But when the nonprofit Children’s Rights released a report last month analyzing how long it takes for foster children to obtain a permanent home, the city agency involved – the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) – not only supported the release, but soon announced a related initiative aimed at shortening the length of time children remain in foster care.
This would be even more remarkable if the report hadn’t all but closed the case on what many in the city’s child welfare community have known for years: New York has one of the worst mechanisms for helping children move from foster care to permanent homes in the country. (It placed 44th among 47 states; see p. 71 of this state report.)
For the 153 children followed in “The Long Road Home: A Study of Children Stranded in New York City Foster Care,” the average length of time it took to either be returned to their families or adopted – called “achieving permanency” in child welfare terms – was more than five years.
Beginning next month, ACS will put a benchmark on improving that measure with a new “One Year to Family” campaign, aimed at either returning children to their families or finding them adoptive homes within one year of July 1, 2010. ACS says it will also work to continually increase the percentage of children leaving foster care for each year after that.
“We have increasingly been holding ourselves and our contract agency partners responsible for helping youth find permanency through a safe return home to their families, a kinship placement, or adoption,” said ACS Commissioner John Mattingly when the report was released.
“We intend to work with all of our partners in child welfare to turn the structural improvements we have now made,” said Mattingly, “into the results we all want for children and families.”
In addition to placing tight timeframes on finding permanent homes for children currently in foster care through the use of revamped family team conferences and a greater presence in family court, the division says it will make changes to its relationship with private foster care agencies as well.
ACS says it will advocate for federal funds to create a system-wide level of training among caseworkers at private agencies, create guidelines aimed at limiting turnover, and establish a more flexible funding structure to help private foster care agencies provide services to families to help smooth a child’s exit from foster care.
This ambitious and hopeful glimpse into the future stands in stark contrast to the picture of the city’s current foster care system portrayed in “The Long Road Home,” in which information gathered from ACS, private foster care agencies, family court judges, attorneys and parents showed that close to 30 percent of the caseworkers studied had an average caseload of more than 20 children, and that the length of time it took for a decision to be made about whether a child would either remain in foster care or be returned home took an average of 11 months.
