Tag: CFSA

Struggling to achieve its mission, but wanting to expand it: CWM’s 2022 Performance Oversight Testimony on CFSA

Good morning! Thank you for the opportunity to testify today. My name is Marie Cohen and I write the blogs Child Welfare Monitor and Child Welfare Monitor DC. After my first career as a policy analyst and researcher, I became a social worker and served in the District’s child welfare system until 2015. Soon after leaving that job, I began writing these blogs to share some of the insights I had gained from my time in the field, and I’ve been amazed to see both of my blogs acquiring readers and influence beyond my wildest dreams. I take a child-centered approach, placing the safety and wellbeing of the child above all other considerations. I also take a particular interest in translating academic research for a lay audience and exposing misinterpretations of research by those trying to support their point of view. In my testimony today, I’ll start by talking about CFSA’s performance in child protective services, then continue with in-home services and then foster care. In conclusion, I’ll explain why I fear that CFSA is losing interest in these core services in its desire to become a “child and family well-being agency” and why I hope that the Council will encourage a renewed focus on CFSA’s primary mission.

My testimony draws from several sources. First, I have used recent CFSA reports including the FY 2021 Needs Assessment and the performance oversight responses recently submitted to the Committee, as well as the CFSA Data Dashboard. I also share some insights from my service on the Child Fatality Review Committee and as a mentor through BEST Kids for almost seven years. Finally, I draw from the national research and policy trends I that I review for my blog.

CFSA has had some successes in the past year. The agency has returned to a mostly normal service posture after the pandemic-induced transition to virtual services. It has found a creative way to claim federal funds for case management and improved one service for families with substance abuse by bringing it in-house. The agency is increasing the number of professional foster parents, though not by enough so far, and the menu of therapeutic services available to foster youths and their parents through a contract with MBI. It has used federal funds to add four new staff members to work with schools and families to reduce school absences due to educational neglect. But CFSA is still falling short on meeting its primary missions of keeping District children safe and providing a physically and emotionally safe haven for those children who must be removed from their homes.

Child Protective Services: CFSA’s primary mission of protecting children has suffered as the agency has continued to emphasize narrowing the front door.

CFSA often boasts about the drop in the foster care rolls, which have fallen from over 1500 on September 30, 2012 to only 614 on September 30, 2021, crediting its policy pillar of “Narrowing the Front Door.” But a drop in foster care numbers is not in itself a positive outcome unless it has been achieved without compromising the safety of children. The choice of “Narrowing the Front Door” rather than “Keeping Children Safe” as the first pillar is not accidental: the goal has become reducing foster care regardless of the impact on child safety. Moreover, CFSA is no longer serving more children in their homes as they place fewer children in foster care; the number of children receiving in-home services has also fallen since 2019, with the total number of children served decreasing from 1994 at the end of FY 2020 to 1904 at the end of FY 2021.

My service on the Child Fatality Review Committee (on which I am thankful to have been joined by Chairperson Nadeau), has revealed many occasions in which CFSA missed chances to protect some of our most at-risk children. I have reviewed death after death of children from families that were the subject of multiple reports to the CFSA hotline dating back many years. Yet these allegations were repeatedly screened out or not substantiated by the agency. CFSA needs to assess the operations of its hotline and investigations, which have both been criticized by the Court Monitor in the past, to make sure that its desire to narrow the front door is not outweighing the concern for child safety. But there is also something the Council can do. I have noticed that many children who later died were at some point assessed to be at high risk but were left after an investigation with no support or monitoring by CFSA. When I ask why, I am reminded that CFSA cannot open a case if abuse or neglect was not substantiated, no matter how risky the situation appears to be. So whether we can protect a child depends on whether harm has already occurred, not whether it is likely to occur. But not all jurisdictions require substantiation in order to open a case for in-home services or foster care. In Washington State, an allegation does not need to be substantiated for an agency to file a neglect petition in court; the purpose of filing a petition is to “prevent harm” and there is no need to prove that harm already occurred. In Michigan and Minnesota, a case can be opened or a child removed because of “threatened harm,” which can be substantiated as a type of maltreatment. I hope the Council will consider changing DC law to make it possible for CFSA to protect at-risk children before it is too late, even without a substantiated allegation.

In-home services: Services provided through CFSA’s Prevention Services Plan are reaching few people and wasting funds, at the same time as CFSA is failing to provide families with needed behavioral health and other services.

The Family First Prevention Services Act allows CFSA to spend Title IV-E funds for evidence-based family preservation or reunification services to prevent entry or re-entry to foster care. However, only evidence-based practices (EBP) that are approved by the Children’s Bureau’s Prevention Services Clearinghouse can receive federal reimbursement. Currently, the only services receiving Title IV-E funding from HHS are Motivational Interviewing, which is part of CFSA’s case management model, and a home visiting program called Parents as Teachers (PAT) that is run by the Health Department. The other services included in CFSA’s Prevention Plan are funded by Medicaid or other local sources.  

CFSA deserves credit for realizing that one practice that is reimbursable under Family First, motivational interviewing, could be incorporated into case management, thus allowing CFSA to collect matching funds for case management for all families receiving services in their homes. This was a creative way to claiming federal funds despite the flaws of the Family First Act, under which has not brought about the promised bonanza of federal resources for family preservation services.  I also applaud the agency for improving the performance of Project Connect since they brought the program in-house. Project Connect provides intensive home-based services to families with an in-home case who are addressing substance abuse. When provided by a contractor, Project Connect struggled to enroll families, but now that it is operated by CFSA, the agency reports that the program has been at capacity since January 2020. The agency reports 46 families served, and 26 cases closed, with 9 families having disengaged and 17 having completed the program in FY 2021. Of course the longer-term outcomes of the program in terms of sobriety and child maltreatment remain to be seen and I hope CFSA will be reporting on them.

But the other services provided in CFSA’s Prevention Services Plan are reaching few people.  According to the FY 2021 Needs Assessment, only 8% of the families referred to DBH received services. Similarly, only 8% of clients referred to the Department of Health home visiting programs, Parents as Teachers and Healthy Families America (HFA, the other DOH-run home-visiting program,) received services. Most of these referrals were either rejected as not appropriate or withdrawn because the family did not engage. According to CFSA’s oversight responses, CFSA referred 159 families to Mary’s Center for home visiting services through the HFA and PAT models in FY 2021, but only 26 of these families were served. CFSA paid over $160,000 to Mary’s Center to provide PAT in 2021; we don’t know how many of the 26 families received PAT or completed the program, since data on PAT and HFA are combined. Several other programs included in the prevention plan served between 0 and 4 families, according to the oversight responses.

At the same time as CFSA was paying $160,000 to enroll 26 families in PAT, parents and children who wanted basic behavioral health services such as cognitive-behavioral therapy and medication management could not get them because of the crisis in the District’s mental health system that affects all residents who must rely on Medicaid to access services. I hope the Council addresses this crisis. But regardless, there is no gain in accessing federal money to serve no-one. CFSA might as well spend this money on services families need, whether or not they are approved for Title IV-E funding.

Another set of services that is sorely needed for CFSA families are services to address domestic violence.  According to CFSA’s 2021 Needs Assessment, of 123 child welfare professionals, the largest percentage (64%) ranked domestic violence (DV) as a prevalent risk factor among their clients. It is encouraging that the 2021 Quality Services Reviewers found three-quarters of the families with DV in in-home cases were receiving services. But some of these services were provided by the CFSA social worker themselves, presumably because services were not available. Moreover, the reviewers found that accessing the agency’s one DV specialist for consultation was a challenge for social workers and that case managers for only six of the 16 families reviewed were able to obtain such a consultation. I hope that the Committee will choose to add funding for at least one more DV specialist to make sure that caseworkers can benefit from a real expert to determine what their clients need and link them with services. The Needs Assessment also indicates that there is a general shortage of DV services in the District, which I hope the Council will address.

