.

TPR mediation

A process whereby a third-party professional helps to resolve conflict between birth parents and agency workers during the process of terminating parental rights.

Appendix C. A Review of 12 Reunification Efforts

Program: Wraparound Services -- Santa Clara County, California
Established: 1994

The Wraparound Services program in Santa Clara County provides intensive services to remove severely emotionally disturbed children from the county's most restrictive residential facilities and reunify them with their families. These cases represent some of the most difficult ones to serve and reunify in the child welfare system, where parents' problems with parenting are exacerbated by children's serious mental health needs. Wraparound is a family-centered, strength-based approach where an extensive array of services are "wrapped around" the family unit to support their strengths and meet all their needs with respect to personal and community safety, education, emotional and physical health, family life, recreation and legal issues. The program uses a team approach to involve the family, wraparound staff, relatives, neighbors and other community members to make decisions about the family's service plan.

Program Contact:

Sue Farr
Social Service Program Manager
Santa Clara County
1725 Technology Drive
San Jose, CA 95110
(408) 441-5610

Program: Substance Abuse Recovery Management System (SARMS) and Dependency Court Recovery Project -- San Diego, California
Established: 1998

The Substance Abuse Recovery Management (SARMS) and Dependency Drug Court are coordinated programs to address the overwhelming need to resolve the substance abuse problems of parents in San Diego whose children are in foster care. When a custody petition is entered and the caseworker has identified substance abuse as a contributing factor to the abuse or neglect of the child, the parent(s) is referred to the 6-month SARMS treatment program where treatment is provided by several inpatient and outpatient substance abuse treatment centers. Parents' failure to comply with treatment may result in the court exercising a number of sanctions, including 3-5 days in custody and/or a monetary penalty for contempt of court. About 80-85 percent of parents successfully complete the SARMS program. The balance are referred to the 9-month Dependency Drug Court program. In the Drug Court program, parents continue to receive treatment for substance abuse, but must make frequent court appearances to report their progress to the judge.

Program Contact:

Pat Peterson
Substance Abuse and Recovery Management System (SARMS) Coordinator
SARMS
2851 Meadowlark Drive
San Diego, CA 92123-2792
(858) 514-8498

Program: Homeward Bound -- Pensacola, FL
Established: 1992

The Homeward Bound program provides reunification services to children at the time of their first out-of-home placement. These reunification services begin immediately following a child's removal from the home. Using a team approach with a caseworker and a para-professional, Homeward Bound provides a variety of services, including child counseling; concrete services of food, transportation, and housing referral; parent training; household management; visitation; foster care mentoring (for new foster parents) aftercare services; wraparound services; day care; education and training; and medical care. The children are seen weekly by the caseworkers (rather than monthly for regular reunification services), and workers establish a relationship with the children and parents so that they can contribute to the planning process. Reunification services may be provided for up to 12 months and the program also provides 6 months of after-care services to a parent or relative once the child has returned home.

Program Contact:

Kim Rayburn
Program Director
Homeward Bound
Children's Home Society
5375 North Ninth Ave.
P.O. Box 19136
Pensacola, FL 32523
(850) 494-5985

Program: Bridging for Success --Georgia
Established: 1992

Bridging for Success is a statewide reunification program in Georgia that provides strength-based, family-focused, community-based, and solution-focused services to families whose children are primarily in residential treatment. The program serves children ages 12 to 17 who have been severely physically or sexually abused, most of whom have been in multiple foster care placements. The program does a thorough assessment of the family early in the treatment process and tries to involve as many relatives or close friends of the clients as possible in the service planning, treatment and case review process. The program provides individual and family counseling/therapy, concrete services, parent training, household management, visitation, after care services, wraparound services, substance abuse services (to parent or child), education and training (to parent or child), and medical care for 11 to 14 months, while the child is in residential care. After-care is provided for up to 12 months after the child returns home.

Program Contact:

Thomas Russell
Executive Director
Bridging for Success
1559 Johnson Rd., N.W.
Atlanta, GA 30318
(404) 792-0070

Program: Mothers Making A Change -- Cobb and Douglas Counties, Georgia
Established: 1992

Mothers Making a Change (MMAC) provides services to women who are at risk of losing their children due to substance abuse. The program provides a coordinated set of services, including substance abuse treatment, anger management sessions, parenting education, general education, and child care support to keep families together. The program includes a residential component, where women and their children may live together while services are provided. If a client is pregnant upon referral, the program provides services to make sure she delivers a drug-free baby and is not at risk of losing the baby upon delivery. Other clients must have and maintain rights to at least one child, or be eligible to petition for rights, in order to qualify for the program. The program has a multi-level team staff to address client needs, including a residential site coordinator, site supervisor, educational coordinator, clinical counselor, physician, nurse, and child care staff, and a Child Protective Service worker is also located at the MMAC site. Families generally receive services for 12-15 months, although they can extend for up to 2 years.

Program Contacts:

Teresa Smith
Director of Women's Services
Mothers Making A Change (MMAC)
331 N. Marietta Parkway
Marietta, GA 30060
(770) 499-2422

Doris Walker
Chief, Foster Care Unit
Division of Family and Children Services
2 Peachtree, 18^th Floor
Atlanta, GA 30303
(404) 657-3459

Program: Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children -- Somerset, Kentucky
Established: 1996

The reunification program operated by the Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children is based on a Homebuilders model: Caseworkers are available to families 24 hours a day, 7 days per week and each worker serves three to five families for a service duration of 2 to 4 months. The program serves families where the child has at least 30 days left in placement before returning home. Services available to families include individual and family counseling, budgeting, communication skills, mediation, crisis intervention, parenting skills, alternative forms of discipline, and concrete services, with nearly all services provided to the family in-home. The program is distinct from other reunification services in Kentucky due to its intensity of service, particularly the number of hours per week it serves the family and the flexible hours workers are available to the family (i.e., weekends, after hours, and nights).

Program Contact:

Michael Phelps
Program Director
Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children
111 S. Church St.
Somerset, KY 42501
(606) 677-0784

Program: Family Reunification, Blue Grass Comp Care -- Kentucky
Established: 1995

Family Reunification is a program where staff work with both the family and the foster family to help the child make a smooth transition to return home with the birth parent. The program provides intensive services to families, beginning at the point just prior to when a child returns home, and for up to 12 weeks after the child is home. Services are most intense at the time the child returns home, when tensions and stress can make reunification difficult. Children eligible for the program must have been in foster care for less than 15 months, the family must have had at least three extended overnight visits, and have a case goal of reunification. Workers generally carry a caseload of 4 to 5 reunification cases, and provide 5 to 20 hours of services per week, depending on the family's need. Services received by the families includes individual counseling, concrete services, connecting families with community services and resources, parenting skills, and communication skills.

Program Contact:

Rosemary Coldiron-Ekes
Office Manager and Program Director
Family Preservation, Blue Grass Comprehensive Care
2311 Fortune Dr. Suite 201
Lexington, KY 40509
606-299-0794

Program: Family Reunification Network -- Massachusetts
Established: 1993

The Family Reunification Network (FRN) is a regional network serving children, generally over 6 years old, in specialized foster care. FRN's goal is to reunify children in high-cost, specialized, residential treatment placements with their parents. A Network clinician provides in-home services to both the child (in specialized foster family care) and to the birth parents. Eighty percent of the children in the program are also receiving mental health treatment through an outpatient clinic, so most children in foster homes are receiving support services in-home as well as outpatient mental health services. Birth parents receive services to prepare them for reunification and other services necessary to meet their needs. The clinician also works to link families to natural community supports, such ongoing therapy through a neighborhood clinic, and helping to find afterschool programs for children in their communities. FRN services are provided for 1 year. When a child enters FRN, concurrent planning is done with the case from the start. If reunification is not possible following services and the child is freed for adoption, FRN staff work aggressively to find an adoptive family for the child.

Program Contact:

Peggy Mosley
Director of Operations
Communities for People, Inc.
566 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, MA 02215-09111
617-267-1013

Program: Family Reunion -- Missouri
Established: 1993

Family Reunion is a statewide intensive reunification program serving children ages 0-17 who are in foster care or kinship care, and have had safety issues addressed. The program is based on the Homebuilder model encompassing a philosophy of empowering and building new skills for families; small caseload sizes; and short-term, intensive services to families. Family Reunion specialists carry a caseload of three families, and spend 10-13 hours per week with each family, most often providing in-home services. Children and families are provided services for an 8 to 12 week period, although some areas provide up to 6 months of services to a family. The program provides concrete services, parent training, behavior training, household management, housekeeping or cleaning, and safety training. Other services provided to families, if available in the community, including individual and family counseling, assistance to find day care, crisis intervention and crisis funds, and transportation. The program also works to connect the family with community resources and services.

