The power of wishful thinking revisited: the improbable growth of Healthy Families America

I have written before about the power of wishful thinking and how it causes people to disregard research and real-life results. In that earlier commentary, I discussed the successful promotion of a practice called race-blind removals based on data from an article by a scholar who now denies knowledge of their provenance, and which have been shown to be inaccurate. A program called Healthy Families America (HFA), which currently serves over 70,000 families per year according to its website, offers another example of the power of wishful thinking. This program has become the centerpiece of the nation’s oldest and largest charity dedicated to the prevention of child abuse, even though the program has failed to demonstrate its utility in preventing child maltreatment. This organization, now called Prevent Child Abuse America, launched HFA based on weak evidence that a program in Hawaii called Healthy Start Program (HSP) could prevent child maltreatment. The first experimental study of HSP found no impact on child maltreatment but did nothing to derail the launch of HFA. Studies of HFA programs around the country have found little evidence of reductions in child maltreatment, but the program has continued to grow and now serves more families than any other home visiting program. The story of HFA is a lesson in the power of wishful thinking and the failure of evidence (or lack thereof) to counteract it.

As told in a helpful history of home visiting, all modern programs can trace their origins to Henry Kempe, whose book, The Battered Child, brought about the recognition of child maltreatment as a national problem. To address child abuse, Kempe called for universal prevention through a network of home health visitors. Inspired by Kempe, modern home visiting began with Hawaii’s implementation of the Healthy Start Project (HSP) in 1975. As described in the 1999 evaluation by Duggan and colleagues, HSP was developed by the Hawaii Family Stress Center (HFSC) on the island of Oahu. It had two components: early identification (at the birthing hospital) of families with newborns at risk of child abuse and neglect and home visiting by trained paraprofessionals for those families classified as at-risk who agreed to participate. This initial program was never evaluated, but anecdotal information suggested it was successful in promoting effective parenting, and six similar programs were established on neighboring islands.

As described by Duggan et al., the Hawaii Legislature authorized a three-year pilot program focusing on one neighborhood in Oahu, which began in 1985. There was no control group in the pilot study, and the researchers used CPS reports and changes in family stress in participating families to measure program effectiveness. During the three-year pilot, there were few reports of physical abuse, neglect or imminent harm for program participants. Because evaluations of other home visiting programs had found much higher rates of reported maltreatment in comparison group families, these results were viewed as evidence that the program had a positive impact. According to Duggan and her co-authors, “The pilot study results might have been given too much weight, given the lack of a control group and the short period of follow-up for most families.” Nevertheless, the results of this unpublished study were enough evidence for the Legislature to expand HSP throughout Hawaii starting in 1989.

Home visiting in general was gathering steam in the 1980s and early 1990’s. In 1990, the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) issued a report promoting home visitation as a “promising early intervention strategy for at-risk families.” In its summary of research evidence, GAO focused mostly on health and developmental benefits for children, rather than maltreatment prevention. In 1991, the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect issued a report recommending a pilot of universal voluntary neonatal home visitation, stating that the efficacy of home visiting as a preventive measure was “already well-established.” The Board cited the results of a federally-funded demonstration begun 17 years earlier as well as the the nurse home visitation program started by David Olds in 1977. But HSP was not mentioned.

Despite the lack of a rigorous evaluation, the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse (NCPCA, now called Prevent Child Abuse America) the nation’s “oldest and largest organization committed to preventing child abuse and neglect before it happens,” had become interested in using HSP as the nucleus of a national home visiting program. But first, NCPCA conducted a one-year randomized trial of HSP, as described by Duggan et al. The trial suffered from severe methodological limitations, including “less than ideal followup,” differential dropout rates in the program and control groups, the failure to blind interviewers to experimental or control status, and reliance on program staff rather than researchers to measure some outcomes. Nevertheless, the trial concluded that HSP reduced child maltreatment, and this apparently gave NCPCA the assurance it needed to invest in the model.

NCPCA launched Healthy Families America in 1992, with financial support from Ronald MacDonald House Charities, arranging visits to 22 states by Hawaii Family Stress Center Staff. The “theory of change,” or theoretical basis for the program, as quoted by Duggan et al, started with the targeting to all newborns and their parents, which allows for diversified service options determined by individual need. Also part of the theory was a commitment to change at the individual and community levels. Rather than impose a single service model, HFA contained a set of critical elements, which included the prenatal initiation of services and the assessment of all new parents. A network was launched to bring together researchers doing experimental and quasi-experimental studies of HFA programs.

Unlike NCPCA, The Hawaii Department of Health recognized the limitations of both the pilot study and the NCPCA study and initiated a more rigorous evaluation of HSP in 1994. This was a randomized controlled trial, with at-risk families identified at the hospital and randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups. In 1999 the results of the Evaluation of Hawaii’s Healthy Start Program were released as part of an issue of the Future of Children journal containing evaluations of six different home visiting models. No overall positive program impact emerged after two years of service in terms of child maltreatment (according to maternal reports and child protective services reports). Early HFA evaluation results, published in the same issue, also failed to find effects on abuse and neglect in three randomized trials, which included the HSP evaluation discussed above and another Hawaii HSP study.

David Olds had had begun testing his Nurse Home Visiting Program in 1977 and already had long-term results on the program in Elmira, NY, as well as shorter-term results for a replication in Memphis, Tenn. That program, now known as Nurse Family Partnership, was very different from HFA. It was restricted to first-time teenage mothers and the home visitors were nurses rather than paraprofessionals. The nurses followed detailed protocols for each visit. The researchers found that among low-income unmarried women (but not other participants), the program reduced the rate of childhood injuries and ingestions of hazardous substances that could be associated with child abuse or neglect. Follow-up of the Elmira group when the children were 15 found that the nurse-visited mothers were significantly less likely to have at least one substantiated report of maltreatment. These results are particularly impressive because they overrode a tendency for nurse-visited families to be reported for maltreatment by their nurse visitors. The researchers concluded that the use of nurses, rather than paraprofessionals, was key to the success of the program. In their analysis of all six studies published in the volume, Deanna Gomby et al. concluded that while the HFA and HSP evaluations showed some change in maternal attitudes and self-reported behaviors related to abuse and neglect, only the Nurse Home Visiting Program showed impacts on abuse and neglect other than from self-reports.

Gomby and her co-authors also concluded that the results of the six home visiting evaluations were discouraging for those who had high hopes for home visiting for solving an array of problems. All the programs “struggled to enroll, engage and retain families.” Program benefits generally accrued to only a subset of enrolled families and were often quite modest. The authors explained the disappointing results by concluding that human behavior is hard to change, particularly when problems are community-wide. They recommended that “any new expansion of home visiting programs be reassessed in light of the findings presented in this journal issue” and stated that home visiting services are “best funded as part of a broad set of services for families and children.”

But the home visiting juggernaut was already in motion nationwide. And NCPCA had already made HFA its centerpiece program. Home visiting grew, and HFA grew with it. In 2010, Congress created the Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program (MIECHV), which was re-authorized in 2018 with funding of $400 million per year through FY 2022. According to the HFA website, HFA is the model most frequently implemented with MIECHV dollars. Home visiting programs can also receive funding through Medicaid, Title IVB and IVE of the Social Security Act, and many other funding sources.

The infusion of funding for HFA research by NCPCA initiative set in motion a multitude of research projects (both randomized trials and less rigorous studies) that continues to result in publications. Nevertheless, HFA research has yet to find solid evidence that these programs have an impact on child maltreatment: The California Evidence-Based Clearinghouse for Child Welfare (CEBC), the pre-eminent child welfare program clearinghouse, reviewed 19 research reports on HFA. It gave the program a rating of “4” on a scale of 1 to 5 for prevention of child abuse and neglect, meaning the evidence fails to demonstrate that the HFA has an effect on abuse and neglect. HFA did receive a rating of 1 for “child well-being,” based on its impacts on outcomes like physical health, child development, and school readiness. In contrast, Nurse Family Partnership was rated as “1,” “well-supported by the research evidence, for the prevention of child abuse and neglect, as well as for child well-being.