Early care and education is one service which has great potential to prevent maltreatment recurrence among families with in-home cases, but has been largely ignored by CFSA.  Guaranteeing a slot in a high-quality preschool like Educare in Ward 7 for every preschool-aged child involved in an in-home case might do more to prevent child abuse and neglect than any other single strategy. We know that high-quality early care and education prevents child abuse and neglect by multiple pathways: easing parental stress, providing family support and parenting education, increasing monitoring by mandatory reporters (at Educare children are checked for abuse daily), and simply reducing the amount of time a child is alone with caregivers and vulnerable to abuse. And indeed, multiple studies link early care and education with reductions in child maltreatment. I hope the Committee will work with CFSA, the Mayor and OSSE to ensure that all children with in-home cases receive high-quality early care and education.

Foster care is not yet a truly safe haven where youth in CFSA custody can heal from past trauma and address educational deficits.

When CFSA takes the drastic step of removing a child from their home, it has the obligation to make sure the child is placed together with siblings, in the home of either a known relative or family friend if possible, and with all the necessary supports, including mental health services, the best healthcare (including covid-19 vaccines) and educational and vocational supports. And whenever reunification is not possible, CFSA should stop at nothing to support permanency with real or fictive kin. But CFSA is falling short in these areas. Often agency leaders seem to lack the creativity, passion, and outside-the-box thinking that is necessary to make foster care the safe haven that CFSA advertises.

Foster care: CFSA continues to lack appropriate placements for older youth and those with significant behavioral health needs.

The lack of suitable placements for older youth and those with more serious behavioral health needs continues to be a crisis leading to placement disruptions, abscondence, and further deterioration in the mental health of our most vulnerable youth. This issue has been covered in depth the Children’s Law Center in their written testimony. In general, I agree with their findings and recommendations on building an adequate placement array but I would add that CFSA may have to consider adding one or more therapeutic group homes as well as increasing its supply of professional foster parents. There are simply not many potential foster parents who are dedicated and gifted enough to take on these very challenging young people.

Too few foster youth are receiving the behavioral health services they need.

Only 18 children were receiving therapy at CFSA in the first quarter of FY 2022, out of the 600+ children in foster care, according to CFSA’s oversight responses. That means CFSA’s four in-house therapists are being paid to provide therapy to only 18 children, so that each therapist is seeing fewer than five children a week. CFSA did not report on the number of children receiving therapy outside of the agency, but the low number receiving in-house therapy is concerning. Moreover, according to the 2021 Needs Assessment, the percentage of children recommended for therapy who received it went down from 69% in FY 2020 to 40% in the first half of FY 2021. I understand there is a citywide crisis in mental health services, with a catastrophic shortage of providers, not to mention quality, cultural competence and turnover, as the Children’s Law Center explains in its written testimony. I join the CLC in urging that this Committee work with the Committee on Health and the rest of the Council to fix the District’s behavioral health system. However, until this reform can take place, CFSA must not waste the resources it has allocated for behavioral health for its foster care youth.

I do appreciate, however, that CFSA has added two popular evidence-based therapeutic modalities – Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and Eye Movement Rapid Desensitization Therapy (EMDR) – through its contract with MBI Health. And I’m also happy that CFSA has included parents of children in foster care in its contract with MBI. However, I’m disappointed that MBI served only 16 of the 28 children and parents referred during FY 2020.

CFSA needs to find creative housing solutions to keep siblings together in foster care and to enable children to be placed with kin in foster care, guardianship or adoption.

According to the 2021 Needs Assessment, the Agency has only 50 licensed providers to care for three or more children in foster care. However, there are 194 foster children in a family of three or more siblings, which indicates the need for more foster parents with the capacity and willingness to take groups of three or more siblings.  CFSA should look for creative, out-of-the box ideas tor increasing placements for sibling groups. For example, CFSA could seek a public-private partnership to create a community of homes for foster parents who take in large sibling groups, in the mode of SOS Children’s Villages in Illinois and Florida. Perhaps this could be included as part of a development plan for a parcel owned by the city.

CFSA also needs to be more creative and proactive in finding housing for relatives who want to take in children who have been removed from their families, temporarily or permanently. CFSA’s oversight responses state what we already know: “For DC-based kin, the ongoing lack of affordable housing in the District continues to impact the families’ ability and/or willingness to provide licensed kinship care.” And it’s not just kinship care but also permanency. I recently heard of a teenager being pressured to accept guardianship with a foster parent with whom she is not bonded, even though a relative is willing and available but has been unable to find suitable housing. This is unacceptable. As it did with Wayne Place for youths leaving foster care, CFSA should work with the private sector to create housing for relatives who are providing a home for children in foster care – housing like Plaza West, a building for grandparents raising children that was created without CFSA involvement. It is not acceptable to force children into guardianship with unrelated foster parents because relatives cannot find housing.

CFSA is not making sufficient efforts to ensure educational success for foster youth.

Education outcomes for District foster youth are truly horrendous. Foster youth aged 15-21 for whom Grade Point Average (GPA) information was available had a median GPA of 1.98 in the last academic year, according to the oversight responses.  And only 68% of the foster youth who were eligible to graduate high school in June 2021 graduated or got a GED by that date. The blame for this abysmal school performance should not be placed entirely on CFSA: most of these children were probably struggling academically when they were removed from home. After all, many of these children came into foster care with a history of chronic absenteeism and school transfers. But if CFSA is going to remove children, it needs to take responsibility for improving their educational performance regardless of what it was before.

There are some things CFSA can do to improve educational performance among foster youth that have drawn little attention. For one, CFSA needs to make sure that foster parents are involved with the schools that the children in their custody attend. It is well-known that home-school communication is critical to school success. But when I was a social worker at a private agency working with Maryland foster parents of CFSA youth, many foster parents I worked with had never even been to the children’s schools, especially when these schools were in the District. They certainly did not attend Back to School Nights and parent-teacher conferences. Foster parents should be told that attendance at these events and regular communication with the schools is required. Secondly, CFSA needs to end the practice of pulling kids out of school for a whole day in order to attend one medical, dental, or court appointment. When I was working in the system, I found that family support workers usually made appointments during school hours because they were busy after school taking youths to family visits or therapy. For the same reason, they usually made these appointments in the middle of the day, ensuring the maximum loss of school time. Requiring foster parents to take children to these appointments might help solve this problem; it should clearly be their job anyway.  These two steps, requiring foster parent involvement and stopping system-caused school absenteeism, would be a good place to start in improving foster children’s school performance. Monitoring the performance of the tutoring provider is another; I’ve heard too much over the years about incompetent tutors.  

OYE Vocational specialists must be replaced.

The 2022 Needs Assessment states “CFSA has identified a gap for career preparation and available employment supports for youths.” That’s putting it mildly! In FY 2019 CFSA eliminated OYE’s Career Pathways unit and replaced it with the LifeSet program, which is not dedicated to career preparation or staffed with vocational specialists. There are no vocational training specialists at CFSA, only college specialists. As a result, there are NO youth currently enrolled in vocational training programs, according to the 2022 oversight responses. Around the country and here In the District there is a growing recognition that college is not for everyone, especially for those who are not likely to complete it. Many jobs requiring vocational training or apprenticeships provide a path into the middle class and a much better option than college for youths with poor academic skills. At this time of unprecedented labor shortages, it is a shame that the agency is not taking advantage of this opportunity to get our young people into good jobs. In the Needs Assessment CFSA indicates it is working with the Department of Employment Services to address this gap; the Committee should encourage the agency to address it with the urgency and intensity it deserves.  

CFSA has neglected its responsibility get foster youth vaccinated

As I have written, CFSA seems to be prioritizing parental consent, even when not required by law, over the health of foster children and containment of Covid-19 in the District of Columbia. Moreover, it appears that the agency been reluctant to educate older foster youth about the benefits of vaccines. They don’t even know how many foster children have been vaccinated. And they have not reported how many have gotten Covid-19. This is not acceptable.

Conclusion: CFSA appears to have lost interest in its primary mission of protecting abused and neglect children.

In conclusion, CFSA continues to struggle to carry out its primary mandates of investigating allegations of abuse and neglect and responding appropriately with in-home supervision and support and foster care when necessary. Yet, despite these struggles, CFSA is eager to add more responsibilities to its plate. As the agency explains in its oversight responses, it wants to “transform from a child welfare system to a child and family well-being system.” This sounds great on first hearing but does not bear closer scrutiny. Child and family well-being are dependent on all the health, education and human services agencies in the District of Columbia. CFSA is having enough trouble accessing the services of these agencies for its current clients. Why not concentrate on performing its core duties rather than expanding them? I must acknowledge that CFSA is being encouraged on this misguided path by the federal Children’s Bureau, which has included the agency in its partnership to do exactly what CFSA is proposing. But just because it is being promulgated by the feds does not make it a wise policy.