Program Contact:

Vincent Geremia
CS Program Manager
Missouri Department of Social Services
Division of Family Services
P.O. Box 88
Jefferson City, MO 65103
573-751-3221

Program: Natural Parent Support Program -- New Jersey
Established: 1999

The Natural Parent Support Program (NPSP) is a statewide intensive reunification program that emphasizes a holistic approach to family issues, and provides each family with 5-7 hours of in-home services per week to reduce the stress of transitioning the child back into the home. A wide array of services are available to help teach parenting, home management, communication, parent behavior and discipline techniques, and to assist the parent in dealing with daily activities of work, home, and child care. Parents may also receive education and training, medical care, and transportation to appointments and school. NPSP also provides a full-range of service to children including individual counseling, play therapy, monitoring of school progress, psychological evaluation, and school support. Families receive services for 4 to 6 months, with an extension possible if needed. In the final family assessment, the public agency worker (DYFS) and NPSP worker coordinate to arrange referrals to appropriate community based after care services for the family.

Program Contact:

Joseph Gorman
Assistant Division Director
Catholic Charities
39 North Clinton Avenue
Trenton, NJ 08609
609-394-5157

Program: Families for Kids -- North Carolina
Established: 1996

Families for Kids is a statewide comprehensive service program that targets all children entering the child welfare system. Families for Kids, designed individually by the local social service agencies in each community, includes comprehensive services for at risk families who are at home or in foster care. The program philosophy is based on the belief that better outcomes for children can be achieved through five basic changes in the child welfare system: 1) providing comprehensive preventive services to any family who asked for them; 2) conducting a single assessment for families entering the child welfare system; 3) providing continuity and coordination of services through one social work team; 4) reducing the number of foster care placements for each child; and 5) achieving permanency for a child within one year. A system of care protocol is implemented that incorporates teams of social service staff to serve families to insure that all the agencies serving a particular family or child worked together. The program also includes a written protocol used by social service staff for assessing families' needs (a single coordinated assessment tool). An integrated case plan is developed and services are provided through a single social service team comprised of multiple agency workers, rather than several individual agencies. Services provided include individual and family counseling, concrete services, parent training, household management, visitation, foster parent mentoring, aftercare services, wraparound services, substance abuse treatment, day care, education, and medical care.

Program Contact:

Mandy Stone
Assistant Director, Buncombe County Department of Social Services
P.O. Box 7408
Asheville, North Carolina 28802
(828) 250-5749

Program: Lucas County Ohio Community Development Department (CDD)
Established: 1998

The Community Development Department of Lucas County Ohio (CDD) provides intensive, in-home reunification services to families. The CDD, using the Casey Family-to-Family model, works to connect families with their neighborhoods and communities, and assists in identifying and developing neighborhood-based, family-centered, family-based services (through private agencies). Lucas County has eight community resource centers to facilitate services and work to link families to services in their immediate neighborhoods. CDD is made up of four units: Community Resources Liaison, Parent Education, Day Care, and Community Advocate. These units provide a range of services that are intended to maintain or reunify families including parenting classes, home management, and referrals to counseling and other community services. Families receive services as soon as the child has been removed from the home, and services can last up to 10 months. The hope is that once Children's Services closes a reunification case, that the family, when in need of assistance or support, will turn to the community resource center for additional services.

Program Contact:

Beth Leatherman
Community Development Manager
Lucas County Children Services
705 Adams Street
Toledo, Ohio 43624-9943
419-213-3200

Appendix D. Four Reunification Programs

This appendix provides an in-depth look at four reunification programs. These programs demonstrate innovative reunification efforts taking place in communities around the country, and offer examples of collaborative efforts among agencies and intensive reunification services that are helping families. The programs include:

Chapter 4. The Evaluation of Programs for Permanency and Reunification

1. Background

The purpose of this paper is to review what must be learned to develop more effective programs for assuring that children taken into foster care have permanent, nurturing arrangements for their care. It considers programs designed to enhance the likelihood of reunification with original caretakers but goes beyond that to look at programs focused on permanency more broadly. It also broadens the focus beyond the evaluation of particular programs to consider other empirical work that might inform policy making and program design.¹

Our discussion is framed by the character of the current child welfare system, the values that drive it, the legislation that guides its operation, and the nature of practice within it. In the last decade there has been a shift away from emphasizing efforts to preserve or restore families whenever possible to emphasizing the importance of assuring the safety of children and achieving permanency for them as soon as possible. The shift in emphasis is reflected in and promoted by the 1997 federal Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) which affirmed the primacy of safety in determining the best interests of the child and placed limits on the time spent on attempts to reunite children with original caretakers before implementing other permanency options. However, when most children are removed from their homes, the initial case goals are still return home.² Child welfare professionals have hierarchies of permanency options in their minds, and although there is not universal agreement on a single hierarchy, return home is thought to be the best alternative whenever possible. In this sense, a central requirement for the evaluability of programs is at least minimally met: the necessity for agreement among relevant stakeholders as to objectives of programs.

The discussion here is guided by an updated review of the reunification and permanency practices and programs in 25 states originally included in the 1995 Review of Family Preservation and Family Reunification Programs undertaken as part of the Evaluation of Family Preservation and Reunification Programs. The program update was supplemented by site visits to four programs. We also undertook an examination of decision making processes in three agencies in the Washington, DC vicinity. A framework for what we present here is provided in section 2 of this report entitled "Permanency: A Balancing Act."

1. We limit ourselves here to services for families in which children have been removed from caretakers, not considering "front-end" services or services to intact families, although such services can properly be thought of as part of a continuum of permanency activities.

2. ASFA does, for the first time in federal legislation, specify conditions under which "reasonable efforts" to return children home do not have to be made, so that in these cases the initial case plan objective does not have to be reunification.

1.1 The New Legislative Framework and Its Implementation

The legislation of 1997 not only shifted emphasis back toward the safety of the child, it also placed restrictions on the practice of child welfare workers by limiting the time for decisions, requiring concurrent planning, and limiting the exercise of discretion. Legislative requirements of this kind are always blunt instruments for the achievement of policy objectives. No universal prescription can possibly fit all of the familial circumstances of children in foster care. Fully individualized plans for families are no longer possible.

The requirement that proceedings for termination of parental rights begin if the child has been in state custody for 15 of the most recent 22 months has undoubtedly benefited many children who would otherwise have remained in foster care for a long time. But there are cases in which the legislative timetable may not be appropriate (as is acknowledged by the fact that exceptions are permitted with the concurrence of a judge). Time has different meanings at different ages, and the urgency to act quickly may not be as great for older children as for infants and toddlers. Furthermore, termination of parental rights may not be as appropriate for teenagers in placement who may not wish to sever parental ties and who may be content to live out their childhood in foster care, sometimes with a relative. The requirement for termination may also not be appropriate for some younger children in relative foster care where there are comfortable, or at least adequate, relationships among the natural parents, the foster parents, and the child. This is one of the motivations for the development of the status of guardianship.

One can imagine a number of side effects of the new timetables for decisions. We cite two here. As many children are more quickly discharged from care, whether to their parents, relatives, or adoption, that those remaining in care (1) will be those with problems that are more difficult to resolve such as older children,or special needs children; and (2) will have been in care longer. Hence, the lengths of time in care for the group in care at any one time may be expected to increase (this appears to be happening in some places).

In considering the legislation, one must remember that no policy choice can eliminate all risk of harm to children. Decisions entail predictions and prediction is not perfect. As long as any children are returned home, at least a few will be subsequently harmed. And some children in other permanency arrangements, whether adopted, in homes of relatives, or in long term foster care, will also suffer from maltreatment. And, these arrangements may not turn out to be permanent. As more children enter these alternative arrangements, the rate of their disruption can be expected to increase.³

3. It is to be expected that as more alternative arrangements are used, more of them will experience difficulties. But the rate of difficulty is also likely to go up, since thresholds for deciding to use a particular alternative arrangement will go down. That is, use will be made of relative's homes and adoptive homes that might not have been used previously.

1.2 Role of Research

Tracking Studies. The issues identified here make clear the need to continue to track the experience of children and families under the new policy. This should be done first through administrative data systems, which in most states are now improving to the point that long-term follow-up of cases will be possible. But administrative data systems are limited in the information they contain, so they must be supplemented by more detailed studies of the course of cases. How many cases are being declared exceptions to the time limits? In how many other cases do the rules not fit? What is the trend in the rate of maltreatment of children returned home? What is the safety record of alternative placements? We know that decisions on permanency are being made more quickly, will that trend be sustained? Do quicker decisions in fact result in real permanency, or is there an increase in the disruption of placements intended to be permanent? Is the trend toward increased adoptions sustained or will the number of adoptions begin to decline once backlogs of children in care for a long time are reduced?

Decision Making Studies. Discussions of the operation of the child welfare system inevitably lead to questions about decision making. The questions are both descriptive and prescriptive: how are child welfare workers, supervisors, administrators, and judges making decisions in the changed policy environment and how should they be making them? Prediction and risk assessment are central here. Most, if not all, child welfare departments make use of risk assessment tools. While there has been a considerable amount of research conducted in connection with these instruments, we need more. The effectiveness of risk assessment procedures is still not known with certainty and undoubtedly can be improved.⁴ Any decision as to a course of action implies predictions of the likely outcomes of both the action to be taken as well as alternative actions. We need to understand better how good those predictions are.

