Connecticut DCF to Fix Foster Care System

“DCF has mounted a major push away from putting young people, particularly those ages 12 an under, in residential treatment centers — from small group homes with as few as five kids to larger campus facilities. In other words, while there always will be a need for live-in care, centers that depend on filling dormitory wards with troubled kids and employing shifts of workers are a dying business in this state.

The Klingberg Family Center in New Britain, one of the oldest and most respected in Connecticut, “saw the handwriting on the wall,” its vice president said Thursday after the center cut 42 of its 68 beds to focus on in-home therapy, outpatient services and family support. Some of the 400 workers will lose their jobs, but the center says it will try to shift as many of the workers as possible into the community programs.

So young people who normally would have been sent to residential care will now need some other place to go.

One option is foster care, but the system has had problems there. It takes too long for new foster parents to get into training classes, for example, and DCF has had trouble recruiting new families. Also, too many families leave the system after a year, feeling disrespected or that they weren’t part of the team, or frustrated that they couldn’t learn more about their foster child’s background and medical history, according to foster care advocate Jean Fiorito.

So all that is going to have to change fast. A new law allowing foster families greater access to social, medical, behavioral and school records will help. So will the team of consultants DCF is paying to train staff to deal more meaningfully with foster families.

Meanwhile, DCF isn’t sending young people to out-of state-facilities anymore unless Katz approves the transfer. She said she won’t do that unless there’s a very good reason, such as a child so medically complex that there’s no place for him here. Her crackdown on that score has stopped an out-of-state exodus — but it also keeps more children in the state and more pressure on the foster care system, said DCF’s Ken Mysogland, head of foster and adoptive care.

The recent Glastonbury case involving child molestation charges also has forced the agency to change the way it sizes up the fitness of foster and adoptive families. Felony sexual abuse charges were filed against two men who adopted nine DCF boys over 11 years. Though the boys in the Glastonbury case were adopted, DCF subsidies and support services followed the children because they came out of foster care.

So while the agency needs to line up many more of these families and match them up with young people who have increasingly complex problems, it has to do so more carefully and selectively than it ever has before.

But DCF has to make up ground before it can turn a shortage of foster care families into a surplus. Between 2008 and last year, the department actually had a net loss of such families.

So without out the old fall-back of residential centers, group homes, and shelters, the pin is out of the grenade.

“A lot of synergy needs to be created for this to work. There’s pressure and urgency across the system,” says Mysogland.

“What we know is that kids do better in families or with families, but the science has to catch up with the art,” says Fiorito, executive director of the Connecticut Association of Foster and Adoptive Parents.

Her organization was hired by DCF to survey foster families that have left the system. Katz’s deputy, Janice Gruendel, used those survey results — some of them alarming in how deeply families felt they were forced to go it alone — in a report on what DCF has to do to get a lot better.

Slow Progress

There’s been movement. Over the past two years, the percentage of DCF children placed with relatives has gone up from 14 percent to 22 percent, with much of the increase coming in the past six months.  

But the national average is 25 percent, and some states are above 40 percent.

“We’ve been significantly below national averages, but we’re making strides in closing the gap,” said Josh Howroyd, the DCF’s liaison with the legislature.

The latest quarterly report by the federal court monitor tracking DCF noted that “the increased use of relative and kinship care is evident in all six [DCF] regions, as is a focus on placing children in family-type settings.”

The agency has been under a federal-court decree since a landmark child-neglect lawsuit in 1989, known as the Juan. F. case, forced reforms and performance benchmarks.

The monitor’s report, covering July 1 to Sept. 30, 2011, says that a “cultural change” is bringing improvements across the agency, but that there is still a lack of resources to support a system relying less and less on residential treatment centers. These include a need for more foster families and in-home programs, as well as more mental-health, domestic-violence and substance-abuse treatment services.

“The goal of placing children in family and community settings is hampered by the unavailability of services and existing service gaps,” reported the monitor, former DCF executive Raymond Mancuso.

He said that while there are fewer children in residential centers, those who are there are still spending too much time waiting for release. Mancuso said the “lack of sufficient foster/adoptive resources remains the most significant barrier to timely discharge” from live-in facilities.

Some of the children on “overstay” status are part of sibling groups, and Mancuso said finding families willing to take multiple siblings can be difficult.

Fiorito, who was a social worker in Vermont for 20 years, said DCF has to give the public more information about foster and adoptive opportunities. And the agency has to be a lot quicker about getting new parents into training classes, and more diligent in making sure that the families have the support they need, she said.

“The biggest complaint during the exit interviews was that the department didn’t always respond to the questions and needs of the families on a daily basis,” Fiorito said. “Sometimes there is a fear on the part of the social workers to tell a family everything they can about a child’s background, for fear the family won’t want the child. But these families want to step up, they want the chance. And knowing something up front is better than something surfacing later.”

A system that favors foster and adoptive care over residential centers also makes economic sense.

The department in 2010 paid out $118.2 million in subsidies to foster and adoptive families. The figure rose to $125.6 million last year.

The per diem rate ranges from about $25 to $46, depending on the age of the children and their medical needs. In contrast, the daily rate at an in-state residential center for a child with behavioral-health needs is $265, and for a child committed as a juvenile delinquent, it’s $395.

Looking Hard At Families

The more the department relies on foster and adoptive care, the more careful it has to be about granting over-capacity waivers — the permission for a family to exceed the number of foster or prospective adoptive children for which it is licensed.

The Glastonbury case made that clear. The two men who adopted the nine children received two waivers, one in 2006 and another 2008, that enabled two additional sibling groups to come into the home. The number of children the couple adopted and the number of waivers they received made the Glastonbury situation unusual.

Out of the more than 6,300 foster and adoptive homes, the department granted 17 over-capacity waivers in 2010. Last year, 22 were granted. The majority in both years went to relatives caring for children in their extended families.

When Katz came on, she delegated the job of approving waivers to division chief Mysogland, a former DCF regional director and a man who grew up with eight adopted brothers and sisters.

After the Glastonbury case, Katz took back the final say on waiver approvals, with Mysogland as her chief consultant.

“Now we really need to look hard at the strength of the family. Those numbers [above the licensed capacity] can be the tipping point that overwhelms a family,” Mysogland said.

“We need,” he added, “to make sure we’re bringing in the type of family that understands the needs of our children.””

DCF Forcing Itself To Fix Foster Care System
[The Hartford Courant 1/7/12 by Josh Kovner]

REFORM Puzzle Pieces

They are recognizing that they need accountability for granting over-capacity waivers, for lagging in percent of children given family placements, for honesty in foster children files and for postplacement services.

They are finally recognizing that the full truth needs to be told to the foster families about the children’s history.

They admit that access and assistance in receiving postplacement care is one of the most important keys to success.