The expansion into primary prevention through creation of the Family Success Centers is a prime example of this desire to broaden CFSA’s mission when the agency struggles to perform its core responsibilities adequately. Prevention of child maltreatment is not in the original mandate of child welfare agencies, and for good reason. If anything, child maltreatment prevention is normally conceptualized as a public health function, which is why home visiting programs are generally provided by health departments.  More and more jurisdictions, including our neighbors in Maryland and specifically Baltimore, are investing in Family Connects, which provides a hospital visit from a nurse to every newborn to assess risk and refer to appropriate services. Family Connects has been shown by randomized controlled trials to reduce emergency room visits and hospital stays by 50% in the first year of life and CPS investigations by 44% in the first two years of life. The jurisdictions that have adopted Family Connects understand that neighborhood family support centers will never reach the most at-risk children, whose parents are too mentally ill, impaired by drugs, or overwhelmed to recognize that they need help.

I have some ideas about why CFSA (and the Children’s Bureau for that matter) appears to have lost interest in its core mandate of protecting children and providing a safe haven for those who must be removed from their homes. But until we figure out how to prevent child maltreatment, and even after we do, there will still be maltreated children who need to be protected. CFSA may have lost interest in these duties, but it is up to the Committee and the entire Council to remember our most vulnerable children and make sure the agency performs its core mandates.  

CFSA in the second quarter of FY 2021: rejecting more referrals, serving fewer kids

On Tuesday, Judge Thomas F. Hogan approved a settlement in the 32-year-old case now called LaShwan vs. Bowser–a suit which was filed in 1989 alleging major mismanagement in the District’s foster care system. Today, Mayor Bowser announced the end of court oversight over the Child and Family Services Agency (CFSA). Nevertheless, released by CFSA concerning its operations in the quarter ending March 31, 2021 shows there is still reasons for concern about whether CFSA is complying with its mandate of protecting DC children in a time of pandemic.

A major concern for child advocates has been the possibility that the COVID-19 pandemic would have a double effect–increasing abuse and neglect and also making it less likely to be discovered. As we have already reported, data from the District of Columbia Child and Family Services Agency (CFSA) indeed showed a drastic drop in calls to the CFSA hotline at the onset of the pandemic and associated closures. The most recent data, from the quarter ending March 31, 2021, show the beginning of a return to normal levels of hotline calls, with an uptick in calls from schools and child care providers. But just when calls are starting to return to normal, the agency seems to be focused on limiting these calls and screening out as many as possible. Moreover, a large decrease in the total child population served by CFSA (including those served both in their homes and in foster care) over the course of the pandemic is of concern as it is unlikely to reflect an equal reduction in the number of abused and neglected children.

CFSA’s Data Dashboard is updated 45 days after the end of each quarter. Child Welfare Monitor DC reported on FY 2021 Quarter One (October to December 2020) update in Testimony at the CFSA oversight hearing conducted by the DC Council’s Human Services Committee on February 25, 2021. We also reported on some preliminary data from Quarter two in a post entitled CFSA, DCPS and the Safety of children not in school buildings. This post integrates the full Dashboard data from Quarter Two (the quarter ending March 31, 2021) into an overview of trends since the onset of the pandemic.

Referrals

Figure One below shows the monthly number of calls to the CFSA hotline, known as “referrals,” from March 2020, when the pandemic emergency began, through March 2021, compared to the same dates of the previous year. (Note that March 2020 is included in both 13-month periods as the pandemic closures began in the first half of that month). DC’s sudden closure of schools for an extended spring break in March 2020 was followed by a chaotic virtual reopening, as schools and nonprofits strove to get children connected with computers and internet service. Not surprisingly, the first three months of the pandemic produced a drastic drop in hotline calls, investigations, and substantiated cases of maltreatment. Reports stayed at basically the same level from April to August, unlike a normal year, when reports drop after schools close.

Perhaps in part due to new guidance for educators produced by CFSA about how to spot abuse and neglect in a virtual environment, referrals rose In October 2020 and began to approach the previous year’s level in November and December, then dropping slightly in January in contrast to an uptick in January of 2021. But the number of referrals increased from 1,224 in January 2021 to 1,408 in February and took a staggering jump to 2,233 in March. We don’t know the extent to which this change was due to the fact that about 20 percent of the school system’s population returned to school early in February. Perhaps there was an onslaught of reports from teachers seeing students in person for the first time that school year. March was the first month where the pre-pandemic and pandemic curves crossed: the 2021 uptick contrasted with a downturn in March 2020 when pandemic closures began. In fact, there were many more calls (2,253) in March 2021 than in March 2019 (1858), when all schools were open.

Figure One

Source: Data from CFSA Dashboard and data provided by CFSA for January-March 2020.
Note: March 2020 data are shown twice in this table

The number of hotline calls per quarter is shown in Figure Two. This quarterly view shows how referrals plunged in the first full pandemic quarter (April-June 2020) and have increased in each quarter since then. The total number of referrals fell from 18,751 in the four quarters ending March 2020 to 13,172 in the four quarters ending March 31, 2021.

Figure Two

Source: CFSA Data Dashboard, https://cfsadashboard.dc.gov/page/hotline-calls-referral-type

While monthly data on reporting source are not available, annual data for FY 2020 shown in Figure Three suggest that a decline in reports from school personnel was a major factor behind the fall in referrals overall. In FY 2019, school and childcare personnel made 42.9 percent of all calls to the hotline, but this percentage went down to 35 percent in the pandemic year of 2020. But in FY 2021 to date the percentage of calls that come from teachers actually increased to 47.7 percent–which is higher than the pre-pandemic share of 42.9 percent in FY 2019. This change reflects the big increase in referrals from schools in March, after some children returned to school.

Figure Three

Source: CFSA Data Dashboard, https://cfsadashboard.dc.gov/node/1435406

Once a referral arrives, it can be accepted as an “information and referral” to be referred to another agency, accepted for investigation, linked to an existing open investigation, or screened out as not requiring any response. It is interesting to look at the numbers (Figure Four) and percentages (Figure Five) of referrals that are assigned to these four categories. Figure Four shows the large drop in the total number of referrals at the onset of the pandemic in April 2020, and the resultant rapid drop in the numbers of referrals that were screened out and accepted. But as the total number of referrals started increasing in September 2020, CFSA began screening out more of these referrals and maintaining a similar number of referrals accepted for investigation. The increase in the number of referrals in February (from 1224 to 1408) resulted in a decline in accepted referrals that month, and a near doubling of calls in March 2021 (from 1408 to 2253) resulted in a much smaller increase of accepted referrals from 307 to 379. Basically, the number of referrals accepted for investigation remained similar from September 2020 (345) to March 2021 (379) despite the big increase in referrals after November.

Figure Four

Source: CFSA Data Dashboard, https://cfsadashboard.dc.gov/page/hotline-calls-referral-type

Figure Five shows that with the rapid drop in referrals due to the pandemic, CFSA began accepting a higher percentage of those referrals starting from May to August 2020. But starting in September 2020, as CFSA began getting more calls, screeners began screening out a higher percentage and accepting a lower percentage or referrals. This trend accelerated in February and March of 2021 with the increase in calls to the hotline. This is particularly notable in March 2021, when the number of calls to the hotline jumped from to 2233 from 1408 the previous month. Confronted with this onslaught of new calls, CFSA increased the percentage screened out from 62.9 percent in January 2021 to 71.1 in February to 78.6 percent in March.

