Obama Signs Bill to Speed Up Transfer of Foster Youth School Records

The Uninterrupted Scholars Act was signed into law by President Barack Obama on Monday, paving the way for easier access to the education records of foster youths by their caseworkers.

“The records of foster youth could not be easily obtained by the agency with custody of them, and that made no sense whatsoever to us,” said Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), one of the bill’s authors and co-chair of the Senate Caucus on Foster Youth.

The bill creates an exception for child welfare workers in regard to the protections included in the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA), which until this week required child welfare workers to either obtain parental consent for a transfer of education records, or receive a court order from a judge.

“These children get labeled, and then they get lost,” Landrieu said, speaking on a press call about the bill today. “This is one of many acts we’re working on to assist them.”

The Administration for Children Families (ACF) will issue a joint letter with the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education to alert state education and child welfare departments about the changes, said George Sheldon, who oversees ACF at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Foster youth are often forced to switch schools when they change foster or group homes. Many schools will not enroll a student until his records have arrived, particularly information related to immunizations received by the child.

When incomplete student records accompany foster youth to new schools, it often costs the student credits. R.J. Sloke, a former foster youth from South Carolina, said he made it to his eleventh school as a 17-year-old freshman before someone took interest in his academic history.

With the help of a faculty member, not his social worker, Sloke pieced together his whole record and was immediately reclassified as a rising high school junior.

The Uninterrupted Scholars Act eliminates the biological parent’s right to prevent the use of those records by child workers. The act amends FERPA to create an exception for “an agency caseworker or other representative of a State or local child welfare agency…when such agency or organization is legally responsible, in accordance with State or tribal law, for the care and protection of the student.”

Child welfare workers can only share or discuss those records with individuals or other entities “engaged in addressing the student’s education needs.

“It’s 100 percent cost effective because it doesn’t cost an extra penny and removes all the barriers social workers have,” said Sloke, who interned last summer for Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Kan.) and now works on Landrieu’s staff.

Early versions of the legislation included a similar exception for use of records for research on “federal and state education-related mandates governing child welfare agencies.” An early House version specifically referred to enrollment practices, attendance and school stability as three issues of interest.

According to Landrieu, that aspect of the act was killed by objections from “one or two” Senate Republicans, including Mike Enzi (Wyo.), the ranking minority member of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

“We fought hard for that, but we ran into a brick wall,” a disappointed Landrieu said of the research exception. “The only promise we got was it would be considered when FERPA reauthorization” came up.

The act originated in the House as the Access to Papers Leads to Uninterrupted Scholars Act, co-authored by Reps. Karen Bass (D-Calif.), Tom Marino (R-Penn.), Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and Jim McDermott (D-Wash.).

The Senate version was submitted by Landrieu, with Republican support from Sens. Roy Blunt (Kan.) and Chuck Grassley (Iowa).

The bill addresses one challenge within a bigger problem: The fact that foster youth have to jump from school to school in the first place. The Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act, passed in 2008, requires child welfare agencies to keep children in their school of origin unless it is not in the child’s best interest to do so.

Sheldon, who led Florida’s Department of Children and Families before joining the administration, said that and other requirements of Fostering Connections were difficult to comply with because of FERPA.

“I recognize the importance of privacy,” Sheldon said on the press call today. But when a child is in foster care, “the state is a parent of that child and is responsible to know everything about a child’s advancement.”

John Kelly is the editor-in-chief of The Chronicle of Social Change

In San Francisco, Dependency Court Trying to Roll with the Fiscal Punches

by Angela Penny

On a sunny Thursday morning earlier this month, San Francisco Judge Linda Colfax takes her place in Room 402 of the courthouse to hear four dependency cases, just her first series on the docket that day. Three of the proceedings end in continuances.

Colfax is in for plenty of days like this in the foreseeable future. Budget cuts have hit California’s juvenile dependency courts hard in 2012, and in San Francisco, the county’s court capacity to hear abuse and neglect cases was literally cut in half, leaving Colfax with the lion’s share of the county docket.

“It’s challenging to work with such a bare-bones budget,” said Judge Patrick J. Mahoney, presiding judge of San Francisco’s Unified Family Court. He oversees the dependency court as well as family law and juvenile delinquency courts. “We are constantly looking for creative solutions to make sure we meet the needs of the county’s children.”