Beyond this, we need greater understanding about how workers make decisions about cases. Again, there is a fair body of literature on the subject, but we need to understand how workers are deciding in the changed policy context. For each of the decisions they face, determinations of services to be delivered to families, deciding to return children home, deciding on the acceptability of a relative's home, moving to terminate parental rights, deciding on an adoptive family, we need to know the factors that enter into the decision, how workers combine those factors in their minds, and how the agency, community, and policy context affects decisions.

Implementation Studies. Besides leading to better decisions, decision making studies probe the ways in which policies are working or not working. Laws and regulations governing the actions of officials are rarely implemented in exactly the ways intended. Street-level bureaucrats shape, and sometimes even subvert, the intentions of policy makers in myriad ways. Sometimes this is a matter of resistance to change, the desire to continue to operate in familiar ways, using skills that are well ingrained. Sometimes it is a matter of inadequate training on new requirements and new approaches. Sometimes it is a matter of adapting general rules to local situations. And sometimes subversion is used to gain more flexibility in order to better serve clients. We need studies of how workers are implementing the requirements of new laws and regulations.

Implementation of Concurrent Planning. One of the central features of the new approaches is the concept of concurrent planning. Although the initial case goal may be return home, workers are required to develop alternatives to that goal from the beginning, usually by exploring the possibility of adoption. This requirement is intended to save time later on, in case the original plan does not work out (the threat of an alternative to return home may also put beneficial pressure on parents to change), but it creates conflicts for workers as well. Workers must be working on two, conflicting plans. Sometimes, as in the case of an older adolescent, an alternative plan such as adoption is just not realistic. Our exploration of current reunification practice suggests that the concurrent plan requirement is interpreted by workers as requiring that adoption or guardianship by a relative or foster parent be explored. "Stranger adoption" (i.e., adoption by an unknown adult) is often not included in concurrent planning. Some workers, contrary to policy, do not begin to work seriously on alternatives until close to the time of administrative or judicial review, when it appears the family is not ready for the return of the child. We need greater understanding of how the concurrent planning requirement is being implemented on the ground and the ways in which it may be avoided or subverted.

The Time Dilemma. The time dilemma facing workers is often put in terms of the conflict between the child's sense of time and the parent's sense of time. For children, a year in placement is a long time, a time in which new relationships may be formed and old ones fade. It is also a time of uncertainty as to the future and it may be a time in which stable, loving relationships are not there to further growth. But parental change does not happen over night, it takes time to overcome old habits, to learn new ways of functioning and particularly of ways to relate to children. The dilemma is particularly acute in cases of parental substance abuse, the treatment of which is characterized by ups and downs, sometimes repeatedly. How many relapses should be allowed? How much time should be allowed for parents to overcome their addictions? Although there apparently has been some waning of the drug problem in our central cities, it remains a central problem facing families in the child welfare system. The field would benefit from greater understanding of the course of treatment of addictions and from better capacity to predict the likely outcome of drug and alcohol treatment.

4. Determining the effectiveness of risk assessment instruments in a definitive way is quite difficult. Ideally, one would want a design in which cases with similar levels of risk (or predictions) are randomly assigned to alternative courses of action.

2. The Evaluation of Programs

Requirements for Evaluation. Successful and useful evaluations require that a number of conditions be met:

The program should have a well articulated set of objectives and a well specified set of activities to achieve them. There should be a "theory of change" that is logical and believable, such that it is credible that the intended objectives will be met. This is a particularly difficult requirement for programs in child welfare, since the problems dealt with are serious and not easily overcome or managed. A corollary of this requirement is that it should be likely that the evaluation will have positive findings, that is, that the program will prove successful.⁵
The program should be generalizable. It should be plausible that it could be implemented in other locations with differing contexts, including differing legal and regulatory frameworks. It should be possible to implement the program elsewhere at a scale such that it will make a difference.
There should be the possibility of implementing a rigorous evaluation, providing the best possible foundation for policy and practice decisions.
The program should have some promise of cost-effectiveness. Without this requirement it is unlikely that it would be adopted elsewhere.
The objectives should be measurable, they should be observable within a reasonable period of time after the completion of the intervention and there should be observable indications of their achievement.
It is necessary that the program be large enough to provide enough subjects for adequate statistical power to detect important effects. This means that it should be reasonable to expect that a sufficient number of cases will enter the program in a reasonable period of time so that an adequate sample size can be accumulated.⁶ It should be remembered that referrals often drop when an experiment is undertaken.
If a randomized experiment is to be implemented, it is desirable that the program not have saturation coverage of the eligible cases, requiring some rationing of services, so that the randomized experiment will not result in fewer cases receiving services than before.
The organizations involved in the evaluation should have adequate administrative data systems that will provide information on important outcomes. Adequate accounting systems should be available to provide information for cost analyses.
Program managers and relevant agency executives must be supportive of the evaluation and be willing to exert influence to assure cooperation of staff with evaluation requirements that could be somewhat demanding. Staff sabotage of an evaluation is an ever present possibility, so there should be the capacity to implement mechanisms that will minimize it.
Front-line workers should get regular feedback about the evaluation and data to support their continued participation.
It should be possible to assess the extent to which a program is implemented as intended, that is, to determine the degree of program fidelity.

Evaluations should provide solid evidence for decisions about the particular program under review and decisions to implement a similar program elsewhere. This requires that evaluations be as rigorous as possible, ideally experiments in which cases are randomly assigned either to a group receiving the service being tested or to a group receiving a different service or no service at all. In the absence of a randomized experiment, it should be possible to implement a convincing quasi-experiment, involving similar groups receiving contrasting services. Besides giving the best possible information on effects of programs, rigorous evaluations maximize the possibility of other learning, such as what can go wrong in program implementation. In any event, the evaluation should be prospective, clients should be followed from the time they enter the program or a contrasting service, through the program and for a reasonable follow-up period, probably not less than one year. Given the length of time required for some actions, such as termination of parental rights, a follow-up period of longer than that would be useful.

While a credible contemporaneous comparison group is essential for a useful evaluation, the set of outcomes examined might depend on available resources for the research. At a minimum, outcomes should include an accounting of the status of children at various points in time, that is, whether in foster care, at home, adopted or freed for adoption, in independent living arrangements, etc. Ideally, assessments should also be periodically performed of the well being of children and the functioning of the families in which they are living. If children are not living in their original homes but reunification is planned, the functioning of the homes to which they are to be returned should also be examined. Sources of data should include administrative data on living arrangements, reports of maltreatment, administrative and judicial actions altering the child's status, and services provided. Again, ideally, periodic interviews should be undertaken with caretakers, workers involved with cases (both in the public agency and in other organizations that are involved), and the child. Data might also be obtained from others in a position to know about the child's well being, such as teachers. Evaluations should also consider cost issues, ideally conducting a cost-effectiveness or cost-benefit analysis.

We note a particular problem in the evaluation of reunification programs: as indicated above, it is the business of virtually the entire body of foster care practice to work toward reunification in the first place and, if that does not work out, alternative permanency arrangements. Thus, many jurisdictions do not have identifiable programs for reunification and permanency, rather seeing all of their "out-of-home" work directed toward those ends.⁷ Furthermore, there is a lack of well known, well articulated models of reunification practice that have been implemented in large scale and no single program model has captured the attention of the field as a whole.

5. Negative findings are useful, but more is learned and better guidance for decisions is available when results are positive. An exception is the situation in which the program has been widely adopted or is widely touted. In this case, it is desirable to undertake a rigorous evaluation in order to verify or disprove accepted wisdom.

6. We cannot specify more precisely the sample sizes required without further exploration of expected size of effects of particular programs.

7. This is in contrast to the situation in regard to family preservation a decade ago. Although the ideals of family preservation had pervaded the system, many jurisdictions had (and still have) identifiable family preservation programs, some of them operating at quite large scale.

