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.

Early Care and Education: A Missing Piece of the Child Welfare Puzzle

early-childhood-education-texas-tech-teaching-2 — Photo: Texas Tech University

Over the past two decades, the emphasis in child welfare policy has been on keeping children at home with their families instead of placing them in foster care. Starting in the 1990’s, states began obtaining federal waivers to use Title IV-E foster care funds for services designed to prevent children being placed in foster care. The use of these funds to prevent foster care placement has now entered permanent law through the Family First and Prevention Services Act (FFPSA), which became law as part of the Continuing Resolution signed by Donald Trump on February 9, 2018. FFPSA allows states to use Title IV-E funds to pay for mental health services, drug treatment, and parenting training for parents whose children would otherwise be placed in foster care.

But there is something missing in this list of allowed services, and that is services to the children themselves. Most notably, quality early care and education (ECE) holds great promise as a way both to keep at-risk children safe at home and to compensate for the developmental effects of past and ongoing neglect.

Providing ECE for infants, toddlers and preschool aged children involved with child welfare was supported in an excellent issue brief by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which received too little attention when it was published in November 2016. This brief explained how high-quality ECE can help promote both the safety and the well-being of children involved with the child welfare system.

Promoting Safety: For a parent to receive services under Title IV-E under FFPSA, the child must be a “candidate for foster care,” which means that the child is at imminent risk of being placed in foster care but who can remain safely at home provided that the parents receive the parenting, mental health, or drug treatment services. Obviously, there is always an element of guesswork in deciding if children can indeed remain safely at home. Many children have been injured or killed after a social worker decides they are safe at home with services.¹ Others end up being placed in foster care later because the abuse or neglect continues.

As described in the HHS issue brief, enrolling young children who are candidates for foster care in high-quality ECE provides an extra layer of protection against further abuse or neglect. There are several pathways that link ECE and child safety.

Participation in an ECE program with staff trained in detection of abuse and neglect ensures that more adults will be seeing the child and able to report on any warning signs of maltreatment.
Taking young children away from home for the day provides respite to the parent, gives them time to engage in services, and may reduce their stress, which contributes to child maltreatment.
Attending quality ECE all day improves child safety by reducing the amount of time the children spend with the parents.
Quality ECE programs that involve the parents can also improve child safety by teaching parents about child development, appropriate expectations, and good disciplinary practices. They may also connect parents with needed resources in the community and help them feel less isolated.

As documented in the HHS issue brief, multiple studies link ECE to reduced child maltreatment. The most striking findings were from Chicago’s Parent Child Centers: participants were half as likely as a similar population to be confirmed as a victim of maltreatment by age 18.

Promoting Emotional and Cognitive Development: Enrollment in high quality ECE would promote healthy brain development for children involved with child welfare. A large body of research demonstrates that ECE has positive effects on the early cognitive and socio-emotional development, school readiness and early academic success of children in the general population. And these effects are greater and long-lasting for children who are socioeconomically “at risk,” like most children involved in child welfare.

Many children involved with child welfare are victims of “chronic neglect,” which has been defined as “a parent or caregiver’s ongoing, serious pattern of deprivation of a child’s basic physical, developmental and/or emotional needs for healthy growth and development.” There is increasing evidence that chronic neglect has adverse impacts on children’s brain development, which may lead to lifetime cognitive, academic and emotional deficits.

High-quality ECE can be viewed as a “compensatory” service to make up for emotional and developmental neglect, as Doug Besharov, the first Director of the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, suggested back in 1988.

Unfortunately, there is already a national shortage of high quality ECE, and children involved with child welfare cannot simply be inserted into existing slots without displacing other children who may be equally at risk. The lack of high quality ECE is a problem that is far broader than the child welfare system.

The federal spending bill recently passed by Congress and signed by President Trump provides some new money for child care subsidies for low-income parents, but it is only $29 billion for a two-year-period. Child welfare advocates should ally with advocates of expanded ECE to support voter initiatives, such as those that have passed in various Colorado jurisdictions, to use public money to expand the number and quality of ECE slots. All at-risk children can benefit from quality ECE. And maltreated children need it perhaps most of all.

The Associated Press found 768 children who died of abuse or neglect over a six-year period while their families were being investigated or receiving services to prevent further maltreatment. According to the latest federal data compiled from 35 states, nearly 30% of the children who died had at least one prior contact with CPS in the previous three years. ↩

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.