Despite the lack of evidence of its impact on maltreatment, HFA received a rating of “Well Supported” from the new clearinghouse established by the Family First Prevention Services Act (“Family First”) to determine whether a program can receive federal funding under Title IV-E of the Social Security Act. To get such a rating, the program must show improved outcomes based on at least two randomized trials or rigorous quasi-experimental studies. But these outcomes could be any sort of “important child and parent outcome,” (not just child abuse or neglect) and there is no standard for how to measure each outcome. Based on its review of all HFA studies that met their criteria for inclusion, the Clearinghouse found 23 favorable effects, 212 findings of no effect, and four unfavorable effects across 16 outcomes. This included five favorable effects on child safety based on parents’ self-reports of maltreatment, with no favorable effects on other measures of child safety. Self-report is generally frowned upon as a measure of child maltreatment, for obvious reasons. A positive impact of HFA might reflect that participants in HFA were more eager than control group members to provide the “right answer” to questions about maltreatment.

The “well-supported” rating from the Title IV-E clearinghouse opened up a new source of funding for HFA. Passage of Family First as Title VII of the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018, allowed states to spend Title IV-E funds on programs on services to families with a child welfare in-home case. To take advantage of this new demand, HFA announced in September 2018 that families referred by the child welfare system were now able to enroll until 24 months of age. To serve these families, HFA introduced special child welfare protocols, with limited evidence that that the program was effective for parents who had already abused or neglected their children.* The program had already departed from its initial mission of screening all families with newborns in a geographic area. Even without the child welfare protocols, each program can choose its own admission criteria and there is no universal screening; potential participants are generally referred by health or child welfare agencies, who often can choose between several home visiting programs when referring a client.

Another part of HFA’s original theory of change was a “dual commitment to change at the individual and community levels.” As described by Daro and Harding in their 1999 evaluation of HSA, this meant that HFA “must move beyond direct efforts to help families and begin to serve as a catalyst for reshaping existing child welfare and health care efforts and improving coordination among other prevention and family support initiatives.” This vision has clearly gone by the wayside as HFA has become one choice in a menu of home visiting programs offered by local jurisdictions. Far from trying to enhance and coordinate available community offerings, HFA is busy trying to maximize its share of the pie through its public relations effort, exemplified by the self-promotional statements on its website.

It is disappointing that Prevent Child Abuse America (“Prevent Child Abuse,” formerly NCPCA), an organization that defines its mission as child abuse prevention, decided to fund HFA before it was proven to prevent child maltreatment and without apparently considering other approaches also being tested at the time. And it is concerning that the organization continued with this commitment even after the disappointing evaluations of 1999 might have led them to diversify their investment beyond HFA or even beyond home visiting or to focus more on advocacy rather than services. And finally, that Prevent Child Abuse continues to use charitable contributions made for the prevention of child abuse and neglect to fund a program that has not been proven after 40 years to accomplish this goal, raises serious ethical questions. Twenty-two of the 40 staff listed on the Prevent Child Abuse website have positions with Healthy Families America. Perhaps the charity has backed itself into a corner; it would be difficult to escape this commitment without serious repercussions.

Some federal administrators do not seem to be much more interested in evaluation results than Prevent Child Abuse. The legislation authorizing MCHIEV required a randomized controlled trial (RCT), which may provide useful information on the relative merits of these programs in addressing different outcomes. But strangely, HHS indicated in a response to a critique from the Straight Talk on Evidence Blog that it is not interested in a “horse race” between the models but rather is interested in assessing home visiting in general. This odd statement is an indicator of the kind of thinking that allowed Prevent Child Abuse to invest in HFA for 40 years despite the lack of evidence that it does “Prevent Child Abuse.”

The story of Healthy Families America is not an unusual one. My discussion of the Homebuilders program could also be called “the power of wishful thinking.” Such stories are all too frequent. They show us how wishful thinking can drive leaders to disregard research, especially after they have made a premature decision to commit to one program or course of action.

*One study of Healthy Families New York, published in 2018, looked at a subgroup of 104 mothers who already had a substantiated CPS report, and found a decrease in abuse and neglect among the mothers who were in the experimental group. However, the sample was small and was not planned in advance, so the authors recommend further testing home visiting programs as prevention of repeat maltreatment for child welfare-involved mothers.

What can happen when “Family First” goes too far: a Wisconsin story

On October 1, 2021, the Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA) took effect for all states that had not yet implemented it. But many jurisdictions had already been realigning their systems in line with the family preservation emphasis of FFPSA before that time – many with great fervor. An article about one Wisconsin county piqued our curiosity, and further investigation suggests the state may be encouraging a disproportionate emphasis on keeping families together at the expense of child safety. Wisconsin is certainly not unique; the focus on keeping families together at almost all costs has been increasingly prevalent in state and county child welfare systems since long before the passage of FFPSA in 2018.

On August 13, the local Gazette published an article reporting that that foster parents and others in Rock County Wisconsin were asking for an investigation into worker turnover and leadership in the county’s child welfare system. Rock County is a county in southern Wisconsin with a population of 163,354 in 2018 and home of the city of Beloit. The article reported that at a recent meeting of the county board, local foster parents complained about employee turnover and a change in philosophy in the County’s child welfare system since the passage of the Family First Act by Congress in 2018. The foster parents alleged that changes in the child welfare system “have led to a mass exodus of longtime county CPS staff.” According to the speakers, the exodus in turn has resulted in a curtailing of investigations and delays in finding services and permanent homes for foster children.

County reports obtained by the Gazette showed that turnover among Child Protective Services (CPS) investigative and ongoing support workers increased from 57 percent in 2016 to 88 percent since that time. The Gazette found that 56 workers had left these jobs since 2016, leaving only three workers still in place who had been there in 2016. In open letters to the board, CPS workers expressed fear that they would “be fired, demoted or marginalized if they voice[d] ideas that run contrary to the county’s shifts in the foster system.” (The county’s Human Services chief later challenged the information about turnover, telling the Gazette that it had been 70 percent since 2016.)

The Gazette also reported dramatic growth in the backlog of completed investigations. According to data from the state Department of Children and Families (DCF) dashboard, the county had a 94% rate of timely completion of initial child screenings (child maltreatment investigations) in 2016, placing it close to the top of all counties in Wisconsin. But by this year as of September 28, 2021, Rock County had completed only 44.7 percent of initial screenings on time, placing it near the bottom of all counties.

Current trends in child welfare suggest that the change in philosophy to which parents and workers were referring was the increased focus on family preservation incorporated in the Family First Act, which had already been taking hold in many states before they actually implemented it. Information available on the website of Wisconsin’s Department of Children and Families supports that assumption. According to a page titled Child Welfare Strategic Transformation in Wisconsin, [s]ince 2018, Wisconsin has been progressively working toward transitioning the child welfare system to become more in-home, family-focused, and collaborative.” The website also indicates that DCF had “partnered with” a company called Root Inc. (a “change management consulting firm”) “to understand how Wisconsin counties were progressing toward achieving the 4 strategic priorities listed above.” A slide presentation from DCF and Root Inc. indicates that the purpose of the partnership is to “dramatically increase the number of children/families served in home.”

In the first phase of the partnership, according to the slides, Root’s ethnographic researchers studied 13 counties (including Rock County) through interviews, focus groups, and observations and came up with “a set of 17 behaviors that differentiated counties along a continuum of change and transformation.” In choosing the counties for the study, the researchers identified counties that they characterized as “on the way” or “advanced” based on the decline in the rate of their foster care populations, the ratio of entries to exits, and the percentage of calls that lead to removals of children from their families. (They left out counties on the bottom of the continuum of change). The authors of the slides did not provide the classification for each county, but Rock County’s inclusion means it was classified as advanced or at least “on the way.”

The first set of findings about “advanced” counties refers to “Mindsets and Decision-Making.” In these counties, one slide indicates that the “culture prioritizes and reinforces the importance of keeping families in home.” There are six bullets under that heading, which are displayed below. Two are of particular interest. “Decisions to remove are met with critical questioning and even pushback. And in “observation, individuals apologize to their peers when pushing for a [court] petition [for removal of a child].”