The budget for the San Francisco Superior Courts is $74 million this year, down from $98 million five years ago. As a result, the county has reduced the number of dependency courtrooms from two to one.

The decline was one county’s portion of a sweeping cut made at the state level to court budgets in July of 2011, when Gov. Jerry Brown approved spending measures that slashed $350 million from the statewide court budget of $1.5 billion in 2010.

San Francisco’s courts had a $13.75 million deficit for the fiscal year that began in July 2011 because of these cuts. They were forced to lay off 200 employees, or 41 percent of their staff, and closed 25 out of 63 courtrooms, including one dependency court.

The dockets of both dependency courtrooms are now largely in the hands of Colfax, a former public defender who was elected to the bench in 2010 and rotated to the juvenile dependency court in January.

She and Mahoney must also hear the majority of the cases that used to go to a special family law-dependency hybrid court, which was eliminated by the budget cuts. The cutbacks have predictably squeezed court functions. Settlement conferences, previously scheduled for 45 minutes, were reduced to 30 minutes.

That has had a taxing effect on the family members in the process, who often must wait longer times for hearings to start, said Patti Fitzsimmons, director of the University of San Francisco Child Advocacy Clinic, who represents low-income children and families as a member of the Association of San Francisco’s Juvenile Dependency Panel.

There are some additional stress factors on the horizon for the court. The juvenile dependency panel Fitzsimmons serves on is administered by the San Francisco Bar Association and is funded by the governing body of the California courts, the Judicial Council. It is also in financial crosshairs after taking a cut from $5.1 million in 2010 down to $3.9 million for this year.

This year’s cuts have been absorbed without a dip in productivity because of concessions by the panel lawyers. The lawyers have accepted more than doubling their administration fees to the bar association, Fitzsimmons said, and agreed to dropping the billing system from a per-minute to a per-half-minute system.

More significantly to the bottom line, says fellow panel lawyer Jill McInerney, the panel has been accepting of the city’s need to limit the amount of time they can pay for. “We have agreed, case by case, to just not get paid for everything we do,” she said.

Adding yet another layer to the time management challenges of the dependency court is Assembly Bill 12, which extends the age that youth can stay in foster care up to 21, creating another time burden on the dependency court because the progress of these young adults needs to be reviewed by the judge. The bill took effect in January of 2012.

Mahoney has begun to convene court stakeholders to discuss how to best function in crisis mode.

“I’ve just asked Judge Colfax to start a task force on how we are going to deal with this increased responsibility,” Mahoney said. “We have an informal task force including lawyers, judges, and representatives from the agency to discuss how we can streamline court functions. We meet about once a month.”

Fitzsimmons and McInerney both commended Colfax’s adjustment to the current situation.

“Judge Colfax does an amazing job of coping with these pressures,” said Fitzsimmons. Even with sped-up timelines on hearings, Colfax still “makes a personal connection with the youth, asking how they’re doing in school, or how their basketball game went.”

Technology Grant to Give Kinship Families Additional Resources

By: Ryann Blackshere

Finding resources may become easier for California’s kinship caregivers.

Truckee, Calif.-based nonprofit iFoster, along with United Ways of California (UWC), received $2.25 million dollar grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services over the next three years to create a single resource portal for families of the child welfare system.

The “Kinship Navigator Grant” will fund a digital service meant to serve as the “Yelp” of California’s child welfare world. Families and providers will be able to access available county, religious and non-profit resources and programs that are local by searching their zip code. The resource portal will also provide discounts at local, regional and national retailers that can save an average household up to $4,500 per year.

The service will be available to all of the state’s child welfare providers, but the focal point of the project is kinship families. More than 2.7 million children are in kinship families across the United States, and about 333,000 of those kids in kinship are in California.

Typically these families aren’t privy to all of the resources they can access because they aren’t as involved in the child welfare system, according to iFoster co-founder Serita Cox.

“Our hope is that if we have this portal and people have this resource, they will be better off with access to these resources,” Cox said. “Those families are vastly underserved because they don’t have an official social worker.”