2.1 Program Dimensions

There are some identifiable programs⁸ around the country, and it would be well to review here some of the dimensions of difference among them:

Intensiveness. Reunification programs usually involve some degree of intensiveness of service with families, having relatively small worker caseloads. Sometimes they are very intensive, with extensive worker involvement and employing approaches such as wrap-around services.
Program theories. Programs have differing theories as to the central problems clients face and as to the activities necessary to deal with those problems.
Use of community resources. Programs can rarely do it all themselves so they make varying uses of community resources. They vary in the extent of dependence on and involvement with other agencies and community organizations.
Time limits. Programs usually have time limits, although there often are exceptions made to them. Programs based on family preservation models are generally short (e.g., Missouri's Family Reunion, 8-12 weeks; New Jersey's Natural Parent Support Program, 3-6 months). Most other programs last for a year or two (e.g., Florida's Homeward Bound, 18 months; Georgia's Mothers Making a Change, 12-15 months extendable to 2 years).
Target groups. Programs receive specific referrals for service, but there is great variation in their target groups. One dimension of targeting is the timing of the referral in the course of the case. Programs could take cases at the time of or shortly after placement of a child in foster care, but this appears to be rarely done in specific reunification programs. More often, programs accept cases only after a child has been in care for a time, while others take long-term, difficult to work with cases. Some programs specialize in cases with particular problems, for example, substance abusing parents or mentally ill children.
Work with foster parents. Some programs make considerable use of foster parents in working with birth parents while others do not. Experience seems to indicate that foster parents must be specially selected for such work. Many foster parents resist involvement with birth parents and are less than enthusiastic about the prospect of the child returning home.
Emphasis on pre- or post-reunification, or both. Some programs focus on work to prepare families for return of children and do little with families after the reunification. Others do most of their work shortly before and after reunification has occurred (they could be considered post-reunification family preservation programs). Still others work with families both before and after reunification.
Use of concurrent planning. As described previously, some programs are quite committed to concurrent planning from the beginning of their work with families while others begin it in earnest only when it becomes evident an alternative plan may be necessary.
Auspices. Some programs are located in public child welfare agencies while others are conducted by private agencies under contract with the public agency.
Use of various program components. Examples are family group conferencing and visitation. Some programs use family group conferencing while others do not. While visitation is a part of virtually all reunification practice, the emphasis placed on it varies.

8. By an "identifiable program" we mean a set of activities involving an identified group of staff who spend a substantial portion of their time (though not necessarily full time) on the work, referral of specific cases, and specification of goals and of activities designed to achieve them.

2.2 Evaluation of Particular Program Components.

In addition to evaluating whole programs, it would be useful to assess a number of program components that are increasingly being used in reunification and permanency programs. The provision of a particular program feature could be varied within an overall program, some families receiving it and others not, with the outcomes of the differing conditions examined to determine whether the feature made a difference.⁹ We consider here several program components that we believe could be separately evaluated.

Foster Parent Mentoring. Foster parents have long been viewed as potential resources in working with birth parents and the idea of foster parent mentoring is being tried in a number of jurisdictions and programs. These efforts obviously require special training of foster parents. It is clear that not all good foster parents are suited for such a role and anecdotal reports indicate that foster parents often resist involvement with birth parents. It is possible that there is a role conflict between foster parent responsibility for the care and safety of children and becoming involved with birth parents. Some staff have reported an unintended consequence of foster parent mentoring is a decision by birth parents to relinquish children once they become aware of the contrast between them and the foster parents. To our knowledge, no rigorous evaluations of foster parent mentoring have been undertaken.

Family Group Conferencing. Family group conferencing seeks to bring together the family, relatives, neighbors, community supports (such as clergy), and representatives of organizations working with the family to determine goals and courses of action. Theoretically, a conference should occur at the outset of the case and periodically thereafter to assess progress and adjust plans. Some research on the outcomes of family group conferencing has been conducted in New Zealand and in Europe. The Chapin Hall Center for Children is conducting an evaluation of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation Community Partnerships Promoting Change program, in which family group conferencing is a prominent feature. However, we know of no rigorous equivalent group designs in the United States.

Termination of Parental Rights Mediation. TPR mediation is being tried in a number of jurisdictions as an attempt to avoid adversarial proceedings and shorten the time before children are available for adoption. In theory, TPR mediation could be examined in a controlled experiment, examining the outcomes of time to termination and families' feelings about the process and its outcome. We have not determined the number of families involved in TPR mediation in particular jurisdictions and one difficulty in evaluation may be that the numbers of cases undergoing mediation in a reasonable period of time are too small to support a controlled experiment.

Concurrent Planning. Concurrent planning presents special problems in constructing rigorous evaluations. For one thing, it is expected by policy to take place in most cases, an expectation that would need to be waived for cases in a control group. Furthermore, there are difficulties in determining just when concurrent planning has taken place: what activities constitute a threshold that could be considered concurrent planning and how can it be determined whether or not these activities have taken place? The determination of outcomes may also be problematic. It is expected that cases with concurrent planning will on average achieve a permanent solution more quickly, but presumably this expectation applies only to those cases in which an alternative to return home is decided upon, so the expectation of shorter times to permanency only applies to a subgroup. Complicating interpretation of times to permanency is the possibility of extensions of timelines and delays in obtaining TPR and finalizing adoptions. While randomized experiments on concurrent planning may not be advisable at present, studies of its implementation and process are quite important to determine whether it is being implemented as intended.

Other Components of Permanency Practice. There are a number of other components of reunification and permanency practice that are potential candidates for evaluation. These include assessment procedures, approaches to visitation, the provision of aftercare services (for both reunification and adoption), and recruitment programs for foster and adoptive parents. However, while these are important elements of practice, we do not know of promising new approaches in these areas that might warrant the mounting of rigorous evaluation.

Therapeutic Technical Packages. A number of models and approaches have been developed for working with troubled families and children. They include multi-systemic therapy, attachment trauma therapy, family resolution therapy, parent-child interaction therapy, parents anonymous, and many others. Some of these approaches focus on work with disturbed children and adolescents. Treating behavioral and psychological disturbances of children obviously may have impact on the likelihood of successful reunification, but we have not focused on these issues in this paper, since the field of child welfare more often focuses on parent and family interventions. Technical packages have varying degrees of research support. Multi-systemic therapy is one approach that has been evaluated fairly rigorously in contexts outside reunification and might well be tried in reunification work.

9. One difficulty with component evaluation is that all elements of a program may be seen as crucial, the program intending to make use of interactions among them, to produce the desired outcomes.

2.3 Evaluation of Programs With Specific Foci

Section 3 of this report, Permanency and Reunification Trends in 25 States, describes programs in 12 locations. Section 2, Permanency: A Balancing Act, puts these programs in four categories:

Programs for substance abusing parents. Drug courts are a subtype of programs focused on parental substance abuse. An example of a drug court is the Drug Court Recovery Project in San Diego County, California. Drug treatment is provided by several inpatient and outpatient treatment substance abuse centers. Services other than substance abuse treatment are provided through a county case manager. Parents' failure to comply with treatment may result in the court imposing sanctions such as short stays in jail and fines for contempt of court. Continued violations may result in dismissal from the program and evaluation for termination of parental rights. Phase 1 of the program requires a court appearance once a week for 90 days; phase 2 requires a court appearance once every two weeks for 90 days; and phase 3 requires a court appearance once a month for 90 days. An additional feature of the program is the use of "safe houses," transitional housing units for parents and children while parents are undergoing treatment. This is a large program, about 880 cases were being served in July 2000.
There are also specialized programs for substance abuse outside the framework of the courts. An example is Mothers Making a Change(MMAC) in Cobb and Douglas Counties in Georgia, a comprehensive program that includes community outreach, early intervention, family preservation and support services, and substance abuse treatment services. The program involves an inpatient phase of 90 days, followed by 9 months of services in the community during which children should be reunified. After that, clients receive 6 months of aftercare services. At the time we talked with this program there were 21 parents in the residential phase and 30 in the nonresidential phases.
Programs for children with severe problems. These programs are focused on children with severe mental health problems and are sometimes characterized by "wraparound" services, an effort to bring to bear a comprehensive set of community services to meet child and family needs. Examples are the Santa Clara County, California wraparound services and Boston's Family Reunification Network. Santa Clara County's program accepts children who are in high-end residential care. It is conducted by two private agencies and has the capacity to serve 195 children. Boston's program is conducted by a network of private agencies and tries to reunify children who are in specialized foster care or residential treatment with their parents. The Heller School at Brandeis University conducts research on the program.
Community-based programs. Community based approaches to child welfare are being tried in a number of communities. The Family to Family initiative of the Annie E. Casey Foundation is a model that is being used in a number of locations. The Lucas County, Ohio Community Development Department uses the Family to Family model to help facilitate reunification. Six neighborhood community centers provide space for visitation, parenting classes, and family conferences. These multi-service agencies also provide recreation, family counseling, health services, and after-school programs. A Community Advocate program provides intensive in-home services when the child is ready to return home. The county has about 500 children in foster care and 500 in relative care. There are between 80 and 100 families in the Community Advocates program.
Family preservation model intensive services. These programs use family preservation like services, often adapting the Homebuilders model. Caseloads are small (2-5 families), services are intensive and short term. An example is the New Jersey Natural Parent Support Program in which families receive services for 6 months. The program is fairly small, each of six counties serve 9 families at a time.

All of the above initiatives deserve evaluation. Of particular urgency is the evaluation of drug courts, both because of the centrality of substance abuse as a problem in child welfare and because drug courts represent an increase in responsibilities and influence of the courts in the child welfare system. An assessment of the effects of strong court sanctions is also needed. We understand that an evaluation of the San Diego program is contemplated and that effort should be closely watched.

Other programs focused on substance abuse should also be evaluated. The Georgia Mothers Making a Change effort could be explored further for possible evaluation. A major issue here is program size. The numbers of cases involved at present may not be sufficient to allow for rigorous evaluation. It is also not known whether there are cases referred that cannot be served because of program capacity limits, thus allowing for random assignment or the construction of a comparison group by other means.