Figure Five

This decline in acceptance of referrals is not surprising because CFSA, citing an influx of referrals in the fourth quarter of previous years, made a conscious effort to reduce calls by telling educators that unnecessary calls would be screened out, as described in our previous post, CFSA, DCPS and the safety of children not in school buildings. CFSA’s increased tendency to screen out referrals is somewhat concerning, especially combined with the strong discouragement of referrals in their most recent guidance. Data provided by CFSA in response to a request from Councilmember Nadeau, shown in Figure Five, shows there is reason for concern. (Because the data provided for School Year 2020-2021 extended only through March 30, we requested data for the same period of the two previous years for comparability purposes, and these are the periods covered by the figures below). The number of educational neglect referrals fell from 3,368 in the first three quarters of the pre-pandemic school year of 2018-2019 to 2,378 during the same three quarters of School Year 2019-2020. This is rather confusing since Covid-19 did not shutter schools until March. In the current academic year through March 30, 2021, educational neglect referrals came roaring back. CFSA had already received 3,581 educational neglect referrals as of March 31–more than in the full pre-pandemic year. But the number of accepted educational neglect referrals declined from 956 in SY 2018-2019 to 443 in SY 2019-2020 to 258 in the current school year through March 31.

FIgure Five

Data Provided by CFSA

Figure Six shows the percentage of educational neglect referrals that were accepted, screened out and other. CFSA accepted 28.4 percent and screened out 71.6 percent of educational neglect referrals in the pre-pandemic academic year, 2018-2019. In the disrupted School Year (SY) 2019-2020, CFSA accepted 18.6 percent of educational neglect referrals and screened out 81.3%. And in the current academic year as of March 31, 2021, CFSA had accepted only 7.2 percent of educational neglect referrals and screened out 86.9 percent.

Figure Six

Source: Data Provided by CFSA

CFSA’s intent to keep a lid on educational neglect referrals is understandable. Administrators are presumably afraid of being overwhelmed by referrals of educational neglect. Moreover, there has been considerable pushback by activists in jurisdictions like New York City about reports of parents being investigated for educational neglect when they were not able to obtain computers or internet service. However, it is important to note that while categorized as “educational neglect,” referrals from schools about absences often serve a much broader purpose than ensuring that children are going to school. Chronic absence is often the first indicator that the child is not safe. It may even be an indicator that the child is missing. In the case of Relisha Rudd, who disappeared in 2014 and was never found, 18 days of absences did not trigger a report to CFSA because the absences were excused with the help of a bogus “doctor” who was probably Relisha’s abductor.

Investigations

An investigation can have several possible results. It can result in a finding of “inconclusive,” meaning the evidence is insufficient to prove maltreatment despite some indications it occurred; “unfounded,” which means “there was not sufficient evidence to conclude or suspect child maltreatment has occurred,” or “substantiated,” indicating that the evidence supports the allegation of maltreatment. (See the CFSA Data Dashboard for the full definitions of these terms as well as of “incomplete investigations.”) It takes up to 30 days, and sometimes more, to complete an investigation, so the trends tend to reflect the previous month’s referrals. Figure Seven shows that the trend in substantiated investigations is very similar to the trend in hotline calls, but with a time lag of about a month. There was a huge decline in substantiated investigations in May, June and July 2020 compared to 2019. Substantiated investigations almost caught up to normal levels in August and September, reflecting the normal decline in hotline during any normal summer, and then fell somewhat below the previous year during the fall. Just as hotline calls approached normal in November and December, so did substantiated investigations in December, January, and February. But in March 2021 there was a big decline in substantiated investigations relative to March 2020, a month that may have been already affected by the pandemic. This may reflect that in January and February, the number of calls again lagged behind the numbers for the previous year. It will be interesting to see what happens in April, after the bulge in new referrals in March.

Figure Seven

Source: CFSA Data Dashboard, https://cfsadashboard.dc.gov/page/investigations-abuse-and-neglect

Educational neglect data provided to the office of Councilmember Nadeau and displayed in Figure Eight show that the proportion of educational neglect referrals that were substantiated increased between School Year (SY) 2018-2019 and SY 2019-2020 (when the pandemic began) and again in SY 2020-2021 as of March 31, 2021. These data may be related to the fact that proportion of referrals that was accepted for investigation has dropped so greatly. Perhaps by screening out such a high proportion of referrals, CFSA is also screening out more allegations that are not worthy of substantiation. But one wonders if there is a cost to this increased discrimination. Perhaps they are also screening out more allegations that would have been substantiated.

Figure Eight

When an abuse or neglect allegation is substantiated, several things may happen, depending on the perceived level of risk to the child or children in the home. The agency may take no action, refer the family to a community-based collaborative, open an in-home case, or place the child or children in foster care. 

In-Home Services

When a CFSA investigator considers children in a family to be at high risk of maltreatment, but not meet “in imminent danger of serious harm,” the policy is to open an in-home case for monitoring and servies. In-home cases have become much more common than foster care placements as CFSA has been been laser-focused on keeping children in their homes. On March 31, 2021 there were only 648 children in foster care compared with 1259 children being served in their homes, or 34 percent and 66 percent of the 1907 children being served in total, as Table One shows.

Table One: Number of Children Served in foster care and in their Homes, March 31, 2021

In HomeIn Foster Care Total
Children Served1259 (66%) 648 (34%)1907 (100%)
Source: CFSA Data Dashboard, https://cfsadashboard.dc.gov/page/total-children-and-families-served-their-homes

Based on the early data from the CFSA dashboard discussed in an earlier post, there was a drastic drop in in-home case openings after CPS investigations with the onset of the pandemic. The total number of in-home cases opened in the pandemic months of March to June dropped from 533 in March-June 2019 to 267 in the same months of 2020–a decrease of 50 percent. However CFSA stopped publishing these data after the quarter ending June 2020 because the dashboard was not populating as expected, according to CFSA’s response to Child Welfare Monitor DC. So we do not know if that 50 percent decrease was correct nor how many cases have opened since that quarter. But we do know the number of children and families being served in their homes has dropped drastically since the start of the pandemic. The number of children served in their homes dropped by 12.6 percent from 1,441 to 1,259 between March 31, 2020 and the same date in 2021, as shown in Table Two below. This drop in children served in their homes is seriously concerning as in-home services are CFSA’s main way of monitoring the safety of children who are at risk of harm at home.

Table Two: Total Children Served in in their Homes, March 31, 2019, 2020, and 2021

DateMarch 31, 2019March 31, 2020March 31, 202
March 31, 2019136514411259
Source: CFSA Data Dashboard, cfsadashboard.dc.gov

Foster Care

Figure Nine examines foster care entries from March 2020 to March 2021, compared to the previous 13-month period. From March 2020, when the pandemic hit, through November 2020, foster care entries were always lower in the pandemic period, although the number of entries in July 2020 was almost identical to those in July 2019. But starting in December 2020 and continuing through March 2021, foster care entries each month were higher than that month in the previous year. The explanation for this trend is not obvious. Hotline calls and substantiated investigations did not eclipse prior-year levels until March 2021. But I pointed out in an earlier post the pandemic did not seem to be the main cause for changes in foster care entries earlier in the pandemic and this may continue to be the case.

Figure Nine

As shown in Figure Ten, there was a big decrease in foster care entries before the onset of the pandemic from the quarter ending March 31 2019 to the quarter ending September 30, 2019. After that quarter, foster care entries bounced up and down. Nevertheless there was some decline in foster care entries in the pandemic four quarters starting April 2020 compared to the previous four quarters. The number of entries in the four quarters before the pandemic (April 2019 to March 2020) was 269. In the four quarters beginning April 2020, the number of entries was 236. So the number of foster care entries during the pandemic period dropped by 33, or roughly 12.6 percent.

Figure Ten

Source: CFSA Data Dashboard, https://cfsadashboard.dc.gov/page/children-entering-or-re-entering-foster-care-during-fiscal-year

Foster Care Exits

There has been widespread concern around the country that COVID-19 would create delays in the achievement of permanency for foster youth. Family reunifications could be delayed by court closures, cancellation of in-person parent-child visits and increased difficulty facing parents needing to complete services in order to reunify with their children. Court delays could also hamper exits from foster care due to adoption and guardianship. And indeed fewer children did exit foster care every month from March to September 2020 than in the same months in 2019, as Figure Eleven shows. This pattern changed after September, with monthly exits sometimes higher and sometimes lower than the previous year, perhaps as the agency and service providers adjusted to pandemic conditions and delayed reunifications began to occur.

