TRENTON — Most of New Jersey's foster children get routine medical care, are more likely to live in a family home than a group home or institution, and wait less than a year to be adopted once a new family is found for them, according to the latest court-ordered monitoring report grading the state's child welfare system. But for...
Allison Blake is sworn in as Commissioner of the Department of Children and Families. A report released today says the Division of Youth and Family Services failed to meet federal requirements.TRENTON — Most of New Jersey's foster children get routine medical care, are more likely to live in a family home than a group home or institution, and wait less than a year to be adopted once a new family is found for them, according to the latest court-ordered monitoring report grading the state's child welfare system.
But for the third consecutive monitoring period spanning 18 months, the Division of Youth and Family Services has failed to do the work critical to returning foster children to their parents. According to the report released today:
• Only half of the roughly 7,800 children living in foster homes had a plan within a month that mapped out how they would be reunified with their families, far short of the federal court's goal of 95 percent.
• DYFS workers conducted periodic "family team meetings" — a nationally accepted strategy of convening parents, relatives, therapists and other people close to the child to discuss how to stabilize the family — 27 percent of the time. Meetings were expected to be held with 90 percent of families.
• Just 18 percent of children in foster care visited with their parents at least every other week. The court had expected 85 percent of children to see their parents, as the vast majority of children leave foster care after their parents have demonstrated their fitness and ability to provide a stable and safe home.
"The Monitor remains extremely concerned about this level of performance,'' according to the report. "Parent child visitation is essential to successful reunification efforts.''
The child welfare system continues to meet other important goals, but overall, according to the report. "Progress ... has slowed in the last six months,'' according to the latest report by Judith W. Meltzer, deputy director of the Center for the Study of Social Policy in Washington, D.C. and New Jersey's child welfare monitor.
The hundreds of millions of dollars in hiring and training caseworkers and supervisors has succeeded in keeping most workloads manageable, Meltzer noted. "Caseloads are low enough that the visitation expectations should be met,'' Meltzer wrote in an e-mail.
Meltzer is expected to deliver the report — her eighth since 2006 — to U.S. District Court Judge Stanley R. Chesler in Newark at noon.
"It's a very fair report,'' said Allison Blake, who became commissioner of the Department of Children and Families in May, toward the end of this latest January to-June monitoring period. "The state has made a tremendous amount of progress ... But we still have challenges. It was a big system and needed a complete overall.''
In an interview before the hearing, Blake said she recognizes field-level employees are failing to regularly communicate with parents whose children are in foster care. Particularly, too few caseworkers and supervisors are conducting family team meetings. Many workers have been trained to hold the meetings but the "comfort level" is not there, Blake said.
Borrowing from the New York City Police Department’s "CompStat initiative'' of the 1990s that used a crime-mapping computer program to identify crime-prone areas, New York and Philadelphia have used a similar approach called Child Stat to address problems, Blake said. Her office launched the same strategy in Bergen and Burlington counties in September and plan to expand to the rest of the state in 2011, she said. The focus will be on training managers to become "mentors and coaches" to lower-level staff who host these critical meetings.
"The leadership, not the caseworkers, need to come together to decide what needs to change,'' Blake said.
Blake said she is very impressed by the department success improving health care services for foster children — one of the highlights of the monitor's report. She credited the creation of "child health units" run by nurses in each of the DYFS offices — an innovation she would have liked when she was a caseworker earlier in her career.
"In the past we were relying on physicians and hospitals and they have many responsibilities,'' she said. "Nurses are providing expert guidance, making connections with specialists in medical fields, acting as liaison and expert'' to see that foster children are getting timely medical care, she said.
Susan Lambiase of Children's Rights, the national advocacy group whose lawsuit put the state on the path to reform in 2003, described the report as having "some very good positives and a couple of serious concerns.''
"Alarms bells should not be ringing,'' Lambiase added. "The system is still on track.''
New Jersey's effort to provide medical and dental care for foster children "is finally showing signs of really having an effect on kids lives'' she said. The state succeeded, Lambiase said, by "making sure there are enough Medicaid providers, even in remote locations.'' She also praised the state for not placing any child under 13 in a shelter. "The state is getting really good at placing kids with families rather than institutions.''
But "family engagement issues" remain a problem, she said. When the monitor first identified problems with DYFS staff meeting with families over a year ago, the Department of Children and Families, DYFS' parent agency, called it a data-collection problem. Now it's clear the meetings were not taking place, Lambiase said.
"I'm not saying it's easy, but it's well-known and accepted in the field of child welfare that this is the way children return home, and it's the agency's job to engage the family and make it happen.''
The report may be found at www.cssp.org.