Source: Wisconsin Department of Children and Families. Child Welfare Transformation. Available from https://dcf.wisconsin.gov/files/press/2021/wi-dcf-root-insights-03-12-county-detailed.pdf

This language raises some serious concerns. Obviously it is best to keep children at home when it is possible to do it safely. But some children cannot be kept safe at home. And to say a worker should receive pushback, or even apologize, for trying to save a child’s life or prevent injury seems excessive, to say the least

In terms of worker-family relationship, the slides state that advanced counties are “[n]on-judgmental towards actions and optimistic in the belief that families can change.” Specific behaviors cited include that “[w]orkers discuss severe forms of maltreatment with a desire to understand the root causes without passing judgment.” Workers in advanced counties are also said to “easily identify strengths of a family.” In fact, teams in advanced counties “hold each other accountable for negative or pessimistic views of families and work hard to avoid anything that could be perceived as disparaging of a given family.” Moreover, “even with complex cases,” workers in advanced counties “approach a new case with optimism, staying open-minded about the severity of safety concerns and/or the possibility of being able to address challenges.”

It may be good practice for social workers to be optimistic and see family strengths, but unrealistic optimism coupled with blindness to danger signals can leave children vulnerable to severe harm. In Los Angeles County. a belief that social workers should focus exclusively on a family’s strengths led a CPS worker and upper management to disregard glaring evidence that four-year-old Noah Cuatro was being targeted for abuse by his parents. The fact that workers are expected to be “open-minded” even in the face of “severe” safety concerns raises some alarm in a system established to protect children. And asking teams to hold each other accountable to take a rosy view of all the families they serve may be problematic.

To be fair to the authors of the slides, they included in the traits of workers in “advanced” counties some attributes that are important for good child protective services workers, such as knowing “how to probe when kids are being coached,” so they clearly understand that families and children cannot always be believed when they deny that maltreatment has taken place. “Regularly assessing danger threats” is another trait the authors ascribe to workers in “advanced” counties. But the presentation makes a questionable distinction, stating that workers in advanced counties are “laser-focused on identifying and isolating safety threats (as opposed to risk) and desire to expand their skills with respect to isolating and controlling safety.” (The italics are ours). Child welfare systems around the country draw this distinction between safety and risk, defining “safety” as the absence of imminent danger while “risk is defined as danger to the child in some unspecified future. But this distinction is hard to draw and can have the paradoxical result of a child being found “safe” but “at high risk of future harm.”

The idea that child welfare systems may have begun overemphasizing family preservation in the years leading up to and following passage of the Family First Act is not a new one for this blog. We have reported that this reluctance to find fault with parents, remove their children, or terminate parental rights allowed the deaths of children known to child welfare systems around the country, including Zymere Perkins in New York, Adrian Jones and Evan Brewer in Kansas, Gabriel Fernandez in California, and Jordan Belliveau in Florida. Reports have found an extreme reluctance to remove children in Illinois, after the deaths of several children while their families were under supervision by the state. In a case mentioned earlier, the Los Angeles Times‘ found that a core practice model focusing exclusively on family strengths and disregarding obvious red flags resulted in the failure of the agency to implement a court order that would have saved the life of four-year-old Noah Cuatro. We have also discussed how this extreme reluctance to remove a child is related to the current “racial reckoning” and consequent desire to reduce racial disparity in foster care placement.

Returning to Rock County, it may not be surprising that workers who came to child welfare to protect children would leave when confronted with a demand to apologize for requesting to remove a child. On the other hand, all the other counties in Wisconsin are being subjected to the same pressures. Whether the family preservation emphasis is the only cause of Rock County’s loss of veteran staff, or whether there are other factors behind it, Child Welfare Monitor cannot say. However, we can suggest that wholesale departure of a child welfare workforce may be one additional consequence of a system realignment that went too far.

Congress must take steps to ensure availability of therapeutic residential care

Around the country, there is a lack of appropriate placements for the most traumatized and hard-to-place foster youth–a shortage that has reached crisis proportions in many states, including Texas, Washington, and Illinois. These children are spending days, weeks or even months in offices and hotels or languishing in inpatient psychiatric units where there is no semblance of normal life. These young people have been damaged by our negligence and now deteriorate daily without the treatment they need and deserve. Unfortunately, recent federal legislation is likely to worsen the crisis by withdrawing federal funding for children placed in some of the best therapeutic residential settings.

An unforeseen consequence of the much-heralded Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA) of 2018 may exacerbate the shortage of therapeutic placements in many states. FFPSA had twin goals: to shift resources from foster care to family preservation, and within foster care, to shift resources from congregate care settings (anything other than a foster home) to foster homes. However, the framers of the act did recognize that some children need more intensive care than a foster home can provide, and for them FFPSA defined a new category of placement called a Quality Residential Treatment Program (QRTP). QRTP’s must have a trauma-informed treatment model, involve families, be accredited by an approved organization, and provide at least six months of aftercare. A child can be placed in a QRTP only if a qualified professional determines that the child’s needs cannot be met in a foster home, and the placement must be approved by a judge. Other than specialized settings for teen parents, children who have been sex-trafficked, and supervised independent living settings for foster youths aged 18 and older, QRTP’s are the only non-family placements that can be funded under FFPSA.

Unfortunately, in creating QRTP’s, Congress unintentionally created a conflict with a provision of the Medicaid law that may sharply limit the number of children who can benefit from this new category of therapeutic placement. The problem is that federal Title IV-E foster care funding pays for room and board, but not the costs of medical, dental, behavioral and mental health care for children in foster care. States generally extend Medicaid to all foster youths, allowing the program to cover those costs. But the “IMD exclusion,” a provision included in the original 1965 legislation creating the Medicaid program, prohibits federal Medicaid dollars to be used to pay for any care or services to anyone under 65 who is a patient in an “institution for mental diseases” except for in-patient psychiatric services provided to children under 21. An Institution for Mental Diseases (IMD), as defined by Section 1905(i) of the Social Security Act, is a “hospital, nursing facility, or other institution of more than 16 beds, that is primarily engaged in providing diagnosis, treatment, or care of persons with mental diseases including medical attention, nursing care, and related services.” (For more on the IMD exclusion, see Fact Sheets by the Legal Action Center and the Training and Advocacy Support Center.)

This “IMD exclusion” reflects the sentiment at the time of Medicaid’s creation in 1965 against the large public institutions where the mentally ill were warehoused at the time. The provision was a driving force behind the transformation of public mental health care from an inpatient to an outpatient model, often known as “deinstitutionalization.” But now, many high-quality therapeutic residential programs have more than 16 beds distributed between separate units or cottages on one campus, and in many states these are exactly the facilities that qualify to be licensed as QRTP’s. Without a legislative fix, QRTP’s of over 16 beds may be considered IMD’s and children placed there will not be eligible for federal Medicaid funding for any of their care, including medical, dental, behavioral and mental health services, whether delivered inside or outside the residential program. States will then have to pay the entire costs of all care for foster children placed in these settings.

Decisions as to whether a facility is an IMD are made on a facility by facility basis based on federal law, regulations and guidance. But the definitions of IMD’s and QRTP’s, as well as the guidance provided by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in the State Medicaid Manual section 4390 on how to determine if a facility is an IMD, suggests that QRTP’s are likely to be considered IMD’s. When California wrote to CMS arguing that its “short-term residential treatment programs” (which they were hoping to designate as QRTP’s) should not be considered IMD’s, CMS responded that it was “unable to provide California the blanket assurance requested that STRTPs are not IMDs.” While a state Medicaid agency can elect not to consider a facility to be an IMD, CMS can essentially overrule these decisions by requiring a state to review the status of these facilities based on its guidance.

Even before the current crisis over QRTP’s, the IMD exclusion had resulted in the loss of Medicaid coverage for foster children living in therapeutic residential facilities in at least two states. For years, Minnesota was using residential programs that would have met the definition of QRTP’s as an alternative to, or a step down from psychiatric hospitalization. But, as reported by the Star-Tribune, after a review ordered by federal officials, 11 treatment centers with a total of 580 beds lost about $4.5 million in federal Medicaid funding–a cost that had to be picked up by counties. Utah went through an “IMD sweep” in 2010, which resulted in its replacing most of its residential treatment centers serving children in foster care with facilities having less than 16 beds.