Figure Eleven

Source: CFSA Data Dashboard, https://cfsadashboard.dc.gov/page/total-number-exits

Looking at the total number of foster care exits over time, we can see that foster care exits began to increase after the first two pandemic quarters. But exits did decrease overall during the pandemic period. The total number of foster care exits was 324 during the pandemic year from April 2020 to March 2021 compared to 400 in the previous four quarters, as shown in Figure Twelve.

Figure Twelve

During the four quarters approximately corresponding to the pandemic, there were 236 entries into foster care and 324 exits. As a result of the surplus of exits over entries, the total number of children in foster care declined from 737 in March 2020 to 648 in March 2020, which was a decline of 12 percent–similar to the 13 percent that we found occurred between September 2019 and September 2020. This is a continuation of a multiyear decrease in foster care caseloads. However, we did note in earlier testimony that the percentage drop in the number of children in foster care was greater in FY 2020 than in any other year since FY 2014. So the decline in the foster care rolls seems to be accelerating.

As shown in Table Three, the total number of children served either in-home or in foster care dropped from 2,178 on March 31, 2019 to 1,907 on March 31, 2020–a whopping 12.4 percent, which inclded a drop of 12.6 percent in children with in-home cases and 12.4 percent in children in foster care. It is important to note that this is a decrease of over 12 percent in one year in the total number of children served by CFSA, rather than a shift in the percentage being served from foster care to in-home. Moreover, while the drop in foster cases can be seen as continuing an earlier trend, the drop in in-home cases cannot: the number of in-home cases dropped only slightly more than two percent in the previous year.

Table Three

DateIn-Home
No. (diff. from prev. year)		Foster Care
No. (diff. from prev. year)		Total
No. (difference from previous year)
March 31, 201913658672232
March 31, 20201441 (5.6%)737 (-15.0%)2178 (-2.4%)
March 31, 20211259 (-12.6%)648 (-12.1%)1907 (-12.4%)
Source: CFSA Data Dashboard, cfsadashboard.dc.gov

To look further back, we used figures from the Center for the Study of Social Policy that date back to 2010 showing the total number of children served in foster care and in home on the last day of the fiscal year. Figure Thirteen shows that this total number served was actually increasing between FY 2017 and FY 2019 as continuing declines in the foster care population were offset by increases in the in-home population.

Figure Thirteen

Source, Center for the Study of Social Policy, LaShawn A. v. Bowser, Progress Report for the Period April – December 2019, available at https://cssp.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/LaShawn-A-v.-Bowser-Report-for-the-Period-of-April-1-December-31-2019.pdf, and CFSA Data Dashboard (for 2020 data), at https://cfsadashboard.dc.gov/page/total-children-and-families-served-their-homes. Note: there is an inconsistency between CFSA and CSSP in home totals for 2019–1376 (CSSP) vs. .1348 (CFSA)

So the large (12.4 percent) drop in the number of children served by CFSA was not a continuation of an earlier trend. Foster care, but not in-home, caseloads were decreasing before the pandemic. It is extremely unlikely the number of abused and neglected children dropped by 12.4 percent from March 2020 to March 2021. It appears that this big decline results from a combination of a continuing decline in foster care placement and a reduction in in-home case openings due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It is concerning that the agency is serving a significantly decreased population compared to before the pandemic.

In sum, the newest CFSA Dashboard data show some encouraging signs of a movement toward normalcy. Referrals for March 2021 are higher than they were two years before and the number of investigations that are substantiated is approaching pre-pandemic levels as well. However, CFSA has displayed a concerning tendency to screen out a large percentage of the new referrals that are coming in. It is clear that CFSA responded to COVID-19 by screening out more education neglect referrals than ever before. And large decreases in the number of children receiving either in-home services or foster care as of March 31, 2021 compared to a year before raises the question of whether CFSA is performing its duty to protect abused and neglected children in the District. As the agency exits from court oversight in the LaShawn class action suit, it is important to ensure that some oversight continues. As we will argue in upcoming testimony, the Council should authorize an Ombudsperson for CFSA to make sure that somebody is monitoring agency operations in the interests of the District’s abused and neglected children.

Relisha Rudd: new podcast misses crucial questions about her disappearance

Image: WAMU.org

WAMU’s new podcast series, Through the Cracks, has just completed its first season, which focused on the disappearance of eight-year-old Relisha Rudd from the DC General family shelter in 2014. The podcast presents a compelling picture of how multiple generations of untreated trauma, combined with an inadequate social safety net, makes such tragedies possible. However, the podcast falls short in its effort to document the systemic failures leading to Relisha’s disappearance. Specifically, it draws an incomplete picture of the failure of DC’s Child and Family Services Agency (CFSA) to keep Relisha safe despite an open case on the family.

In Through the Cracks, host Jonquelyn Hill retells the story of Relisha Rudd’s 2014 disappearance, which many readers will remember well. By the time Relisha was declared missing, it had been 18 days since she was last seen at Payne Elementary School or the DC General shelter where her family resided, according to the podcast. After Relisha had accumulated 14 absences from school,[1] Payne’s social worker, LaBoné Workman, suspected anything was wrong with the excuse notes Relisha’s mother had been submitting, which were signed by a Doctor Tatum. When Workman arrived at the shelter to investigate, he quickly learned that no such Dr. Tatum existed. Instead there was a janitor with the same name. And not just an ordinary janitor. Investigators learned that Tatum had a criminal record that should have prevented his being hired to work at the shelter. Moreover, he had befriended many children and teens and given them gifts. Some parents had turned down the gifts and terminated the relationships, but not so Relisha’s mother, Shameka Young. The social worker’s visit touched off a citywide hunt for Relisha. On March 20, Kahlil Tatum’s wife was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head. On April 1, Kahlil Tatum was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Despite extensive searching by police and volunteers, Relisha Rudd has never been found.

Through the Cracks explains how multiple systems set up to protect Relisha failed. Her mother and stepfather themselves survived instability, abuse, and trauma, which left them with issues that impaired their ability to parent her. Tenant protections failed to prevent the eviction of this family from their home. An abandoned hospital that treated homeless families like prison inmates became the family’s home. A predator named Tatum was hired at this shelter despite his criminal record.

But when it comes to the agency tasked with responding to abuse and neglect in the District of Columbia, the podcast missed the mark. In the penultimate episode, Hill finally mentioned that Relisha’s family was known to CFSA when she disappeared. In fact, she reported that Relisha’s mother Shameka Young was reported three times to the child abuse hotline–in 2007, 2010, and 2013. Hill noted that in none of those cases did the agency elect to remove any of her children, and she devoted some time to discussing that fact. She spoke with a CFSA official, and with Judith Sandalow of the Children’s Law Center, about the policies surrounding the decision whether or not to remove a child. Based on these conversations, Hill finally concluded that “…. because Relisha wasn’t taken away, I can infer that social workers didn’t find enough evidence of abuse or neglect, or I can infer that they believed they could solve whatever the issues were by offering solutions like affordable child care or parenting classes. And if that’s the case, I’m not sure what kind of follow-up there would have been.”

However, the Washington Post‘s extensive coverage of the case has already eliminated the need for some inferences. The Post reported that the abuse or neglect complaints mentioned above were all “sustained” or “verified” by the agency and provided further details. In July 2007, social workers reported finding “inadequate food and supervision for Relisha and her newborn brother and that Relisha had an injury that could have been caused by abuse.” In April 2010, workers investigating a complaint that Shameka failed to bring her son for a follow-up medical appointment after surgery found a home full of cigarette butts and trash and small children being allowed to bathe themselves “without supervision.” In the investigation of the 2013 call, a social worker noted that one of the children had been thrown to the ground, cutting open his lip, and slapped in the face. Young was stated to be “verbally abusive on a regular basis and would leave [the children] alone often.” The Post also explained that these three were the only reports to be sustained by the agency, but others may have been received as well.

Hill and her team could also have consulted CFSA about their options when abuse or neglect is found to have occurred. When CFSA finds abuse or neglect, it can take one of three actions: remove the child or children if they are deemed in imminent danger, open a case for in-home services if the risks are high for future harm to the child, or refer the family to a community-based agency for help if the children are not deemed at high risk. In the case of the 2013 call about Relisha’s family, we know what they did. They opened a case for in-home services.

