Foster Care Reform: Family Dependency Treatment Court

If you are a long-time reader of this blog, you would notice that when I normally use “Florida” and “court” in the same sentence, it usually has a censored smiley, too. But, this is a positive story about a court in Florida. Hillsborough county is dealing with drug addiction in a different way than neighboring courts and having successful reunification.

“USF researcher Moore recently conducted a study of parents in Hillsborough County’s treatment court, comparing them to similarly troubled parents in Pinellas County, which doesn’t have the program. It took longer for parents to be reunited with their children in Hillsborough — about 495 days to Pinellas’ 395 — but other outcomes were much better.

In Hillsborough’s treatment court, 53 percent of children were returned to their parents, compared with 42 percent in Pinellas.

Only 2 percent of children studied were back in the child welfare system within a year in Hillsborough compared with 12 percent in Pinellas.

Moore says keeping the children in foster care until parents have time to complete a drug program is more beneficial to families and less expensive for the state in the long run.

A recent study shows the use of treatment court results in a net savings of roughly $5,500 per case over traditional dependency courts. Most of that difference is the cost of keeping children in foster care longer, which occurs when parents don’t receive adequate treatment for addictions.

For Espinosa, who sees the human misery in his treatment courtroom twice a week, the question comes back to the best life for children. “When children are abused, how do you measure the importance of breaking that cycle?” he asks. “It’s a pretty clear cost to society if you don’t do it. Rachel Villalobos has four intelligent children who needed their mother.”

Read the rest of the story at Court brings abused, addicted mother back from brink [Tampa Bay Online 4/15/12 by Donna Koehn]

REFORM Puzzle Piece

Another example of how offering intense resources upfront can help families in the long-run AND even save the taxpayer some money. It is hard to justify this type of program when the state gets federal $ for every child adopted out of foster care, but it is the right thing to do.