“This Kinship Navigator Collaborative aims to combine the power of a national online community…with rich information about local resources from 2-1-1 programs, and “Yelp”-type feedback from caregivers and youth themselves, into a one-stop resource portal,” said Peter Manzo, president and CEO of United Ways of California, in an e-mail.

United Ways of California operates the local 2-1-1 system, a network of 28 local hotlines that allows states to call and ask about assistance programs and services in their area. iFoster’s user interface, customer relationship management system and search functionalities will all be updated.

When UWC teamed up with iFoster in June  the groups found that majority of the families who call the system are kinship families. The Kinship Navigator Collaborative service will specialize in helping those families, and others in the child welfare system, be directed via telephone or online to the services that will help them the most.

“2-1-1 information and referral programs have a wealth of information about local resources that should be as widely available as possible,” said Lilian Coral, UWC’s director of 2-1-1 California, in an e-mail. “We are excited about the potential of this Kinship Navigator Collaborative project to show the power of combining that data with smart web-based tools that both extend our reach and allow users to seek the resources they need.”

United Ways of California and iFoster were granted the funding this month by the Children’s Bureau of the Administration on Children and Families, the agency responsible for most child welfare-related funding at the Department of Health and Human Services.

“Creating support networks within our communities is essential to the health and welfare of children,” Said Will Lightbourne, director of the California Department of Social Services. “The Kinship Navigation Program is another example of public and private sectors coming together to ensure caregivers are connected with service providers who can help improve outcomes for children and strengthen families.”

The Children’s Bureau also granted the following organizations Kinship Navigator Grants this year:

Catholic Charities of Rochester, Catholic Family Center, Rochester, NY

Community Coalition for Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment, Los Angeles, Calif.

United Ways of California, South Pasadena, Calif..

North Oklahoma County Mental Health Center (NorthCare), Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

Arizona Children’s Association, Tucson, Ariz.

Homes for Black Children, Detroit, Mich.

The Children’s Home, Tampa, Fla

All of the awards were made for three years, at up to $750,000 per year.

“We think this project will show that online and mobile technologies are not luxuries or simply nice features to have, but are essential strategies to connect with kinship and foster families, and engage them, through their feedback, in improving and changing the results they can achieve,” said Manzo.

Ryann Blackshere is a multimedia journalist with Fostering Media Connections.

Congress Rolling on Uninterrupted Scholars Act

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and RJ Sloke appearing on FOX News Live – Sept. 17, 2012.

Last week, Members of Congress converged on Washington DC for a short legislative session before the elections. In short order, the Uninterrupted Scholars Act (USA), which would amend education privacy laws to the benefit of foster children gained momentum.

Last week, Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.) signed on as co-sponsors of the bill.

At the annual the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute‘s Angels in Adoption Gala on September 12th, dozens of members of congress including USA co-sponsors Sens. Roy Blunt (D-Mo.) and Mary Landrieu (D-La.) alongside Reps. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and Karen Bass (D-Calif.) rose to their feet when Foster Youth Intern RJ Sloke explained how the bill would have saved him from having to repeat grades because of lost educational records.

Just this Monday, Sloke and Landrieu were guests on FOX News Live, where they discussed the importance of easing the exchange of educational records for foster youth.

- Daniel Heimpel

Process, Paperwork Make Interstate Adoption A Bumpy Ride

By: Ryann Blackshere

When Rhys Gardiner learned about the urgency with which older kids in foster care need loving families before they exit the system alone, she focused her adoption search toward youth on the brink of independence.

She searched the online registry in her home state of Massachusetts, but the oldest youth registered for adoption was 16. So she looked outside her state.

“I heard from a lot of people in the field that it’s best for kids to stay close to their connections and I really respected that, however I was trying to match with an older teen or young adult who was close to aging out the system and I didn’t realize that at that time so few kids at that age were being worked with for adoption,“ said Gardiner.

Her search took her to the Adopt US Kids website, where anyone can access online photo registries of youth available for adoption in all 50 states. One photo, of a boy in Pennsylvania, stuck out.

The boy was interested in anime cartoons from Japan, the country Gardiner had studied in during college. He was also interested in going to college, a process she wanted to help with, and he had been waiting a long time for a permanent family. Their similar interests were enough to convince Gardiner that she would be a good match with him.