Several pieces of evidence attest to the existence of an open case on Relisha’s family. Unnamed “sources” told NBC News that “D.C. Child and Family Services Agency (CFSA) had an active case working when Relisha went missing, along with three prior cases dating back to 2007.” (A reporter can actually be heard reporting this story in the background of the podcast.) The same information was implied by CFSA Director Brenda Donald in a Letter to the Editor stating that “the fact that CFSA does not remove a child as a result of a substantiated abuse or neglect allegation does not mean we do not provide any services.” The City’s heavily redacted report on Relisha Rudd also makes clear to anyone who knows child welfare that her family had an open case.[2]

The fact that a case was opened means that Hill reached some faulty conclusions. First, as explained above, the opening of a case means that the investigator did find abuse or neglect, contrary to Hill’s suggesting that was only a possibility. Second and more important, if Hill was indeed “not sure what kind of follow-up there would have been,” she only had to ask CFSA or the Children’s Law Center. A case for in-home services means there would be follow-up, including twice-monthly visits to make sure the children were all right and to assess the family’s compliance with their case plan. If things were not going well, the social worker had the option of removing the children or seeking court involvement to hold the parents accountable for changing their ways within a given period of time to avoid removal of the children.

Perhaps Hill and her co-producers fell victim to the common misconception that the primary function of child welfare agencies is removing children and placing them in foster care. In fact, as of December 31, 2014, CFSA was serving 2,812 D.C. children, of whom 62 percent were being served in their homes and only 38 percent in foster care. “In-home services” were the main vehicle for serving abused and neglected children in the District of Columbia. (The in-home percentage was slightly higher as of December 2020–about 65 percent). Then, as now, families with in-home services had a case plan outlining the steps they had to take (like receiving therapy or drug treatment) before the case could be closed. The social worker assigned to their case would have been required to visit them at least twice per month to monitor compliance with the case plan and to check on the safety of the children. That social worker would have been required to see each child on each of these visits.

The timeline provided by Through the Cracks indicates that Relisha was last seen on March 1, 2014 at a Days Inn with Tatum on video. (Police told the Post that she had been with him since February 26.) The school social worker’s visit to the shelter on March 19 touched off the citywide search for Relisha. If they had realized the significance of the in-home case, the producers of Through the Cracks might have wondered if the CFSA social worker visited the family late in February or between March 1 and March 18. If so, they might have wanted to know whether the social worker simply accepted Shameka’s claim that Relisha was safe in another location without seeing her, and if the social worker truthfully indicated that fact in her notes. Moreover, the Washington Post reported that Payne Elementary called the CFSA hotline on March 13, after she accumulated ten unexcused absences. A “person familiar with the case” told the Post that CFSA did not treat this as a high-priority call because Relisha’s brothers continued to show up at school. But this report should have been forwarded to the family’s in-home social worker and at least triggered a call or visit to the family by that worker. If they had read the article, the podcast producers should have wondered about that too.

Of course, it is clear that CFSA would not have answered any of these questions. NBC and the Washington Post cited leaked information from unnamed sources for their reports. CFSA refused to comment on Relisha’s case because it would violate the family’s privacy–the same response they give when asked about any individual case. But at least the podcast staff could have done a bit of digging, searching for someone who has left the agency since 2014 and might be willing to talk. They might have asked their police sources if the social worker had been interviewed. In any case, they could have discussed CFSA’s confidentiality protections and whether they truly protect families or serve primarily to serve the agency. And they could have at least raised the issue of CFSA’s how in-home services are supposed to work to address abuse and neglect while keeping children safe at home, and what changes might need to me made to make them more effective.

Why is it important to know how Relisha was able to fall through the cracks of CFSA? It matters because CFSA was Relisha’s last safety net. After tenant protections, the shelter, and the school failed, the only system left to save Relisha was CFSA. And CFSA continues leaving children in homes where they have been abused or neglected under the assumption that they will be safe with monitoring and services. If a child could disappear from a family that had such a case, then there was obviously a need for change. And indeed, the District recognized this. In the heavily redacted report on Relisha’s case that was released by the District government, many of the findings and recommendations concern CFSA (even though that must often be inferred in the findings, where the agency’s name is often redacted[2]), suggesting the agency should have done a better job of recognizing the family’s problems, sharing information with other involved agencies, and perhaps intervening more intensively by seeking court involvement or removing the children. Available information incidentally casts doubt on whether the recommended changes were actually made or retained, but that is beyond the scope of this post.

One hopes the failure to investigate CFSA’s failure in Relisha’s case was not a reflection of ideology on the part of Hill or the Through the Cracks team in general. In the podcast, Hill states that “Black mothers are so often gleefully blamed when things go wrong for their children.” It may not be an accident that she never specifies the details of the three founded reports against Shameka Young. Hill and her team did not mention the details of these findings, such as Shameka cursing her kids, splitting her son’s lip, and letting small children bathe alone. Were these details excluded so as not to make Shameka look bad? Did did the podcast team fear that saying CFSA should have assumed a more interventionist posture would go against the current child welfare climate and the growing movement urging child welfare agencies to stop policing black families, regardless of whether their children need protection?

The unifying theme of Through the Cracks‘ first season is the question of whether Relisha’s disappearance could have been prevented. The producers point out the irony of the District’s statement that the abuse could not have been prevented, while recommending a long list of changes to the policies and practices of all the agencies that interacted with the family. They rightly question the logic of exonerating DC agencies while telling them to change their practices. It is unfortunate that they missed the opportunity to explore the ways in the city’s child welfare agency failed to fulfill its duty to protect Relisha.

[1] According to the Washington Post, on March 13, Relisha had 10 absences and the school called CFSA. On March 19, Relisha had (by deduction) 14 absences and the school social worker went to the shelter.

[2] On page 4, “child welfare” was obviously redacted from Finding #1 and on page 5, “CFSA” is obviously whited out in Finding #2.

CFSA’s Oversight Responses: What can we learn?

Screen Shot 2020-02-26 at 10.08.48 AMEvery year, the DC Council’s Committee on Human Services, currently chaired by Councilwoman Brianne Nadeau, submits a series of detailed oversight questions to the Child and Family Services Agency (CFSA). These questions focus on many aspects of the agency’s operations and policy.  The lengthy responses, available on the DC Council website, are some of the most interesting and detailed information that the agency releases during the year. This post attempts to highlight some of the more revealing  responses, as well as providing some comparisons with the previous year’s oversight responses.

Child Protective Services

Hotline Calls: The number of calls to CFSA’s child abuse and neglect hotline increased from 26,602 in FY 2018 to 28,561 in FY 2019. The highest number of calls (594) concerned educational neglect (usually student absences from school), followed by physical abuse (428), substance abuse (407), inadequate supervision (343), and domestic violence (248). The agency screened out 11,768 of these calls, or 41%, compared to 35% of the slightly smaller number of calls in FY 2018.

Assessments and Investigations: CFSA eliminated its Family Assessment track as of April 1, 2019, so that all screened-in Hotline calls, other than some infant positive toxicology reports , receive an investigation.  The total number of investigations increased from 4193 to 4788, which reflects the elimination of Family Assessment. The total number of investigations substantiated increased slightly from 1127 to 1204–which was a smaller percentage of investigations than in the previous year. The top factors leading to substantiation in 2018 and 2019 were substance abuse (in almost 25 percent of the cases), educational neglect (21 percent), physical abuse (19 percent), inadequate supervision (19 percent), domestic violence (15 percent) and caregiver incapacity due to incarceration., hospitalization, or physical or mental incapacity (11 percent). Substance abuse was the top factor in both years, but the order of the next five factors differed.

Educational Neglect Allegations: Because of the increase in allegations of educational neglect, CFSA is piloting a new approach to these allegations in collaboration with DCPS. A specialized unit has been created and is being piloted at two schools in order to provide early intervention services.