Also much needed are evaluations of community based programs. Some are underway. As mentioned above, Chapin Hall is engaged in an evaluation of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation's CPPC program. The Casey Foundation's Family to Family programs have research components (for example, the Child Welfare Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley is working with the Los Angeles program). To our knowledge, the Lucas County program is not yet being subjected to rigorous evaluation and could be explored further as an evaluation site.

A major difficulty in evaluating community programs is that they are intended to have community-wide impacts or to involve all cases in a community. (The Lucas County program includes all children in care in the county.) Therefore, forming comparison groups is quite problematic, since one cannot identify contemporaneous cases in the same community that are not affected by the initiative. In this situation, comparisons over time are often suggested (comparing outcomes before the program was implemented) but such comparisons are always subject to alternative explanations of the source of the change (economic conditions are always changing and communities do not otherwise stand still). Comparisons may also be made with other communities in which the initiative is absent but such comparisons are also usually flawed, since one cannot be sure the communities were similar before implementation of the initiative or that their trajectories of change would have been the same without the program (communities are usually chosen for a program because of the likelihood of success). It would be possible to randomly assign communities to interventions but so far foundations do not appear to have taken that option seriously (most community intervention efforts have been supported by foundations).

Programs for children with severe mental health needs and wraparound programs should be evaluated. As we note above, the Boston Family Reunification Network has associated research activities. The possibility of an evaluation of the Santa Clara County program should be explored further. It appears that program may be marginally large enough to support rigorous evaluation, but it is not known whether saturation has been reached.

While it would be desirable to conduct rigorous evaluations of family preservation-like reunification programs, it appears to us that research implementation issues may often be quite daunting. In particular, the programs we are aware of are generally quite small, too small to allow for the accumulation of enough cases within a reasonable period of time.

Given the increased interest in subsidized guardianship as a component of permanency efforts, it is important that evaluative information be developed. Fortunately, a large scale randomized experiment on the Illinois subsidized guardianship program is being conducted by Westat for the State of Illinois. Interim findings from that study showed that the introduction of guardianship as a permanency option increased the number of children placed in permanent arrangements without detracting from the number of children adopted. Questions still to be answered include the continued impact of guardianship on permanency rates and the effects of guardianship on child well being.

3. An Agenda for Research on Permanency and Reunification

The core of all efforts to understand permanency and reunification in the current context is careful monitoring of system performance. Analysis of administrative data is central here, but should be augmented by special studies, as indicated earlier. Of particular importance is follow-ups for reasonable periods of time of children in various permanency arrangements, follow-ups that go beyond data contained in administrative systems.

Beyond the tracking of system performance, we need studies in a number of other areas:

How decisions are made by child welfare workers, administrators, and judges. This includes the use of risk assessment procedures and their effectiveness. It also includes an assessment of how concurrent planning is working.
Evaluations of components of permanency and reunification practice, such as foster parent mentoring and family group conferencing.
Evaluations of drug courts.
Evaluations of other approaches directed at substance abuse in families in the child welfare system.
Evaluations of specific programs for permanency and reunification, in particular, wraparound programs and community oriented programs such as Family to Family.

Chapter 5. Reunification from Foster Care in Nine States, 1990-1997: Description and Interpretation

This work describes discharges from foster care, with a focus on those exits that are accomplished by reunifying the foster child with his or her family of origin. The data presented cover a time period from 1990 through 1997. Child welfare practice has undergone substantial change since the mid-1990s. Some changes are due to new federal legislation, such as the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997. Others result from policy and practice reform at the state and local levels. As a result, the size and dynamics of current-day foster care caseloads in some states already differ substantially from their experience during the early and mid-1990's. The information that follows provides a description of exits from foster care, based on actual records of child histories in care. It is intended to be used as a baseline against which current and future patterns of exit from foster care can be measured and evaluated.

The tables presented include foster care exit dynamics for nine states: Alabama, California, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, New Mexico, New York, and Wisconsin. The data for these analyses is drawn from the Multistate Foster Care Data Archive at the Chapin Hall Center for Children. The Archive was created with individual level records extracted from the automated administrative tracking systems of each state's public child welfare agency and supplied by the states to Chapin Hall for analytic purposes.

The universe for this analysis includes all episodes of child placement in substitute care arrangements that began during the years 1990 through 1997.¹ Each episode (or spell in placement) is tracked either until the child exits from foster care or until the end of 1997. If the child entered care more than once between 1990 and 1997, each spell is retained as a separate event.

Many findings are pooled across all nine states to reveal general trends and patterns. Because these nine states combined contain well over half of the nation's foster care population, observations based on these data should be useful for describing relationships at the national level. However, these data should not be considered as fully representative of the national foster care population, and these nine states are not a representative sample of all state child welfare systems.

This document describes the table contents and figures (located at the end of the document), and highlights some of the patterns and findings observed within them. The discussion of the first table also introduces and describes most of the variables that are used throughout the analysis.

1. The dates of coverage for Maryland and New Mexico are for fiscal years 1990 through 1997 (July 1, 1989 through June 30, 1996). In the analysis, these fiscal year data will be compared directly to calendar year date from the other seven states.

1. Exits from Foster Care

In order to understand patterns of reunification from foster care, it is useful to consider reunification in the context of all exits from care, and in the context of the individual characteristics and the case histories of the children involved.² Table IIA.1 presents an overview of exits from foster care. The left side of the table contains counts of spells by type of exit, classified first by state, then by four child characteristics, and finally by each of four case characteristics. This series of two-way tables is based on a universe of 404,416 distinct spells in foster care. These are all spells that began with a foster placement between 1990-94 in any of the nine states, and are enumerated in the first column, labeled "All Entries. These spells are each tracked until the child is discharged from foster care or through the end of 1997. So the potential period of observation is at least three years (for children who entered care at the end of 1994), and at most eight years (for children who entered care at the start of 1990.

The second column, labeled "No Exit, Still in Care," indicates how many of these spells were still open at the end of 1997. Just under one-fifth (75,199 or 18.6%) of the children who entered care between 1990 and 1994 remained in care through the end of observation. It is important, to note that exits from some long-term stays in care are not observed and are not reported in this table, so that the completed duration and the eventual discharge destination at exit for these spells are censored from this analysis. However, we do know that all of these censored spells, by definition, have a duration of three years or more, and as will be seen, reunification is a fairly rare outcome after three years. Therefore, we assume that these censored spells would probably add little new information to most of this reunification analysis. However, it should be noted that exits from stays of over three years are incompletely described in these tables. The proportion still in care is computed against a base of all entries.

The exit distribution is presented with six categories for destination at exit:

Reunification is defined as a return to the parent or family of origin.
Relative care is full custodial placement with a relative outside of the foster care system. It is not formal kinship foster care, which involves state custody and control.
Adoption is finalized legal adoption of the child, either by relatives or by unrelated persons. Pre-adoptive placements are considered as foster care.
Reach majority occurs when a child ages out of foster care.
Runaway occurs when the child leaves placement for a significant period of time without agency authorization.
"Other exit" is a catch all for a variety of categories, including "unknown," "service completed," death, and transfer to other agency.

Looking at the first row of Table IIA. I , we see that of the 404,416 spells observed, 187,406 ended with a family reunification. There were also 23,398 exits to other relatives, 38,291 completed adoptions, 9,583 children "aging out" of care, 23,635 runaways, and 46,904 spells that exited to "other" destinations. On the right side of the table, each exit type is presented as a proportion of all observed exits. Therefore, the statistic reporting that the proportion of reunification spells for all nine states combined is .569 should be interpreted as meaning that 56.9 percent of all spells where an exit was observed were exits by reunification.

During the period of observation, the majority of exits (57%) were achieved through family reunification. Of the remainder, 7 percent were to relatives, 12 percent via adoption, 3 percent reached majority, 7 percent involved runaways from care, and 14 percent were in the "other" category. This exit distribution for the spells from the pooled nine-state data provides a yardstick against which the distributions for each state or subgroup will be compared.