The Association of Children’s Residential and Community Services (ACRC) has been contacting states to find out how they are dealing with the IMD/QRTP issue. They found that states fall into several groups:

Some states are not concerned about the IMD problem because they are not planning to implement QRTP’s. Some already rely on facilities that are exempt from the IMD exclusion (Psychiatric Residential Treatment Facilities or facilities with fewer than 16 beds) or will use state funds to pay for children placed in residential care.
Some states are proceeding on the hope that their QRTP’s will not be declared to be IMD’s even if they have more than 16 beds. This includes six states where all of the programs that have been approved as QRTP’s have more than 16 beds.
Some states are discussing whether to limit the size of their QRTP’s but have not yet decided whether to do so. In many of these states, the majority of the potential QRTP’s have more than 16 beds–or the majority of the QRTP beds are in facilities with more than 16 beds.
Some states are trying workarounds to avoid the IMD designation. Two states have decided to separately license cottages that are on the same campus, which enables them to use the bed count for the individual cottage rather than the entire facility, thus potentially avoiding an IMD designation. Another state has classified all residential facilities as serving youth at risk of sex trafficking, one of the allowable uses of congregate care. Whether these workarounds will be accepted by CMS or the Administration for Children and Families (in the case of the latter state) remains to be seen.

Colorado has decided to limit its QRTP’s to 16 beds or less, and a FAQ document from the Colorado Department of Human Services provides an interesting case study in how one state has tried to address the QRTP issue. Hoping to find a way to license its existing residential facilities as QRTP’s, Colorado’s Medicaid and child welfare agencies worked together to analyze the federal IMD criteria and its application to QRTP’s. These agencies “explored every possible argument that would allow Colorado to confidently move forward with QRTPs without risking an IMD designation.” But ultimately they agreed that the only way to avoid the designation was to reimburse only QRTP’s with 16 beds or less. Currently almost all of Colorado’s residential facilities that could have been designated as QRTP’s have more than 16 beds. Instead of creating smaller programs, the state is planning to serve fewer children in residential facilities. The question is whether they will have appropriate options for those children who have been determined to need therapeutic residential care. There is considerable concern that they will not.

Without legislation exempting QRTP’s from the IMD exclusion, states will be faced with the choice of paying the full costs of care for children in therapeutic residential care or scrapping their current facilities and starting from scratch. Vulnerable children may end up in greater numbers in hotels, offices, and hospital beds or bouncing between foster homes that are not equipped to care for them.

According to ACRC, there is no evidence that residential programs with 16 beds or less produce better outcomes than programs with a higher capacity. As a matter of fact, there are reasons to think that a larger campus would be able to offer more services (like therapeutic riding or other specialized therapeutic modalities) that would not be possible to offer on a smaller campus. It is also possible that the IMD/QRTP conflict might result in more foster youth receiving a higher level of care through Psychiatric Residential Treatment Facilities (PRTF’s). These are facilities that deliver an inpatient level of care outside a hospital and they are not considered IMD’s. They are exempted from the IMD exclusion and Medicaid can pay all costs for these facilities, including room and board. So FFPSA might have the perverse result of having more children in a more restrictive, less homelike setting.

On July 23, ACRC sent a letter to the House and Senate leadership asking them to pass legislation by October 1, 2021, exempting Qualified Residential Treatment Programs (QRTPs) from the Institution for Mental Diseases (IMD) exclusion. In the letter, ACRC argues that that “without the exemption for QRTPs, thousands of children in foster care who are vulnerable will be pushed into more restrictive placements, non-therapeutic shelters, unlicensed or unstable settings, or they will bounce from placement to placement without addressing their true needs – which is opposite the intent of the FFPSA.” So far, about 540 organizations have signed onto the letter, and more signatures are coming in daily.

Many groups concerned with the mentally ill have long been advocating for an end to the IMD exclusion altogether, arguing that it is behind the nationwide shortage of psychiatric beds. Rep. Grace Napolitano, Democrat from California, has introduced a bill (H.R. 2611) to eliminate it. CMS and ACF during the Trump Administration also proposed eliminating the exclusion specifically for QRTP’s in its budget for 2021. There are strong arguments for eliminating this exclusion, but the urgency of the QRTP problem requires immediate action, rather than waiting to change a policy that has lasted 50 years.

Unfortunately, there is opposition to lifting the IMD restriction among powerful and wealthy advocates whose ideology appears to blind them to the reality facing our most vulnerable children. William Bell of Casey Family Programs, the nation’s most influential child welfare funder and a leading force behind the Family First Act, urged Congress in testimony to “stand firm” in resisting modifications to the IMD rule. In the real world, where staff work face-to-face with wounded children, the picture looks very different.

The IMD exclusion for QRTP’s threatens to eliminate one of the most promising avenues to address the desperate shortage of therapeutic residential placements for foster youth that already exists in many states. On the state level, legislators must open their hearts and their minds to the pleas of those who are on the front lines caring for our most troubled children. They must increase funding for the therapeutic residential programs the most vulnerable foster youth so desperately need. Congress must help by exempting QRTP’s from the IMD exclusion, enabling the federal government to ensure access to therapeutic residential care–and ensure that the legislation they authored and passed can actually be implemented by states.

Family First Act: no funding for important drug treatment and mental health services

Family First Act Passage of the Family First Prevention Services Act as part of the Bipartisan Budget Act early in 2018 was hailed as a game changer in child welfare. For the first time, according to the celebrants, Title IV-E funds could be used to pay for services to keep families intact rather than place children in foster care. But the more we learn about Family First and how it is being implemented, the less cause for celebration there seems to be. In my last post, I discussed the problems caused by the decision to make Title IV-E the payer of last resort for foster care prevention services. In this post, I discuss the surprising omission of important mental health and drug treatment programs from the list of programs that have been approved or proposed to be paid for under Family First. The paucity of useful programs in the clearinghouse certainly will detract from the utility of Family First in preventing foster care placements.

In expanding the use of federal IV-matching funds beyond foster care through Family First, Congress wanted “to provide enhanced support to children and families and prevent foster care placements through the provisions of mental health and substance abuse prevention and treatment services, in-home parent skill-based programs, and kinship navigator services.” Family First allowed federal Title IV-E matching funds to be used for programs in these categories that meet criteria for being “evidence-based” as defined by the Act.

The categories of mental health, drug treatment and parenting programs make sense in light of what we know about why children come into foster care. Anyone who has worked in foster care knows that parental drug abuse and mental illness are two of the major circumstances behind child removals, while a third major factor, domestic violence, was inexplicably left out of the Act. The inclusion of parenting programs makes sense because abuse in particular is often related to parents’ lack of knowledge about child development and appropriate disciplinary practices.

Family First established a Title IV-E Prevention Services Clearinghouse, which is being developed under contract by Abt Associates, to review and approve programs for reimbursement using Title IV-E foster care prevention funds. So far, the clearinghouse has approved nine programs for inclusion and is in the process of considering 21 more. A careful look at the programs that are included, under review, and not on either list raises some questions.

Take substance abuse treatment, the most common single factor behind child removals according to federal AFCARS data, which indicates that drug abuse was a factor in 36% of the child removals that took place in Fiscal Year 2018. The opioid crisis, often cited as a reason to pass Family First, seems to have peaked in most areas but is still wreaking havoc in many states and their foster care systems. Medication-assisted treatment is often called the “gold standard” for treating opioid addiction and is vastly underutilized. But strangely that Abt Associates chose to include in the clearinghouse only Methadone Maintenance Therapy and not the newer buprenorphine treatment, which is not even on the list of programs to be considered for clearinghouse listing. According to the National Institute on Drug abuse, “Methadone and buprenorphine are equally effective at reducing opioid use.” And there are reasons to prefer the newer medication. As the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (SAMHSA) states, unlike methadone treatment, “which must be performed in a highly structured clinic, buprenorphine is the first medication to treat opioid dependency that is permitted to be prescribed or dispensed in physician offices, significantly increasing treatment access.”