Sex Trafficking: Sex trafficking has been a hot topic in child welfare for the past decade or so after it became known that children in foster care are at particular risk. The Committee asked numerous detailed questions about sex trafficking and CFSA’s response.  Unfortunately it requested only the top ten factors accounting for substantiation of allegations to the hotline–and sex trafficking was not one of the top ten.  In order to know the number of substantiated sex trafficking allegations, the committee could ask for the numbers of substantiated allegations for all categories, not just the top ten. Without knowing how many sex trafficking cases were substantiated, we do know that the number of cases must have been less than the 49 substantiated for general neglect, the lowest number listed out of the top ten factors accounting for substantiation.

Worker Caseloads: The current plan to exit the LaShawn court case  requires that 90 percent of investigators and social workers will have caseloads less than or equal to 12′ no individual investigator shall have a caseload greater than 15 cases, reflecting generally accepted caseload standards. In response to the Committee’s question about the average caseload per worker, CFSA provided the average caseload for each individual investigator rather than the entire investigative workforce.  For a better picture, the Committee could request that the agency provide the average caseload for all investigators. It is encouraging to note, however, that the highest average caseload for any investigator in FY 2019 was 10.21 although there were many “instances” when a worker had a caseload of 13-15 and one “instance” when a worker had a caseload of 16 or more. The concept of “instance” is hard to interpret as it could reflect one minute or a year. The Committee could instead request the median number of days with a higher caseload for all investigators.

Newborns with Positive Toxicology: CFSA changed its policy in 2017 to require that all positive toxicology reports for newborns be screened in to make contact with the family and determine whether an investigation needs to be conducted. The number of hotline calls received regarding newborn positive toxicology in FY 2019 was 233, almost exactly the same number as the previous year but the response appears to have been more extensive. Of these 233 calls, 87 percent resulted in an in-home wellness visit by nursing staff (compared to 56 percent in FY 2019), 69 percent resulted in an investigation (compared to 30 percent in FY 2019) and 12 (five percent) resulted in removal of a child (data not provided for FY 2019).

Child Removals: CFSA removed a total of 360 children from their homes in FY 2018 and 378 in FY 2019. The most common reasons for removal were neglect (unspecified, 84 percent), physical abuse (13 percent), parental drug abuse (nine percent), and “caregiver ill/unable to cope” (7.5 percent).

In-Home Services

Cases Opened: In F’Y 2019, 618 cases were assigned to the In-Home Administration. 1 Of these cases, 69 percent resulted from a finding of abuse, 26 percent from neglect, five percent from sexual abuse, and less than one percent from allegations of sex trafficking (three cases) and child fatality (three cases). A total of 662 in-home cases closed in 2019, slightly more than the number that opened.

Case Closures: The the reasons for closure of in-home cases that CFSA provided are confusing, and Chairperson Nadeau asked about these during the hearing. Half of the cases closed because “child welfare services not needed,” a category whose meaning is unclear. Another 126 closed because “services/service plan not completed.” Still another 89 closed because of “completion of treatment plan.” It is hard to understand how that differs from “service plan completed.”  Four cases closed for “client’s failure to co-operate.” Since in-home cases by definition involve high risk to children, this is somewhat disconcerting. The Council might want to ask what happened to the families in these cases. Were the children removed, or simply left in their risky situations without monitoring? Was a risk assessment done before case closure? CFSA and the Court monitor have agreed that court involvement (through community papering) should be considered for noncooperative parents with in-home cases.  It is also significant that 38 of the families moved out of the District. A reasonable conjecture would be that many moved to Maryland. There have been child fatality cases around the country involving families with in-home cases moving between states (or even lying that they were moving out of state) and avoiding further supervision by CPS. The Council could ask CFSA whether they verify such moves and inform the receiving state of these families.

Services to In-home families: Families with in-home cases develop a case plan with their social workers that outlines the services they need to complete in order to close their cases. Among the services most frequently included are mental health services, drug treatment, parenting skills training, and domestic violence interventions. As the Citizen Review Panel pointed out in a recent report, many many parents with in-home cases who need mental health services in order to comply with their case plans, as well as many of their children, struggle to obtain timely quality services in light of long waiting times and high provider turnover. In response to the committee’s question about what the agency is doing to ensure these families get the services they need, CFSA stated that “In-Home families access mental health services through DBH” and that the two agencies work collaboratively to address families’ needs.  It is clear that CFSA understands the deficiencies in DBH services because it has opened an in-house mental health unit to serve children in foster care and plans to expand these services to their families. That leaves the larger group of parents and children with in-home cases out in the cold. Unfortunately, the Family First Act, which was supposed to fund services to prevent children entering foster care, does not allow federal Title IV-E funds to pay for services which can be funded by Medicaid, ruling out most mental health programs in the District for Title IV-E funding..

Family First Act: Under the Family First Act, CFSA can now spend federal Title IV-E funds, formerly confined to foster care, for in-home services that have been included in the federal Title IV-E Prevention Services Clearinghouse. As discussed in the oversight hearing, CFSA expects only $80,000 in revenue from Family First because there was only one program in the clearinghouse at the time CFSA developed its Family First Plan–Parents as Teachers–that CFSA chose to provide and that was not already sufficiently funded using other sources. However, Motivational Interviewing and Healthy Families America have been added to the clearinghouse since CFSA submitted its plan, and CFSA stated that it hopes to draw down federal funding for these programs.

Foster Care

Placement instability: Frequent placement changes continued to be a problem in 2019. About 51 percent of children had one placement episode in FY 2019; another 27 percent experienced two episodes, 16 percent experienced three to four episodes and seven percent had five or more. The percentages were fairly similar in FY 2018, with slightly more experiencing one or more than five episodes. As described by witnesses at the oversight hearing, it is often the children with behavioral problems and disabilities who bounce from placement to placement because foster parents are unable to handle their issues.

Overnight stays at CFSA and emergency placements: As discussed at the oversight hearing, more children stayed overnight at the agency in FY 2019 than in FY 2018.  This number increased from 13 youths in FY 2018 to 31 in FY 2019. According to CFSA’s responses, the factors behind these overnight stays included placement disruptions occurring late at night or early in the morning, lack of psychiatric options such as sub-acute psychiatric programs and partial hospitalization programs, youth brought back to the agency by foster parents, and youths refusing to leave the building for an offered placement. The number of youths staying in an emergency, short-term, or otherwise temporary placement while awaiting a long-term placement also increased from 79 in FY 2019 to 100 in 2020.

Placement Capacity: Placement capacity has increased greatly from 758 beds as of September 30, 2018  to 941 at the time of the oversight responses–presumably January 2020. Not surprisingly, given the decline in the foster care population, the number of vacant beds increased from 66 in January 2019 to 327 in January 2020. This huge increase in vacancies at a time when children are staying overnight in the CFSA building as described below illustrates that the problem in the District is not the number of foster homes but the lack of placements for harder-to-place children.

Expanding Placement Capacity: In order to expand the placement array, CFSA in FY 2019 added two Stabilization Observation Assessment Respite (“SOAR”) professional foster homes with a total of four beds, to serve high-needs children; entered into a contract with Children’s Choice to provide intensive foster care to 36 children, secured six additional congregate care beds for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder, and added six additional behavioral/therapeutic beds in a new group home run by the Children’s Guild. The agency expressed the hopes that these new resources will reduce stays in offices and emergency placements and also hopes to increase placements with kin.

Kinship Care;  Twenty-eight percent of children in out-of-home care were  in kinship homes on the last day of FY 2019  (up from 26% in FY 2018), as compared to a national average of 32 percent. To explain this difference, CFSA cited the stricter licensing requirements in Maryland, where many relatives live, as well as the lack of affordable housing in the District. More use of  kinship diversion to place children with relatives outside of the foster care system could account for a jurisdiction’s lower-than-average percentage of foster parents who are kin. However, neither CFSA nor most other jurisdictions collect the data that would allow comparison of the frequency of the practice.

Assistance to relative caregivers outside foster care: In FY 2019, 521 families with 822 children were served by the Grandparent Caregiver program, up from 513 families with 798 children in FY 2018. The average benefit received in FY 2019 was $1,145 per month. The Close Relative Caregiver program was established in FY 2019 and currently serves 12 caregivers and 22 children, who are expected to receive an average of $553 per child per month. CFSA started its Kinship Navigator Program in the last quarter of FY 2019 and includes a helpline, enrichment events for families, flex funds for one-time or short-term needs, and educational groups, which are slated to begin later in FY 2020.

