Child Welfare Changes Stir Hopes, Fears

Ten years ago, the Administration for Children’s Services overhauled the way it provided services to children and families in need, shifting the focus away from monolithic institutions to community-based services. A second and similarly profound wave of change was supposed to sweep through New York's child welfare world this year, as ACS advanced its philosophy of keeping children in their homes or as close to them as possible.

But when it came time to select the private agencies that would implement this change, ACS decreased contracts for many providers with long-established connections to ACS¾with little clarity on how proposals were vetted and decisions made.

Last week, ACS announced a drastic shift, telling agencies it would rescind contract awards in a broad swath of categories, because "re-evaluation and re-scoring ... is warranted." As City Limits reported on Thursday, ACS spokeswoman Laura Postiglione confirmed that ACS will "rescind its recent recommendations for awards" to re-evaluate how and why decisions were made.

What this sudden change represents for the 16,000 children in foster care and the 257 children a day who are reported as abused or neglected is not yet clear. What is clear, however, is that the contract awards were only one of the concerns that experts and service providers have voiced about the sea change at ACS.

The focus on keeping children better connected to their families has wide support among service providers and advocates. But some of those same stakeholders have raised concerns about how that vision is being executed.

Shrinking resources

The budget is a primary worry. Changes include a 25 percent reduction in residential foster care beds and a two-thirds cut in community-based group homes. Critically, a threatened 21 percent hit to preventive services—including counseling, drug/alcohol treatment and parenting classes designed to keep families intact—that could have affected 3,000 households was largely restored in last-minute budget negotiations..   

The foster-care cuts do not reflect empty beds in the foster-care network: Earlier this year, children placed by ACS filled all of the 451 beds now being cut. And cuts in residential care programs dig into an already-lean budget: Funding for residential programs was trimmed by 38 percent in 2005.

Overall, ACS statistics show a steady rise of youth in need of ACS support—from 50,000 children in 2005 to 64,700 in 2009, including a steep increase in reports of abuse and neglect in foster care—yet the current budget proposes a $33 million decrease, according to sources at the city’s Independent Budget Office, including cuts to family and residential foster care. (Adopted budgets can and do change in actual practice: In fiscal 2010, for example, the adopted budget for ACS was $2.67 billion, while actual spending reached $2.9 billion.)

ACS plans to add new services even as cuts are made, including mobile crisis response teams and services targeting developmentally disabled youth, children who have been sexually exploited and youth who have participated in sexual aggression or abuse.

Both new services and cuts, announced in June, were intended to be in place by October for foster care and preventive services programs, and by April 2011 for children in group-home care, a timeline that will surely be affected by ACS’ reworking of the RFP process. But their effects are already being felt.