Let’s turn to mental health. It is clear that mental illness is the major factor behind many removals into foster care. AFCARS data indicate that 14% of child removals are associated with a “caregiver’s inability to cope,” but that percentage sounds small to this former social worker. It is likely that many more removals where other factors (like child abuse and substance abuse) are cited are also related to parental mental illness. Parents suffering from untreated depression, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and other mental health disorders often have difficulty providing appropriate care to their children. So it is not surprising that mental health was included as a category of services to prevent foster care under Family First.

What is surprising is the nature of the services that have been chosen so far. The clearinghouse has approved four mental health programs: Functional Family Therapy, Multisystemic Therapy, Parent Child Interaction Therapy, and Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavior Therapy. All of these programs are geared at addressing the issues of children–not their parents. It is very odd that the clearinghouse did not include any services to address common mental disorders, such as depression and PTSD, that afflict many parents who come to the attention of child welfare agencies. After all. the California Evidence-Based Clearinghouse for Child Welfare (CEBC), the leading repository of evidence practices in child welfare, lists nine programs meeting Family First criteria as well supported, supported or promising for treating depression and 11 programs meeting those criteria for trauma treatment for adults. Even odder, among the six mental health programs being considered for inclusion in the Title IV-E clearinghouse, only one (Interpersonal psychotherapy) could be used to treat adults although there is also a version for adolescents and the clearinghouse does not specify which one is under review.

Among the evidence based practices included in the CEBC and not included or under review by the Title IV-E clearinghouse are some well-established programs known to be effective, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for adult depression and Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy. Both of these have the top rating of “well-supported” from CEBC for treatment of depression in adults. Another mindfulness-based treatment called Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction is becoming increasingly popular and supported by research for treatment of depression and anxiety. Because it is not generally covered by insurance, using Family First funds could make this treatment available to parents who could not otherwise get it. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), a popular trauma treatment, is also given the top rating from the California clearinghouse and not included or being reviewed by its Title IV-E counterpart.

On the other hand, the inclusion of two out of three “in-home parent skill based” programs in the Title IV-E Clearinghouse is somewhat surprising. The inclusion of Healthy Families America (HFA) raises questions because it has not yet been able to demonstrate an impact on the prevention of child abuse and neglect. There is one study with a promising result but this study was criticized by CEBC due to a very small sample size, limitation to one region, reliance on parent self-report and other factors. CEBC gave HFA as a rating of “4” (“evidence fails to demonstrate effect”) for the prevention of child abuse and neglect.

Another home visiting program, Nurse Family Partnership (NFP), has limited potential to prevent foster care among the Title IV-E eligible population. NFP is the only home visiting program given the top rating for prevention of child abuse and neglect by the CEBC; however it is approved only for first-time teenage mothers. It cannot by definition be used to prevent a recurrence of abuse or neglect. NFP can be provided under Family First in jurisdictions, like the District of Columbia, that have defined all children of teens in foster care as foster care candidates. But it is not applicable to most families eligible for prevention services under Title IV-E.

In sum, the list of programs that have been cleared by the Title IV-E clearinghouse as well as those that are being reviewed contains some disconcerting omissions and surprising entries. While some of the most exciting and promising mental health and drug treatment programs are not included, some home visiting programs with very limited applicability to the purposes of the Act have been included. When added to the decision to make Medicaid the payer of last resort, these decisions by the clearinghouse make the utility of Family First as a vehicle of foster care prevention even more dubious. Those who agree should join me in requesting that the Title IV-E Clearinghouse review and approve some of the effective practices mentioned in this post.

Title IV-E as Payer of Last Resort: The Achilles Heel of the Family First Act?

Family First Act The Family First Prevention Services Act Act was widely hailed as allowing for the first time the use of federal Title IV-E child welfare funds for services to prevent a child’s placement in foster care. Unfortunately, the law has been interpreted in a way that has almost negated this central purpose of Family First. Thanks to a technical-sounding determination about Title IV-E’s place in the hierarchy of programs as payers for services, Title IV-E funds are now unavailable to beef up services that are eligible for funding from other programs.

Before implementation of Family First on October 1, 2019, federal matching funds under Title IV-E of the Social Security Act could be used only to match state spending on foster care. Advocates of Family First and its predecessors argued that providing Title IV-E funds for foster care and not services to prevent it encouraged jurisdictions to place children in foster care rather than helping their parents address their problems and keep their children at home. As I argued in an earlier post, this was a false narrative that disregarded the fact states were already working with families in their homes using other funds, such as Medicaid, maternal and child health programs, and others.

But the advocates won and Family First was passed. It allowed federal Title IV-E matching funds to be used for evidence-based practices (EBP’s) in the categories of “in home parent skill-based programs,” mental health, and drug treatment programs that meet criteria for being “evidence-based” as defined by the Act. These are all considered to be “prevention services” because they are aimed at preventing placement of children in foster care. (Funds can also be spent on kinship navigator programs to help kin who agree to take custody of children temporarily while their parents pursue services.) The Act also created a clearinghouse of programs from which states can choose. The clearinghouse has so far approved nine programs for inclusion and is in the process of considering 21 more.

But the contents of the clearinghouse have much less impact in light of decisions made by Congress and the Children’s Bureau, as explained in a useful webinar from the Chronicle of Social Change. As a result of these decisions, Title IV-E became in effect the “payer of last resort” for the foster care prevention services authorized under the Act .

It would be difficult to overestimate the magnitude of this decision to make Title IV-E the payer of last resort for foster care prevention services. Many of the services that are already included in the clearinghouse or being reviewed now are covered by Medicaid or paid for by other programs in many states. This means that states with more generous Medicaid plans (those covering more people and/or more services) and more participation in other federal programs have less opportunity to use Title IV-E funds for foster care prevention services.

Consider the District of Columbia, which has a generous Medicaid program in terms of whom and what it covers. In my five years as a child welfare social worker in the District, I don’t remember a parent who was not eligible for Medicaid. The District was the first jurisdiction to submit a Family First plan and the first to have its plan approved, but it’s hard to understand the District’s eagerness to make the transition. In its plan, the District’s Child and Family Services Agency (CFSA) indicates that of the seven services in its plan that are currently deemed allowable by Title IV-E, six are funded through other federal sources–Medicaid and the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program. Therefore, CFSA will be claiming Title IV-E funds for only one allowable evidence-based program–Parents as Teachers (PAT).

So here is the irony. Family First was supposed to revolutionize child welfare by allowing federal foster care funds to be used for family preservation or foster care prevention, whatever one chooses to call it. Never mind that states have been using Medicaid and other funds for this purpose for many years. And now it turns out that with Title IV-E as a payer of last resort, many states will continue to provide these services with other funds. Family First will make little difference except adding a new layer of bureaucracy: states will now have to include these services in their prevention plans even if they are not funded by Title IV-E!

Things are actually worse under Family First for the 27 states that had waivers under Title IV-E. Under the waivers, states were able to use Title IV-E funds in combination with other funds to expand and improve services–an option not available to them now.

It gets even worse. Under Family First, states must spend at least 50% of their Title IV-E prevention funds on practices defined as “well supported” as defined by the Act. It looks like payments made by Medicaid won’t count toward the 50%, so states will need to find enough “well-supported” practices that are not covered by Medicaid in order to meet this requirement, which may cause great difficulty.

Title IV-E’s status as payer of last resort also appears to prevent Title IV-E from paying a provider who does not accept Medicaid for an EBP that is allowed under Medicaid. It is widely known that low Medicaid reimbursement rates restrict the quality and quantity of mental health services available to Medicaid participants. Both jurisdictions where I have served as a foster care social worker, Maryland and the District of Columbia, use their own funds to pay for top-notch providers who don’t accept Medicaid. In both jurisdictions and I suspect many others, children with the most complex mental health needs are enrolled with one of these high-quality providers rather than left to the mercy of the Medicaid-funded agencies, with their long waits for service and high turnover. We rarely or never paid for mental health services to parents but isn’t that just what Family First should allow jurisdictions to do? Where, otherwise, is the revolution in child welfare that Family First was supposed to bring about?