Group Homes: The number of group home beds decreased from 71 as of January 15, 2019 to 67 as of January 15, 2020 despite CFSA’s opening two new group homes for children with special needs. There were 17 vacant group home beds, as compared to 14 the previous year. In an email responding to my questions, CFSA’s Intergovernmental Affairs Liaison Yolanda McKinley explained that the decrease stemmed from the decline in foster care caseloads and the continuing move away from congregate care as a placement option for most youths.

Mental Health Services: The new in-house mental health unit appears to have reduced the time it takes for children newly placed in foster care to access needed mental health services. Children receiving services from the Department of Behavioral Health (DBH) waited an average of 75 days between mental health screening at CFSA and intake and the actual receipt of services. Children served by the in-house mental health unit waited an average of 35 days. Seventy-three children were served by the unit in FY 2019. Unfortunately, CFSA answered the question about length of service, type of service, and transition to an external provider with a table that provides a separate row for each of the 73 children receiving services. The Committee might want to request aggregate data about length of service to get a better overall picture. For those children who completed services, the average length of service ranged from seven to 399 days.  Six children, all of whom received at least 259 days of services at CFSA, transitioned to another provider after completing service at CFSA.

Psychiatric hospitalization: A total of 118 children in foster care had an episode of psychiatric hospitalization in FY 2019, compared to 122 in 201,  according to Director Brenda Donald, who corrected in her oral testimony an error in the oversight answers for FY 2018.

Educational Performance: The abysmal educational performance of DC youths in foster care is no surprise and not different from that other jurisdictions around the country. Only five percent of third through eighth graders and two percent of those in grades nine through twelve met or exceeded expectations for their grade in mathematics. In reading, the percentage meeting or exceeding expectations was 12 percent  for grades 3-8 and five percent for grades 9-12. In its oversight responses, CFSA rightly points out that there are many factors behind this abysmal school performance, most of which predated children’s placement in foster care. These include cognitive or other disabilities, periods of missed schooling, mental health concerns, and trauma histories. But while all foster youth should receive intensive supports to help reduce the deficits they bring into foster care, my experience as a foster care social worker and mentor has revealed that the system often instead imposes new disadvantages. These can include foster parents who take little interest in the child’s education (especially Maryland foster parents when the child attends a DC school), long commutes to keep children in their original school (which may result in a child missing a whole day of school for a doctor’s appointment), and system-induced absences for court hearings, meetings, and medical appointments scheduled during school hours for the convenience of staff who must take them to these appointments.

The number of students receiving tutoring went down from 285 in 2018 to 209 in 2019. CFSA’s Yolanda McKinley explained in her email that the agency conducted a comprehensive review of service utilization and terminated tutoring services for students with a “poor history of utilization,” those who had completed their educational goals, and those who had exited foster care.

The number of youths receiving mentoring services declined from 172 to 118 during Fiscal Year 2019. In her email, McKinley explained that CFSA has changed its referral guidelines so that youth who are nearing reunification with their families are not referred to contracted mentoring services through BEST Kids. They also removed from the mentorship rolls young people who were not actually participating in mentoring services. According to McKinley’s email, “[T]he lower FY19 number accurately represents youth who are actively engaged in mentoring services.”

School stability transportation: CFSA paid a total of $1,310,966 , or $99 per youth per day, to transport 199 foster youth living in Maryland to their original schools in the District. In addition to the high costs, these transportation arrangements may require children to spend two to three hours on the road daily and deprive them of the opportunity to participate in extracurricular activities. There is no debate that it would be  better to place children in foster homes that are near their schools. CFSA is already investing heavily in foster parent recruitment in the District but perhaps future efforts could be targeted around the schools and neighborhoods that send the largest number of children to foster care. Trying to recruit families and teachers from schools and churches close to these schools might be a good approach. In view of the large numerical surplus of foster homes, CFSA might want to consider closing some Maryland foster homes in order to increase the ratio of DC to Maryland homes.

High School Performance and Graduation: CFSA had access to grade point average information for only 84 of the 186 youths enrolled in high school during the 2018-2019 school year. These GPA’s ranged from a low of 0 to a high of 4.42, with a median of 1.61. The high school graduation rate for the last academic year was 73 percent, which was calculated by dividing the number of youth who graduated from the 12th grade or earned a GED by the end of the school year by the number of foster youth who were in the 12th grade or a GED program 2 at the beginning of the year.

College: Thirty-six young people were enrolled at a four-year college in Fall 2019, and 11 were enrolled in a two-year college. These figures are similar to those from the previous year. Eight young people received a Bachelor’s degree in the 2018-2019 school year and no youths achieved an associate’s degree in that year. CFSA reports that 19 youths dropped out of college in FY 2019.

Older Youth Issues

Program changes: YV LifeSet is a new grant-funded program that has replaced Career Pathways. There were 49 youths involved in YVLifeset as of January 2020, compared to 113 in Career Pathways in 2019. Eighteen youths were enrolled in vocational programs in FY 2019, compared to 35 in 2018. It is possible that the reduction is due to the end of the Career Pathways program.

Independent Living: In January 2019, there were 10 beds in Independent Living Programs (ILP’s) in CFSA’s system, of which 5 were vacant. By January 2020, all of these beds had been eliminated. In its oversight responses, CFSA explained that it no longer offers ILP’s due to “underutilization.” Last year’s oversight responses clarify the meaning of this term. In its 2018 responses, CFSA described its conclusion that youths placed in ILP’s who have not demonstrated their maturity have struggled after aging out. In 2018, CFSA revised its policy by requiring youths to demonstrated readiness by having a high school diploma, being engaged in employment, education or training and having a savings account in order to move into an ILP. In tandem with this policy change, CFSA reduced the number of ILP slots from 20 to 10 by eliminating one of the two ILP programs. CFSA reported that only three young people moved into an ILP after the new policy and there were only five youths total in the one ILP at the end of the fiscal year.  This appears to be the “underutilization” that resulted in closure of the remaining program in FY 2019.

Aging Out: CFSA answered that 45 out of 49 youths had stable housing at the time they aged out of foster care in FY 2019. However, a witness from the Children’s Law Center stated at the oversight hearing that “the agency improperly defines transitional housing, college dorms, staying with friends, and DDS placements as ‘stable living arrangements.”’ If those arrangements are considered unstable, 32 out of the 49 youths who aged out were in unstable housing.

Permanency

The number of adoptions finalized remained nearly the same–98 in FY 2019 and 101 in FY 2019. There was an average of 14 months between filing of the adoption petition and finalization of the adoption, up from 10 months in FY 2018. The number of guardianships finalized declined from 64 to 40 with an average of 19 months between placement in a home and finalization of the guardianship, down from 39 months in FY 2018. The Committee did not ask similar questions about reunification.

Fatal Incidents

CFSA reported that eight children and youth died while in CFSA care in FY 2019. Four children were in foster care, three had open In-Home Cases and one had an open Family assessment or investigation at the time of death. I view these numbers as very distressing and I hope that the Council requests further information about them. It could be that some of these children were medically fragile and that their deaths were not due to maltreatment of any type. Such basic information as the cause of death is necessary for the Committee to make sense of this information.

Conclusion: CFSA’s answers to the oversight questions of the DC Council’s Human Services Committee provide a trove of useful information. A continued reduction in the number of children in foster care, an increase in stays in agency offices and emergency placement, a large surplus of foster care beds along with continued need for more placements for hard-to-place youth, expansion of the placement array in response to this problem, successful implementation of a mental health unit to serve foster youth, the elimination of independent living programs, and high number of fatalities among system-involved children are among the  results that stand out.  Child Welfare Monitor DC was able to obtain corrections for some responses from CFSA that did not appear to make sense. Nevertheless, some responses were unclear or delivered in a format that is difficult to use. The Council might want to seek clarification in these cases and modify its questions next year in order to obtain information that is more useful in its effort to oversee and support CFSA’s important work.

  1. There are no comparable data for FY 2018 because of a change in the data collected. ↩
  2. This number was incorrectly reported as 32 instead of 26 in the oversight responses, according to the clarifying email by CFSA. ↩