It is important to note that the distributions presented in Table IIA. I describe each type of exit as a proportion of all observed exits, not as a proportion of all entries. If the 9-state reunification statistic (.569) were recomputed as a proportion of all spells, we would see that 46.3 percent of all entry spells were observed to end in reunification by the end of 1997. This latter statistic is usually what would be considered as a reunification rate, in that it describes the likelihood of reunification for an entire population at risk. The difference between the two measures is caused by spells where an exit is not observed. The relationship of these statistics is presented in Figure A. Here, we can see that the reunification rate (reunifications/entries) can be described as the product of a) the likelihood of exit (exits/entries), and b) the likelihood that an exit is by reunification (reunifications/exits). Alabama has one of the highest exit rates, so the low reunification rate must be interpreted in the context of knowing that many children exit foster care in other ways. In contrast, the low reunification rate in Illinois must be understood in the context of low overall exit rates -- as relatively few children leave foster care to other destinations.³

Table IIA.1
Type of Exit from Spells in Foster Care, by State and selected covariates. Nine States Pooled . 1990-1994 Entry Cohorts, spells starting before 1995. Exits observed through December 1997.
	Counts								Proportion of Entries	Proportion of Exits
	All Entries	No Exit	Exit Type						No Exit	Exit Type
	All Entries	Still in Care	Reunify	Relative Care	Adopt	Reach Majority	Run Away	Other Exit	Still in Care	Reunify	Relative Care	Adopt	Reach Majority	Run Away	Other Exit
State
Alabama	9,224	774	2,423	2,668	454	50	269	2,586	0.084	0.287	0.316	0.054	0.006	0.032	0.306
California	143,973	30,944	75,910	2,838	10,571	4,181	6,351	13,178	0.215	0.672	0.025	0.094	0.037	0.056	0.117
Illinois	56,354	20,767	17,661	915	5,506	684	4,475	6,346	0.369	0.496	0.026	0.155	0.019	0.126	0.178
Maryland	14,003	2,512	5,155	2,346	1,629	676	401	1,284	0.179	0.449	0.204	0.142	0.059	0.035	0.112
Michigan	31,537	1,750	14,442	3,074	5,734	619	1,264	4,654	0.055	0.485	0.103	0.193	0.021	0.042	0.156
Missouri	22,629	2,315	10,732	983	2,457	390	1,204	4,548	0.102	0.528	0.048	0.121	0.019	0.059	0.224
New Mexico	5,889	275	3,342	448	553	172	344	755	0.047	0.595	0.080	0.099	0.031	0.061	0.134
New York	94,758	13,474	41,949	8,528	9,854	1,806	8,064	11,083	0.142	0.516	0.105	0.121	0.022	0.099	0.136
Wisconsin	26,049	2,388	15,792	1,598	1,533	1,005	1,263	2,470	0.092	0.667	0.068	0.065	0.042	0.053	0.104
Nine State Total	404,416	75,199	187,406	23,398	38,291	9,583	23,635	46,904	0.186	0.569	0.071	0.116	0.029	0.072	0.142
Child Characteristics
Age at Entry
< 3 mos.	51,521	13,215	15,095	2,772	15,492	0	0	4,947	0.256	0.394	0.072	0.404	0.000	0.000	0.129
3-11 mos.	31,028	6,835	13,733	2,060	5,161	0	0	3,239	0.220	0.568	0.085	0.213	0.000	0.000	0.134
1 to 2 yrs.	57,188	13,032	28,155	3,773	6,835	0	0	5,393	0.228	0.638	0.085	0.155	0.000	0.000	0.122
3 to 5	61,649	15,148	31,406	3,897	5,525	0	9	5,664	0.246	0.675	0.084	0.119	0.000	0.000	0.122
6 to 8	46,372	11,556	24,199	2,924	3,036	0	209	4,448	0.249	0.695	0.084	0.087	0.000	0.006	0.128
9 to 11	40,943	8,822	21,637	2,545	1,514	165	1,817	4,443	0.215	0.674	0.079	0.047	0.005	0.057	0.138
12 to 14	62,742	5,498	31,067	3,315	601	2,294	10,611	9,356	0.088	0.543	0.058	0.010	0.040	0.185	0.163
15 to 17	52,973	1,093	22,114	2,112	127	7,124	10,989	9,414	0.021	0.426	0.041	0.002	0.137	0.212	0.181
Age at Exit
0 years	20,487	0	13,813	2,558	1,217	0	0	2,899	0.000	0.674	0.125	0.059	0.000	0.000	0.142
1 to 2	47,325	0	29,317	4,090	8,375	0	0	5,543	0.000	0.619	0.086	0.177	0.000	0.000	0.117
3 to 5	80,501	17,848	35,440	4,578	15,529	0	0	7,106	0.222	0.566	0.073	0.248	0.000	0.000	0.113
6 to 8	62,543	20,868	26,189	3,160	7,041	0	0	5,285	0.334	0.628	0.076	0.169	0.000	0.000	0.127
9 to 11	46,650	13,449	22,288	2,592	3,484	0	359	4,478	0.288	0.671	0.078	0.105	0.000	0.011	0.135
12 to 14	58,176	10,620	27,935	3,101	1,883	59	7,220	7,358	0.183	0.587	0.065	0.040	0.001	0.152	0.155
15 to 17	69,444	8,747	30,330	3,016	682	1,960	14,573	10,136	0.126	0.500	0.050	0.011	0.032	0.240	0.167
Over 17 yrs	19,290	3,667	2,094	303	80	7,564	1,483	4,099	0.190	0.134	0.019	0.005	0.484	0.095	0.262
Gender
Female	207,204	37,079	95,132	12,124	18,895	6,095	14,803	23,076	0.179	0.559	0.071	0.111	0.036	0.087	0.136
Male	197,212	38,120	92,274	11,274	19,396	3,488	8,832	23,828	0.193	0.580	0.071	0.122	0.022	0.056	0.150
Race/Ethnicity
African American	161,625	44,281	59,368	11,302	16,070	2,794	9,057	18,753	0.274	0.506	0.096	0.137	0.024	0.077	0.160
Hispanic	61,343	11,049	32,146	2,544	4,301	1,381	4,046	5,876	0.180	0.639	0.051	0.086	0.027	0.080	0.117
Other	31,480	4,167	14,730	2,367	2,866	795	2,683	3,872	0.132	0.539	0.087	0.105	0.029	0.098	0.142
White	149,968	15,702	81,162	7,185	15,054	4,613	7,849	18,403	0.105	0.604	0.054	0.112	0.034	0.058	0.137
Case Characteristics
Spell Sequence
First Spell	352,029	67,390	166,035	20,842	34,935	7,833	15,624	39,370	0.191	0.583	0.073	0.123	0.028	0.055	0.138
Reentry Spell	52,387	7,809	21,371	2,556	3,356	1,750	8,011	7,534	0.149	0.479	0.057	0.075	0.039	0.180	0.169
Duration
< 1 mo	49,767	0	34,820	5,027	271	90	4,048	5,511	0.000	0.700	0.101	0.005	0.002	0.081	0.111
1 to 3 months	46,432	0	30,905	4,336	510	216	4,297	6,168	0.000	0.666	0.093	0.011	0.005	0.093	0.133
4 to 6 months	35,492	0	23,517	2,862	459	334	3,309	5,011	0.000	0.663	0.081	0.013	0.009	0.093	0.141
6 mos to 1 year	48,657	0	33,358	3,197	1,706	872	3,661	5,863	0.000	0.686	0.066	0.035	0.018	0.075	0.120
1 year to 18 mos	36,557	0	24,329	2,210	2,170	1,041	2,165	4,642	0.000	0.666	0.060	0.059	0.028	0.059	0.127
18 mos to 2 year	26,752	0	15,077	1,655	3,141	1,097	1,529	4,253	0.000	0.564	0.062	0.117	0.041	0.057	0.159
2 to 3 year	36,103	0	14,327	2,040	9,777	1,948	2,098	5,913	0.000	0.397	0.057	0.271	0.054	0.058	0.164
3 years +	124,656	75,199	11,073	2,071	20,257	3,985	2,528	9,543	0.603	0.224	0.042	0.410	0.081	0.051	0.193
Placement Type
Congregate Care	64,836	4,602	30,990	3,529	739	2,195	11,932	10,849	0.071	0.514	0.059	0.012	0.036	0.198	0.180
Foster Care	214,991	31,805	103,302	14,303	30,038	4,955	8,029	22,559	0.148	0.564	0.078	0.164	0.027	0.044	0.123
Kinship Care	108,750	35,027	46,611	5,084	6,738	1,478	2,356	11,456	0.322	0.632	0.069	0.091	0.020	0.032	0.155
Mixed Type	15,839	3,765	6,503	482	776	955	1,318	2,040	0.238	0.539	0.040	0.064	0.079	0.109	0.169
Placement Stability
1 placement	207,134	22,650	117,125	14,699	12,216	3,958	11,212	25,274	0.109	0.635	0.080	0.066	0.021	0.061	0.137
2 placements	97,561	18,850	42,557	5,317	12,391	2,260	5,284	10,902	0.193	0.541	0.068	0.157	0.029	0.067	0.139
3-4 placements	66,504	19,090	21,272	2,688	9,981	2,025	4,161	7,287	0.287	0.449	0.057	0.211	0.043	0.088	0.154
5+ placements	33,217	14,609	6,452	694	3,703	1,340	2,978	3,441	0.440	0.347	0.037	0.199	0.072	0.160	0.185

Figure A
Likelihood of Reunification from Foster Care Components of Reunification Rates

The proportions in Figure A.1 report the likelihood that a child or youth entering foster care between 1990 and 1994 exited before 1998 via reunification with their family.
One decomposition of the proportions in Figure A.1 is represented in Figure A.2, which presents the likelihood of any exit from care and the proportion of exits that are achieved via reunification. Mathematically, the likelihood of reunification is the product of these two separate proportions.