Title IV-E as payer of last resort means that very little will change, except perhaps in some states with very narrow Medicaid programs and little categorical federal funding. To have any hope of fulfilling its promise to keep families together, Family First should be amended to allow Title IV-E to supplement Medicaid and other funding to provide critically needed services to parents.

Family First Act: a False Narrative, a Lack of Review, a Bad Law

Family First Act The passage of the Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA) was greeted with joy and celebration when it passed as part of the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018. “The Family First Prevention Services Act will change the lives of children in foster care,” crowed the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The new law “will change foster care as we know it,” raved the Pew Charitable Trusts. But the Act took effect on October 1 to little fanfare. Based on contacts with all the states, the Chronicle of Social Change expects only 14 states and the District of Columbia to implement the Act and 36 to delay implementation for up to two years as allowed by the law. But as of two weeks before implementation, only four states had submitted the plan required in order to implement the Act.

An Act with Many Flaws

FFPSA has been revealed (as some knew all along) as a messy and poorly written piece of legislation. It starts with a misnomer. What the Act calls “prevention services” (“in-home parent skill-based,” mental health, and drug treatment programs for parents who have already been found to have abused or neglected their children) are aimed at prevention of foster care, not of child abuse and neglect before they occur. To most experts, these would be considered to be “intervention” and not “prevention” services. But beyond this misnomer, the legislation has multiple flaws which means it may create more problems than it solves. Among these issues, covered in detail in a recent webinar from California’s Alliance for Children’s Rights and an article in Governing, are the following:

Lack of new funding: FFPSA was designed to be budget neutral, redirecting funds toward foster care prevention services from congregate care and a delay of an expansion in adoption assistance. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that FFPSA will actually result in a $66 million reduction in federal spending over a ten-year-period. This comes on the heels of 20 years of federal disinvestment in foster care, leaving jurisdictions struggling to maintain reasonable caseloads and services. Some states are anticipating crippling losses of of funds due to the loss of their Title IV-E waiver programs, which expire at the end of the year and were far more generous and less restrictive than FFPSA. For example, California anticipates the loss of $320 million in federal funding when the waiver ends, forcing service reductions in some of its largest counties. New York will lose support for a program that hired more social workers and supervisors and has been credited with allowing youth to leave foster care earlier.
Requirement that 50% of funding be spent on “well-supported” programs. FFPSA requires that 50% of funding be spent on programs that meet a rigorous set of criteria to be defined as “well-supported.” But so far, the clearinghouse created for the purpose of this provision has designated only six programs as “well-supported”: three mental health programs, three home visiting programs, and no drug treatment programs. Some states may prefer to adopt or expand in other similar programs that are not on the list. Therefore there has been a chorus of proposals that this provision be eliminated or delayed.
Interaction with Medicaid: Each state’s Medicaid program covers a different set of services, but many of the services meeting FFPSA criteria, especially mental health and substance abuse treatment, are already funded by Medicaid in most cases. Allowing Title IV-E to supplement Medicaid funds might have helped improve the quantity and quality of services available. But in its guidance on implementing the legislation, the Children’s Bureau specified Title IV-E as the payer of last resort for these services. That means that Medicaid must pay first before Title IV-E can be billed. Thus, in states with more generous Medicaid programs, the law will greatly expand the services available to families. Moreover, it appears, based on the federal government’s answer to one state’s question, that programs paid for by Medicaid may not count toward the 50% of programs that must be “well-supported,” leaving states that use Medicaid to fund these programs in a difficult situation.
Restrictions on congregate care: One of the two main purposes of FFPSA was to restrict congregate care, which is basically any placement that is not a foster home. To do so, FFPSA cuts off funding after two weeks for any placement that is not a foster home, with four exceptions. Three of these are programs for special populations and the fourth is a new category called a Quality Residential Treatment Programs (QRTP)–a new category created by FFPSA. QRTP’s must meet numerous requirements, such as accreditation, 24-hour nurse coverage, and a “trauma-informed” approach. Moreover, a child must be assessed by a “qualified individual” as needing placement in a QRTP and that decision must be approved by the family court. Furthermore, a youth may not remain in a QRTP for more than 12 consecutive months without written approval from the head of the agency. As Child Welfare Monitor has discussed elsewhere, there is concern that some group homes will have trouble meeting the FFPSA criteria. Group homes are closing around the country due to insufficient funding and state-level policy changes. Many states have desperate shortages of foster homes, and closing group homes at the same time will worsen their placement crises. Furthermore many young people, especially those with more issues, may need more than 12 months in a group home and may lose all their gains if transferred prematurely to a foster home. There is also a problem with Medicaid and QRTP’s, as it appears they will fall into a category of “Institutions for Mental Diseases” that are not payable by Medicaid.
Kinship Diversion: FFPSA creates an avenue for prevention of foster care by placing a child with relatives (often called kinship diversion) while the parents receive prevention services for up to 12 months. If reunification with the parents never happens, there is no requirement that the children be placed formally with the relatives, or that the relatives receive any assistance either financially or with services. They would be forced to rely on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which is much less generous than foster care payments, and to make do with any services they can find in the community. There is concern that FFPSA may encourage states and counties to use kinship diversion rather than licensing relatives as foster parents, thus entitling them to more services and assistance and ensuring that the agency does not lose track of the children.

How a bad bill was born

The passage of FFPSA was the outcome of many years of advocacy, under the mantra of “child welfare finance reform.” So how did such a flawed bill pass after so many years of proposals and discussions? The answer includes a truncated legislative process, an insistence on budget neutrality, and a false narrative promoted by a wealthy group of organizations.

False Narrative

This call for finance reform was based on the idea that, as expressed by one of its primary proponents, Casey Family Programs, in a white paper published in 2010:

…the major federal funding source for foster care, Title IV-E, primarily pays for maintaining eligible children in licensed foster care, rather than providing services for families before and after contact with the child welfare system. The fact that no IV-E funding can be used for prevention or post-reunification services has created a significant challenge to achieving better safety and permanency outcomes for children.

This statement was literally true. Before implementation of FFPSA, Title IV-E funds were not available for services provided to families to help them avoid placement of their children in foster care. But plenty of other funds were available to cover these services. We’ve already mentioned that Medicaid currently pays for many or most of the services that will be provided under FFPSA, with the specifics depending on the state. Other funding sources included Title IV-B, TANF, Social Services Block Grant, and CAPTA funds.

Moreover, Title IV-E does not cover all foster care costs. The federal government reimburses states for 50 to 75% of the cost of foster care payments, depending on the state. But only 38% of foster children were eligible for federal reimbursement under Title IV-E in 2016, down from an estimated 54% in 1999. The reason for this decline is an antiquated provision (often called the “Title IV-E lookback”) that links Title IV-E eligibility to eligibility for Aid to Families with Dependent Children, a welfare program that ended in 1996. Anything calling itself finance reform should have addressed this senseless linkage, but the framers did not.

So, between the availability of other funds and the fact that states had to pay a large share of foster care costs themselves, it is hard to accept the narrative that states had an incentive to place children in care rather than provide services to their families to keep them at home. And indeed states have for years been providing in-home services to help families avoid foster care. According to federal data, 1,332,254 children received in-home or family preservation services in FY 2017 compared to only 201,680 children who received foster care services. So the argument for “finance reform” is simply a red herring.

The idea that a foster home is almost always better than a group home or residential placement is behind the other major part of FFPSA, the strict restrictions on funding for congregate care. But this narrative ignores the fact that there are not enough foster parents, especially those who are willing, loving and gifted enough to care for older and more troubled young people. Perhaps some supporters think that these foster parents will suddenly appear once group homes disappear. But this kind of wishful thinking failed when the mental hospitals closed in the 1960’s and the promised community mental health services did not appear, and there is no reason to think it will be more accurate this time around.

So how did a false narrative gain such a large following and become accepted as the truth? This idea has been supported by a powerful coalition of organizations led by Casey Family Programs, author of the white paper quoted above. Casey’s assets totaled $2.2 billion at the end of 2018 and it spent $111 million that year in pursuit of its goals, which include “safely reducing the need for foster care by 50 percent by the year 2020.” Casey has relentlessly promoted this narrative through publications, testimony, and assistance to jurisdictions that agree to implement its agenda.