A total of 185,000 potential adoptive parents indicated they would adopt a child 13 or older, which means there are six prospective parents for each teen eligible for adoption, according to the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth. Yet, only one in 28 people who initially contact a child welfare agency actually make it to the end of the adoption finish line, according to a 2005 Harvard University study.

At least part of the drop out rate for prospective parents is due to the long and complicated adoption process. This is magnified even more in the case of interstate adoptions, which require two child welfare systems to hash out paperwork, responsibilities and costs.

“The whole issue of interstate adoption has been such an issue for decades,” said Madelyn Freundlich, former executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute and 2007 recipient of the U.S. Administration for Children and Families’ Adoption Excellence Awards.

During a convening of adoption experts in March 2011, called “Eliminating Barriers to the Adoption of Children in Foster Care,” participants listed the obstacles of adopting children in the U.S. The highest on the list was the difficulty of interstate adoption.

“The United States does not have a national adoption system. Instead, there is a different system in each state, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico,” says the report from the convening. “Moreover, some state child welfare systems are administered at the county level. Each jurisdiction has its own criteria for adoption eligibility and process for recruitment, approval, and training of adoptive families.”

Under the current structure of interstate adoption, the sending state enjoys a financial gain because it reduces the number of youth in their child welfare system; the receiving state loses financially because its number of children in the system rises.

Gardiner knows personally the challenges of interstate adoption.

Massachusetts requires public child welfare agency involvement in receiving an interstate placement. So the Department of Children and Families was needed to supervise the placement.

“There was not always agreement between the two states as to what each state would be responsible for providing,” said Gardiner. “[Massachusetts] was willing to provide the required home visits but not the service planning and independent living skills services which appeared to be the responsibility of the sending state. But the sending state kept insisting that Massachusetts should provide it.”

The Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children (ICPC) is a contract entered into by all 50 states, D.C. Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands to work together during interstate adoptions.

“The role of the interstate office when a child is leaving their home state is to assure that the agency placing the child has the appropriate authority to do so, that the birth parents rights are protected, that the adoptive parents rights are protected, and most importantly that the child will be in a safe and appropriate placement in the new state,” said Jason McCrea, Interstate Compact Office director of the Pennsylvania ICPC Office.

When determining which state is responsible for follow-up assessments and services for the child and family, McCrea says it varies case by case.

“The sending agency makes arrangements with an appropriate resource in the receiving state to provide supervision,” he said. “Many agencies are licensed and have offices in neighboring states, so they use their branch offices to provide the adoptive match and supervision. Normally the agency that licensed the adoptive home provides the supervision, but this isn’t always the case.”

“The ICPC does not go far enough to ensure minimum standards on inter-state procedure,” Freundlich said in a report for Donaldson in 1999.

“The purpose of the compact is…to assure that children ‘receive the maximum opportunity to be placed in a suitable environment and with persons or institutions having appropriate qualifications and facilities to provide a necessary and desirable degree and type of care.,“ Freundlich wrote in the report. “The ICPC, however, in its substantive provisions, fails to set even minimal standards for the assessment of suitability, appropriateness, and desirability of care.”

“The outcomes for children,” Freundlich writes, “have been, at best, troubling, and at worst, dire.”

Filing costs and transfer of services are just some of the discrepancies that states can debate when overseeing an interstate adoption, according to the 2011 convening report. Other issues that frequently arise include differences in home study procedures and the process by which states determine whether or not a family is suitable to adopt. Each state has its own set of measures.

“Everyone recognizes a driver’s license, but not everyone recognizes home studies across states,” said Jeff Katz, founder of Listening to Parents, a non-profit created in 2009 to increase the number of adoptions of children in foster care through eliminating barriers to adoption.

Listening to Parents has created a list of policy suggestions for Congress aimed at simplifying interstate adoptions. Among them: Both the sending and receiving state should receive financial reward for interstate adoptions, and a national standard for home studies. The latter recommendation was recently pushed by child welfare researchers at a roundtable on Capitol Hill.

Adopt US Kids provides interstate adoption trainings for social workers and department staff across the nation in an effort to help them better serve families.