2. Ideally, we would also consider attributes of the family of origin, the parents (or other home caregivers), and the home environment; but this type of information is not generally available through child welfare tracking systems.

3. The analysis in later sections will focus almost exclusively on reunification rates (the likelihood of reunification among entrants). The focus on exit distribution in this section is to highlight the differences between children who are reunified and children who exit in other ways.

1.1 State Patterns of Exit From Foster Care

Individually, the nine states present very different patterns of exit distribution from foster care. Illinois and California had the largest proportion of children remaining in care, which meant that they had the greatest share of long duration foster spells. Over one-third of the spells in Illinois and one-fifth of the spells in California had not been completed by the end of 1997. By contrast, in five states (Alabama, Michigan, Missouri, New Mexico, and Wisconsin) only one tenth or fewer of all spells remained open in 1997. To the extent that reunification is related to the length-of-stay in foster care, this is a very significant dynamic to remember during this analysis.

Reunification levels differ by state -- from 28.7 percent of exits in Alabama to 67.2 percent in California and 66.7 percent in Wisconsin. In the other six states, 45-60 percent of all foster care exits were family reunification. This state-to-state variation in the use of reunification to end episodes of foster care placement is substantial. Alabama is a clear outlier, with far lower proportions of reunification exits than any of the other states, but the reunification levels among the remaining eight states still vary widely, from 45 percent to 67 percent of observed exits.

Exits to relatives also differ widely among states. Alabama and Maryland reported the most family discharges (31.6% and 20.4%), while California and Illinois each reported less than 3 percent family exits.⁴ This is a difficult category to interpret, because it represents differences in foster care practice and in state data definitions. The child welfare agencies in Alabama and Maryland tended to use strategies that supported kinship placements outside of the formal foster care system, while California, Illinois and New York placed a substantial number of foster children in kinship arrangements within the foster care system. When exit to relatives and reunification are combined into a single category of "family exits," the variation between states is somewhat smaller than it is for either exit type considered alone. In part, the higher level of exit to relatives helps to explain why the reunification levels in Alabama and Maryland are very low. It should also be noted that children in care in California, New York, and Illinois (but in kin placements) may be similar to the exits to relative placements elsewhere.

Michigan has the highest rate of completed adoption with almost one-fifth (.193) of foster care spells ending with adoptive placement. Exits by adoption were least common in Alabama and Wisconsin (.054 and.065).

Few children exit foster care because they reach majority (or "age out"), with Maryland showing the highest proportion at .059.

Illinois (.126) and New York (.099) have the highest rates of runaway exits.

Overall, "other" exits represent almost 15 percent of all foster care spell endings. These are particularly common in Alabama (.306) and Missouri (.224). In both cases, most of the "other" exits are to unknown destinations. It is possible that many of these undefined exits are by reunification, but that the exit reason coded in the data system was represented in some unidentifiable way (such as by a change in legal status).

4. Other evidence suggests that a large share of the exits coded as "other" in Illinois (17.8% of exits) may actually be relative exits.

1.2 Exit Destination by Child Characteristics

Age at entry is the age of the child at the time of their initial placement into this spell in care. Reunification levels are highest for children who enter the foster care spell between the ages of 3 and 11 years. Over two-thirds of the exits for these children are by reunification. Reunification is least likely for children who enter as infants (39% of exits for children entering under 3 months of age) or as adolescents (43% of children 15-17 years).

The youngest children are much more likely than others to leave foster care via adoption (40% of exits for children <3 months, 21% for children 3-11 months). For the 0-3 month entry group, more spells end through adoption than through reunification. Adoption becomes a far less likely outcome as the age at entry to foster care increases. Older entrants are far more likely to leave foster care via runaway, by reaching majority, or for "other" reasons.

Age at exit. This variable is the age of the child at the end of the spell in care. While the previous finding shows that the youngest children are least likely to exit by reunification, those young entrants who do exit quickly (and thus are still very young at exit) have very high rates of reunification and high rates of relative placement. This is partly because the large number of infants that move to the adoptive track tend to remain in care for several years, and are older by the time they exit. Adoption is most likely for children who leave care at age 3-5, almost one quarter (.248) of whom exit by adoption. Aging out of care and exiting by runaway occur only for foster children in their teens. That these exit types are age-limited, and are not available exit options for young children.

Gender. The relationship between gender and the type of exit from foster care is very weak. Boys are somewhat more likely to remain in care longer, and slightly more likely to be reunified. Girls are slightly more likely to reach majority in care, and somewhat more likely than boys to run away from substitute care arrangements.

Race/Ethnicity. Hispanic foster children who leave foster care are more likely to be reunified (.639) than children from the other groups, and are the least likely to exit to relative care or by adoption. African American children who exit are the least likely to be reunified (.506), while they are the most likely to exit to relative care or adoption. The exit patterns of white children in foster care fall between these extremes, with a reunification proportion (.604) somewhat closer to the Hispanics than to the African Americans. White children, however, are more likely to leave foster care without experiencing long-term stays before exit. Just over 10 percent of the white children who entered care in 1990-94 remained in care at the end of 1997, compared to 18 percent of Hispanic children and 27 percent of African American children.

1.3 Exit Destination by Case Characteristics

Spell sequence is defined by whether this is the first foster care experience for the child or a reentry spell in care. Children exiting from their first spell in foster care are more likely to be reunified than children who have already left care and then reentered (.583 vs. .479). Children exiting first spells are also more likely to exit to relative care (.073 vs. .057) and to be adopted from care (.123 vs. .075). Runaway and "other" exits are far more common for reentrants (.180 and .169) than for children experiencing a first spell in care (.055 and .138).

Duration of spell is the length of stay in a completed spell in care. By the design of this study population, all spells with duration of less than three years are completed, while approximately three-fifths of the spells with duration of three years or more are censored. The proportion of reunifications decreases as the length of stay in foster care increases. For all spells that exit in less than 18 months, over two-thirds end with family reunification. In contrast, of the completed spells that lasted over 3 years, less than one-quarter (.224) ended through reunification. Exits to relatives follow a similar pattern to reunification. Adoptive exits and exits by aging out are most likely from long spells in foster care. One implication of shorter spells showing high levels of reunification is that reunification tends to occur more quickly than other exits.

Placement type is defined by the of primary type of care experienced during a spell. A spell is classified as kinship care,⁵ congregate care (institution and group home), or nonrelative foster care if the child spent more than one-half of their days in care in that type of placement. If no care type was primary, then the spell is classified as being of "mixed" type. Among observed exits, children in kinship placements are the most likely to be reunified with their families (.632). This suggests that kinship care can in some cases work to maintain family ties during the period of removal from the home. This statistic must be interpreted cautiously, though, because children in kinship placement also tend to remain in care the longest, and were the least likely to exit at all within the study period.⁶ Only two-thirds of the kinship placement spells were completed, while 85 percent of children in nonrelative foster placements and 93 percent of children in congregate care facilities have observed exits. Children exiting congregate care spells were the least likely to reunify (.514), and the most likely to exit by runaway (.198) or "other" exit (.180). Children in nonrelative foster care were much more likely to be adopted (.164) than children in other placements.

Placement stability is defined by the number of different physical placements (and caregivers) a child experiences within a spell in care. Reunification is far more likely from a foster care spell that involves placement in only one home or facility. Two-thirds (.635) of the children who exited from a one-placement spell returned home upon exit. As the number of placements within a spell increases, the reunification rate decreases. A similar pattern applies to relative exits.

Adoptions are more common among children exiting spells with multiple placements. One explanation is that adoptive placements usually require some movement, as children on the adoptive track are often shifted into a pre-adoptive foster care arrangements.

5. Please note that kinship care is not tracked in Alabama, Michigan, and Wisconsin because it is not fully identifiable in their data systems. Kinship placements in these states are combined with nonrelative foster care. Fortunately, for these analyses, none of these states uses kinship placement with the frequency that Illinois, New York, and California do.

6. Looking at reunification as a proportion for all entries (rather than exits) illustrates the issue discussed here. During the period of observation, about 43 percent of children in kinship care were reunified, as compared to 48 percent of children in nonrelative foster care and congregate care. Therefore, while a higher proportion of exits from kin care were by reunification, a lower proportion of kinship care cases were observed to result in reunification.

1.4 Summary

Table IIA.1presented nine sets of two-way tables. Taken together, they demonstrate that there is systematic and substantial variability in the patterns of exit from foster care spells. Of all nine variables, only gender did not produce an important qualification about the use of reunification to end spells in foster care. Variables with particularly strong relationships were state, age at entry, and spell duration. Some of the more important relationships are portrayed graphically in Figure B.

Figure B
Proportion of Observations Exit from Foster Care, By Destination and Selected Characteristics 1990-1994. Entries Observed Through December 31, 1997. Nine States.

Exit Type by Age at Entry

Figure B1. Proportion of Observations Exit from Foster Care, By Destination and Selected Characteristics 1990-1994. Entries Observed Through December 31, 1997. Nine States.