Budget Neutrality

As mentioned above, FFPSA does not add resources to the system but instead redirects them from congregate care and adoption assistance to services designed to keep families together. Much of the savings will come from states taking on the full cost of group home placements that they cannot avoid. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that about 70% of the children residing in group home placements (other than residential treatment programs) would become ineligible for Title IV-E funding in 2020. So the cost of funding this placements will be shifted to states and counties that are often already struggling to fund these necessary placements. Moreover, the continuation of the TItle IV-E “lookback” means that the federal share of foster care funding will continue to decrease.

Much of the blame for the Act’s budget neutrality goes to Casey and its fellow advocates, who have been uninterested in increasing resources for foster care. As longtime Hill staffer Sean Hughes points out, “…Congressional staffers will tell you that child welfare advocates are perhaps the only group of federal advocates that consistently decline to even ask for new resources.” According to Hughes, these advocates have been unwilling to increase resources for foster care because of their bias toward family preservation. (Remember Casey’s goal of reducing foster care by 50% by 2020). They apparently hope that “starving the foster care beast” might result in fewer foster care placements, whether or not children might be left in unsafe situations. The framers wanted a budget neutral bill, and the advocates were happy to accept it in order to reallocate resources away from foster care (through the continuation of the “lookback” and the restrictions on group homes) toward family preservation.

Lack of review

Aside from a pair of hearings that were orchestrated by the bill’s sponsors to support their vision for the legislation, there were no hearings or floor debate on the Family First Act after it was introduced in 2016. In 2017, it passed the House by voice vote, and its Senate sponsors failed to get it passed. In 2018, after failing twice to attach it to larger bills without hearings of debate, the sponsors succeeded at the eleventh hour in getting it attached to the budget act. Young people whose lives were saved by group homes were never able to tell their stories. The technical problems with Medicaid eligibility were never discussed and may not have even been noticed until long after passage.

A bill called the Family First Transition Act has been introduced to ease the transition to the new legislation. It would delay for two years the implementation of the 50% “well-supported” requirement for services reimbursement, provide a small amount of transition funding to help states implement the Act, and provide temporary grants to jurisdictions with expiring waivers to make up for a portion of their loss under FFFPSA. However, none of these temporary fixes would cure this fundamentally flawed bill, the inevitable result of a false narrative, inadequate funding, and a truncated legislative process.

This post was updated on November 7, 2019, to specify that the Children’s Bureau made the determination that Title IV-E would be the payer of last resort for prevention services to foster care candidates. This designation of Title IV-E as payer of last resort was not made in the Act itself.

Therapeutic Group Homes: Needed Programs in Danger from Family First Act

It is a fact universally acknowledged that some children cannot thrive in foster care. This includes children whose behaviors are so challenging that most foster parents will be unable to cope. These children often go through many foster homes before they are finally placed in a more appropriate placement, usually a therapeutic group home or residential treatment program.

One of the goals of the Family First and Prevention Services Act (FFPSA), passed last year as part of the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018), was to reduce the use of placements other than relative homes and traditional foster care. However, FFPSA recognized that some children and youth cannot thrive in foster care and allowed for placements to meet their needs. Unfortunately, the many restrictions imposed by the Act mean that many of these young people may not able to access these facilities or will be prematurely removed from them.

Many youth who are placed in foster care have serious emotional and behavioral issues. Many have endured years of trauma, including physical and sexual abuse, severe neglect, and living in dangerous and chaotic conditions. Some have cognitive or neurological issues caused by drug exposure in utero or severe neglect. Some have violent outbursts, many are verbally aggressive, and many have difficulty in making attachments. As a result of these problems, many of these hard-to-place young people have been placed in ten or more foster homes.

High-quality therapeutic group homes are more able than foster families to work with challenging youth for a number of reasons described in an excellent video from the Sonoma County Juvenile Justice Commission. Their staff are trained in working with behaviorally challenging youth and often operate from a trauma-informed perspective. These facilities often have therapists and psychiatrists and other mental health personnel on staff. Good therapeutic group homes create a homelike environment, with young people living in cottages with a total of six or eight youths. Staff are dedicated and passionate about what they do. Unlike foster parents, these staff usually work shifts and thereby avoid burnout. Residents also draw strength from peers with similar issues, especially older peers who have improved and can serve as role models.

Some hard-to-place youth could thrive in the right kind of foster homes, those with training, time, and willingness to work with young people whose behavior is challenging. But many foster parents refuse to take teens or any or children with behavioral or mental health problems. Some states are trying to increase the availability of therapeutic foster homes, but funding and supply constraints mean that such efforts will be far too small to replace therapeutic group homes.

Unfortunately, the restrictions imposed by FFPSA may make it difficult to for many needed therapeutic group homes to continue operating. FFPSA allows the federal government to share the costs of treatment-based congregate care only at facilities that qualify as Qualified Residential Treatment Programs (QRTP). These programs must meet several criteria, including accreditation, a trauma-informed model, medical staff on call, and an aftercare program, among others. Accreditation especially is a long and arduous process that generally takes 12 to 18 months and some homes may not be able to accomplish it by the time the Act takes effect on October 1, 2019 (unless the state chooses to delay implementation for two years). Accreditation is a difficult and costly requirement for a smaller facility. It is important to ensure that only high-quality group homes retain state contracts, but accreditation may not be the best way to ensure quality for smaller programs.

Even more concerning are the limits on which children can be placed at these facilities and for how long. A child’s initial placement in a QRTP will not be reimbursed unless a “qualified professional” determines within 30 days of placement that the child needs to be placed in such a setting rather than a relative or foster family home. This assessment must use an approved tool and be conducted by “a trained professional or licensed clinician who is not an employee of the State agency and who is not connected to, or affiliated with, any placement setting in which children are placed by the State.” The decision must be approved by a court within 60 days and must be reviewed at subsequent status hearings. Moreover, a child cannot remain in a QRTP for more than 12 consecutive months (or 6 months for a child under 13) without written approval from the head of the agency.

There are several problems with these restrictions. It is not clear that agencies can find enough qualified professionals who are not employed by the agency or connected to any placement setting used by the state. More concerning are the time limits. Many therapeutic group home professionals believe that most children with emotional and behavioral problems cannot be in and out of therapeutic residential settings in six months. Many will need to stay a year or even longer.

Without needed therapeutic group homes, many children will experience a string of failed foster home placements, with each one leading to further damage to the child, who may end up on the streets or in jail. As a director of a facility that closed in North Dakota put it, new policies mean that “You are only going to refer kids to (residential child care facility) levels of care after you have exhausted all the other less restrictive options of care. That means putting them with their families, in foster care and repeating failed foster care placements several times before a referral to this level of care would be entertained.”

Group homes have already been closing around the country as states have adopted policies against congregate care (and also due to failure to provide adequate funding) and some states are already seen bad consequences from these closures. In Baltimore, the number of children sleeping in offices shot up from less than five per six month period in 2015 to 130 in the first half of 2018 due to a shortage of foster homes and a dramatic reduction in group home capacity. In Hillsborough County, Florida, hard-to-place foster youths have been spending the night in cars for lack of appropriate placements. In the state of Washington, group homes have been shutting down for years due the state’s failure to keep up with the increasing costs of care. This has contributed to a crisis in care for older, harder-to-serve youth, who are being put up in hotels, offices and $600-per night emergency foster homes and being sent out of state for care. In Illinois, hundreds of foster youths were being kept unnecessarily in psychiatric hospitals as of last August because of a decline in licensed residential facilities.

The attempt to close congregate care facilities without providing an alternative is eerily reminiscent of the closure of institutions for the mentally ill in the 1960s. These hospitals were supposed to be replaced with community health services that were never funded. We are still reaping the consequences with the abundance of mentally ill people sleeping on the streets of America’s cities.

As I mentioned in last week’s post, FFPSA’s group home restrictions were not based on ideology alone. The cost savings from reducing federal reimbursement for group homes were necessary to offset the increased cost of funding services to prevent children’s placement in foster care. But penny-wise is often pound-foolish and the future costs of eliminating therapeutic residential options for foster youth may be much greater than the present savings.

It is not too late for Congress to amend the Family First Act to reduce restrictions on therapeutic group care. Until we have an abundance of qualified therapeutic foster parents willing and able to take the hardest to place youth, cutting down on therapeutic group homes is irresponsible, short-sighted, and a recipe for possible disaster.

New book debunks prevailing child welfare myths

A new book by two leading child welfare researchers aims to elucidate the complex world of child welfare for the general public and policymakers. In After the Cradle Falls, Melissa Jonson-Reid and Brett Drake of Washington University provide a useful primer for the child welfare field. While they may be overly optimistic in assuming that a lay audience will pick up this book, it will certainly be useful for policymakers, journalists, students and advocates who want a general overview of child abuse and neglect, child welfare systems, and proposals for change.

Jonson-Reid and Drake make a particularly valuable contribution by highlighting myths and common misconceptions that are rife in the child welfare field. Among the common myths they debunk are the following:

“Neglect” is just another word for poverty, and parents become embroiled with Child Protective Services just because they are poor. Johnson-Reid and Blake explain that while poverty increases the risk of neglect, most parents who are poor do not neglect their children. Neglect is much more serious than a missed dental appointment or a messy house. Some neglect cases are extremely severe, even fatal. But even less severe cases can result in devastating lifetime consequences on brain development and the ability to form relationships.
Racial disproportionality in child welfare involvement is caused by racist decision-making by Child Protective Services (CPS). There is no dispute that African-American children are overrepresented in child welfare services and foster care compared to their share of the population. But Jonson-Reid and Drake conclude that “it is hard to find current empirical data that suggest that widespread bias within today’s CPS system is a significant driver of current disproportionality.” It would have helped if they had included the key research finding that actually debunked the myth about racism and disproportionality. As I have explained elsewhere, research has conclusively shown that higher Black representation in the child welfare system reflects higher rates of maltreatment in African-American families. This Black/White maltreatment gap may in turn reflect the relationship between race and poverty, as Jonson-Reid and Drake suggest.
State and local agencies have an incentive to take more kids into foster care. This trope was mentioned over and over again by supporters of the Family First and Prevention Services Act (FFPSA), which was signed into law on February 9, 2018. Jonson-Reid and Drake rightly give it short shrift. They explain that states are required to make “reasonable efforts” to keep children with their families and can be sanctioned by the federal government if they fail to document that they have made such efforts. The authors could have cited some other key evidence against this myth. For example, only about half of children in foster care are eligible for federal foster care support under Title IV-E of the Social Security Act and the federal government pays only part (50 to 83% depending on the state) of the cost. States and localities spent about $8 billion on foster care in FY 2014, 47% of their total child welfare spending, so it is hard to understand how they could have an incentive to place children in foster care. Moreover, states have access to other federal funds for services to intact families, such as TANF, Title IV-B, and the Social Services Block Grant.
Child welfare systems should prevent abuse and neglect. As the authors point out, child welfare systems (which they refer to as CPS, a term that I prefer to reserve for the investigation function only) have no truly preventative role. They are charged with responding to abuse and neglect after they have already occurred. This common misconception is particularly important in relation to the recent debate on FFPSA. Despite its name, the Act does not fund prevention; rather it funds treatment, or services to parents who have already maltreated their children. Obscuring the distinction between prevention and treatment prevents an honest and clear-headed debate about the appropriate allocation of resources between these purposes.
Child welfare is a broken system: Jonson-Reid and Drake argue that rather than being broken, the child welfare system has never been completed. They compare it to a fire department that will will send out a fire truck only 60% of the time, and often after the house has been consumed by flames. When a truck does respond, the firefighters may have minimal training in firefighting. A firefighter might show up without a truck and will have to wait until a truck with water is found. An injured person, instead of being taken into a hospital, may be placed in the home of someone who has no idea what treatment they need.
Child welfare can be fixed in a cost-neutral manner. Jonson-Reid and Drake point out that reform efforts (such as privatization or differential response) have often aimed to do more with less or the same amount of resources and have thus either done harm or failed to make a difference. They argue that any real improvement would raise costs but but could result in big long-run savings. They point out that we spend only $30 billion a year on child welfare when the long-term costs of child maltreatment have been estimated at $250 to $500 billion for each year’s cohort of victims.

The last myth is particularly poignant in view of the recent passage of FFPSA. It expands the use of federal Title IV-E funds to services to parents at risk of losing their children to foster care. But it finances some of this new spending by taking money from other key functions of child welfare. like congregate care placements (necessary both for therapeutic reasons and to make up for the foster parent shortage), and foster care payments to kin, who will now not be allowed these payments if the parent is receiving federally-funded services.

Jonson-Reid and Drake end with an extensive list of suggestions for changing programming, policy and law. These include primary (or universal) prevention such as poverty reduction and educating parents about positive parenting, systemic improvements to child welfare (such as completing the system), and improving and expanding treatment for children and families. The list is somewhat overwhelming, but gives policymakers and advocates many options for where to start addressing this massive and complex problem.

After the Cradle Falls is a realistic and informed discussion of child welfare. It will be a useful resource to those who are open minded enough to accept the conclusions of science and common sense even when they conflict with the facile platitudes of ideologues, which have all too often had a disproportionate influence on policy and practice.

Family First: A “Reform” that Isn’t

By now most readers will know that Congress passed the Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA) as part of the continuing resolution to fund the government until March 23. The passage of this major legislation as part of a continuing resolution marks the final victory of an ideological agenda that has taken over the child welfare advocacy community.

FFPSA was drafted in secret without feedback from stakeholders such as state and county child welfare administrators, many of whom expressed opposition to the bill or at least concern about its consequences. After several failed attempts to pass the bill over a two-year period, it was finally passed as part of a continuing resolution that was urgently needed to fund the entire government and avert a shutdown.

If we had a more pluralistic intellectual landscape in child welfare, FFPSA might have looked very different. Any bill calling itself “child welfare finance reform” should have started by addressing the most egregious flaw in child welfare financing–the linkage between Title IV-E eligibility and eligibility for the long-defunct AFDC program, which was terminated in 1996.

As a result of this linkage, fewer children are eligible for Title IV-E assistance every year, and states spend millions of dollars on the useless exercise of verifying eligibility for every child entering the system, as described by Sean Hughes in the Chronicle of Social Change. Yet, the advocacy community, in its single-minded quest to reduce the foster care rolls, gave up the fight to de-link foster care from AFDC.

Instead, the goal of “finance reform” became expanding the use of Title IV-E funds to included what the Act calls “prevention services.” These are not services to prevent abuse and neglect, but rather to prevent a child’s entry into foster care once that abuse or neglect has already occurred. FFPSA allows the use of these funds to fund parenting education, drug treatment and mental health services for parents.

Most of these “prevention” services logically belong to other systems, such as drug treatment and mental health, and are also funded by Medicaid. But prevailing ideology favors diverting foster care funds to other purposes, ostensibly to encourage prevention. In the most recent display of this ideology, the President and CEO of Casey Family Programs testified last week that “for every $7 the Federal government spends on foster care, only $1 is spent on prevention.”

No footnote was provided, but it appears that Bell was restating a common refrain that compares Title IV-E foster care expenditures with spending under Title IV-B, that is used mostly for in-home services. This comparison fails to take into account all the services provided by other programs, such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Social Services Block Grant, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, Medicaid, the Maternal Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program and the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. Most of these programs are insufficiently funded, but it makes sense to increase their funding rather than divert funds that were designed to help good Samaritans meet the needs of the children they have volunteered to care for temporarily.

This view that a foster home is always better than a congregate (non-family) placement is another part of the prevailing ideology in child welfare. Congregate placements also happen to be more expensive, making restrictions on congregate care a perfect offset to FFPSA’s increased costs. It’s very convenient when ideological correctness coincides with saving money! Unfortunately, restrictions on congregate care may be harmful to children when there is a foster home shortage and so many of today’s foster homes are inadequate, as I described in my last column.

The lack of robust conversation and debate in the child welfare advocacy community has resulted in a “reform” that will create more problems than it solves. Our most vulnerable children deserved a better outcome.