Exit Type by Placement Type

Figure B2. Proportion of Observations Exit from Foster Care, By Destination and Selected Characteristics 1990-1994. Entries Observed Through December 31, 1997. Nine States.

Exit Type by Race/Ethnicity

Figure B3. Proportion of Observations Exit from Foster Care, By Destination and Selected Characteristics 1990-1994. Entries Observed Through December 31, 1997. Nine States.

Exit Type by Spell Duration

Figure B4. Proportion of Observations Exit from Foster Care, By Destination and Selected Characteristics 1990-1994. Entries Observed Through December 31, 1997. Nine States.

As observed by their relationships with the other variables, it appears that reunification exits and family exits are related -- in that they tend to occur commonly to the same type of children and in similar case situations. These observations suggest that we might consider them together as permanency solutions. This will be examined in a following section where they are combined into a single category termed "family exits."

However, these bivariate findings also pose questions. One issue is the high interrelation among the independent variables (multicollinearity). For example, placement stability is highly correlated with duration and with placement type. The relationships seen in the two-way tables between exit type and any of these variables might easily be caused by one of the other related predictors, by a combination of the predictors, or by another related factor that is not described. To address this issue of multicollinearity, multivariate analyses will be presented later in the report that use the predictor variables simultaneously.

Another issue is interpreting what a variable actually represents. For example, age at entry can capture many dimensions of a foster care case. The high level for adoption of infants is partially due to child characteristics (e.g., their attractiveness on the adoption market). But it is also true that the family situations that lead to the removal of infants also involve a large share of cases where terminating parental rights and initiating the adoptive process is thought to be necessary. These tables demonstrate that reunification is complex and multidimensional, and we see that interpretations should be made with care.

2. Timing of Foster Care Exits and Trends over Time

Exits from foster care are presented in this section in a format designed to encourage comparisons of the rates and the timing of foster care exit activity, both between states and across time. A series of 10 pages of tables, plus one summary, is employed.

Table IIB.1 Reunification Tracking Tables for Annual Entries to Foster Care
(Pooled information for all nine states combined)

Table IIB.1
Reunification Tracking Tables for Foster Care Spells. By year of Spell Start: 1990-1997. Nine States Pooled (AL,CA,IL,MD,MI,MO,NM,NY,WI)
Year	A. Number of Exits in Interval(months)								Total Exits	Total Entries
Year	0 < 1	1 < 3	3 < 6	6 <12	12<18	18<24	25<36	36+	Total Exits	Total Entries
1990	9,506	8,979	6,671	8,831	6,748	5,086	6,598	14,019	66,438	74,162
1991	9,811	9,374	6,898	9,130	7,058	4,983	6,825	12,991	67,070	77,324
1992	9,801	8,861	6,685	9,673	7,229	5,143	6,951	10,896	65,239	78,580
1993	10,185	9,395	7,485	10,006	7,448	5,479	7,583	8,012	65,593	83,293
1994	10,464	9,823	7,753	11,017	8,074	6,061	8,146	3,539	64,877	91,057
1995	10,038	9,455	7,527	10,353	7,536	5,463	4,507		54,879	86,301
1996	10,885	9,118	7,598	10,532	6,326	1,675			46,134	94,013
1997	9,874	7,461	4,629	2,948					24,912	90,013

Notes: Observations in italic are partially censored by time limit of period of observation.
Observations in blank are fully censored (unobservable).
By calendar year in 7 states. By fiscal year in Maryland and New Mexico.

Year	B. Number of Reunifications in Interval (months)								Total Reunifs
Year	0 < 1	1 < 3	3 < 6	6 <12	12<18	18<24	25<36	36+	Total Reunifs
1990	6,914	6,164	4,621	6,202	4,588	2,949	2,786	3,454	37,678
1991	6,932	6,237	4,603	6,234	4,687	2,803	2,839	2,924	37,259
1992	6,691	5,857	4,349	6,558	4,764	2,922	2,859	2,304	36,304
1993	7,109	6,152	4,941	6,837	4,896	3,047	2,945	1,673	37,600
1994	7,174	6,495	5,003	7,527	5,394	3,356	2,898	718	38,565
1995	6,707	6,062	4,885	6,807	4,845	2,735	1,517		33,558
1996	7,003	5,300	4,568	6,337	3,633	759			27,600
1997	5,794	4,018	2,531	1,499					13,842

Year	C. Cumulative Proportion of Entrants Exiting By Month
Year	<1	<3	<6	<12	<18	<24	<36	36+
1990	0.128	0.249	0.339	0.458	0.549	0.618	0.707	0.896
1991	0.127	0.248	0.337	0.455	0.547	0.611	0.699	0.867
1992	0.125	0.237	0.323	0.446	0.538	0.603	0.692	0.830
1993	0.122	0.235	0.325	0.445	0.534	0.600	0.691	0.787
1994	0.115	0.223	0.308	0.429	0.518	0.584	0.674	0.712
1995	0.116	0.226	0.313	0.433	0.520	0.584	0.636
1996	0.116	0.213	0.294	0.406	0.473	0.491
1997	0.110	0.193	0.244	0.277

Year	D. Cumulative Proportion of Entrants Reunifying By Month
Year	<1	<3	<6	<12	<18	<24	<36	36+
1990	0.093	0.176	0.239	0.322	0.384	0.424	0.461	0.508
1991	0.090	0.170	0.230	0.310	0.371	0.407	0.444	0.482
1992	0.085	0.160	0.215	0.298	0.359	0.396	0.433	0.462
1993	0.085	0.159	0.219	0.301	0.359	0.396	0.431	0.451
1994	0.079	0.150	0.205	0.288	0.347	0.384	0.416	0.424
1995	0.078	0.148	0.205	0.283	0.340	0.371	0.389
1996	0.074	0.131	0.179	0.247	0.286	0.294
1997	0.064	0.109	0.137	0.154

Year	E. Average Monthly Exit Rate during interval
Year	0 < 1	1 < 3	3 < 6	6 <12	12<18	18<24	25<36
1990	0.128	0.069	0.040	0.030	0.028	0.025	0.019
1991	0.127	0.069	0.040	0.030	0.028	0.024	0.019
1992	0.125	0.064	0.037	0.030	0.028	0.024	0.019
1993	0.122	0.064	0.039	0.030	0.027	0.024	0.019
1994	0.115	0.061	0.037	0.029	0.026	0.023	0.018
1995	0.116	0.062	0.038	0.029	0.026	0.022	0.010
1996	0.116	0.055	0.034	0.026	0.019	0.006
1997	0.110	0.047	0.021	0.007

Year	F. Average Monthly Reunification Rate During Interval
Year	0 < 1	1 < 3	3 < 6	6 <12	12<18	18<24	25<36
1990	0.093	0.048	0.028	0.021	0.019	0.015	0.008
1991	0.090	0.046	0.026	0.020	0.019	0.013	0.008
1992	0.085	0.043	0.024	0.021	0.018	0.013	0.008
1993	0.085	0.042	0.026	0.020	0.018	0.013	0.007
1994	0.079	0.040	0.024	0.020	0.017	0.013	0.006
1995	0.078	0.040	0.024	0.019	0.017	0.011	0.004
1996	0.074	0.032	0.021	0.016	0.011	0.003
1997	0.064	0.025	0.012	0.004

Year	G. Reunifications as Proportion of Exits (Cumulative)
Year	<1	<3	<6	<12	<18	<24	<36	36+
1990	0.727	0.707	0.704	0.703	0.699	0.686	0.653	0.567
1991	0.707	0.686	0.681	0.682	0.679	0.667	0.635	0.556
1992	0.683	0.672	0.667	0.670	0.668	0.657	0.626	0.556
1993	0.698	0.677	0.673	0.675	0.672	0.660	0.624	0.573
1994	0.686	0.674	0.666	0.671	0.670	0.657	0.617	0.594
1995	0.668	0.655	0.653	0.655	0.653	0.636	0.611
1996	0.643	0.615	0.611	0.609	0.604	0.598
1997	0.587	0.566	0.562	0.556

Tables IIB.2 Reunification Tracking Tables, by State
(Tables with the same information for each state separately, plus a summary page).

Table IIB.2_AL
Reunification Tracking Tables for Annual Entry Cohorts to Foster Care, 1990-1997, State of Alabama
Year	Number of Exits in Interval								Total Exits	Total Entries
Year	0 < 1	1 < 3	3 < 6	6 <12	12<18	18<24	25<36	36+	Total Exits	Total Entries
1990	391	414	269	271	171	120	118	175	1,929	2,004
1991	433	392	269	268	147	90	107	155	1,861	1,960
1992	421	316	289	248	149	67	85	148	1,723	1,855
1993	295	377	195	248	126	65	102	79	1,487	1,692
1994	326	319	236	241	144	75	76	33	1,450	1,713
1995	286	301	164	213	98	84	58		1,204	1,582
1996	337	322	264	305	95	17			1,340	2,107
1997	332	292	160	90					874	2,101