While Massachusetts and Pennsylvania were debating back and forth, Gardiner’s prospective son was waiting in a group home for a decision. She was able to visit him back and forth for half a year, and because Massachusetts requires kids under 18 to live with their prospective adoptive parents, he moved in with her for the summer, almost a year to the day of her first inquiry.

The family ran into more roadblocks on their road to adoption. There was a lack of clarity on which state the adoption would be formalized in, because of the burden of paying for filing fees. And the Massachusetts office claimed they never received the initial ICPC paperwork.

“All this was happening while he was in my home, while he was under stress of trying to stay in touch with his family in Pennsylvania, the holidays were hitting, the stress of committing to a new family, and the process could have gone smoother for his emotional well-being,” said Gardiner. “I feel that we didn’t receive the services that an in-state match would have received.”

The process slowed to a crawl, and he returned to a transitional living placement in Pennsylvania.

Though Gardiner’s interstate adoption process was put on pause, they continued building the relationship and have filed papers towards formalizing an adoption, which is much simpler now because he turned 18. In that time, Gardiner has also adopted a daughter, Victoria, from her state of Massachusetts, and says both processes of interstate and intrastate adoption are worth the end result.

“There has never been any question in my heart since I’ve met either of these two that they are family to me,” said Gardiner.

Ryann Blackshere is a multimedia journalist with Fostering Media Connections.

 

 

An Open Letter Calling for Ethical Coverage of Juvenile Dependency Proceedings

An appeal to journalists across the country to gain access to juvenile dependency courts, write about their findings and end the cloak of confidentiality obstructing deeper, necessary reform to the foster care system.

Having studied foster care and covered it for the better part of a decade, I have come to understand that the greatest impediment to improved outcomes for foster children is our current, warped public perception of the system. A combination of the system’s overt obfuscation, coupled with the news media’s over representative coverage of child death and tragedy, have painted a picture of a broken foster care system. While this may be part of the story, it is neglects to paint the fuller, more-nuanced picture of what child welfare actually is: a system that is as much progressive as backwards, and that likely helps more than it hurts. The result is a general public, who generally accept the notion that the system is broken and too often regard foster children as tainted for their association with it.

This is dangerous to those children. It contributes to the dearth of exceptional foster and adoptive parents, leads lawmakers to make knee jerk reactions and negatively stigmatizes foster children themselves.

For years, I have worked to give the public a more accurate picture of the foster care system through my writings, that of my staff and FMC’s consistent outreach to journalists across the country.

But for all these efforts an enormous barrier still remains: the cloak of confidentiality asserted by public child welfare administrations as a protection of the best interests of children in the system. Like the public perception of foster care I already described, this is only part of the truth. Confidentiality laws often become a shield against the news media’s scrutiny of the system’s handling of particular cases or flaws in general policy. This lack of transparency invariably stymies reform and arguably impinges on systemic improvements that would better the lives of individual foster children.

If the goal is a more balanced, full and thus accurate picture of the foster care system, we must knock down one of the clearest barriers to transparency – media access to juvenile dependency court proceedings.

I will not go deep into history on the subject. Jim Newton of the Los Angeles Times, Andrea Poe of the Washington Times, Kelli Kennedy of the Associated Press, Marjie Lundstrom of the Sacramento Bee, Kim Hansel of Fostering Families Today, Petula Dvorak of the Washington Post and many others have contributed greatly to an already robust debate on this subject.

Instead, I offer a strategy to grant all journalists across the country access to juvenile dependency hearings, foment trust between circumspect child welfare professionals and journalists; and through these efforts create a framework for nuanced and exceptional coverage of the foster care system.

Here you will find a report on the debate over open courts that my organization, Fostering Media Connections, produced with the help of a law student at Harvard Law School’s Child Advocacy Program as well as a draft code of ethics for journalists who are attempting to access dependency proceedings. We have been using the code of ethics to access otherwise closed juvenile dependency hearings throughout California.

On November 15^th, 2012, FMC  - alongside the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy – will hold a convening at the University of California Berkeley’s School of Law (Boalt Hall) to promote the code of ethics as a means to promote transparency in the juvenile dependency system and ethical coverage of those hearings and the foster care system more generally.

We are now asking you to take the attached code of ethics to judges, commissioners and court referees in your jurisdiction and ask for access to these proceedings. Please write about what you see; feel free use our report as background or for attribution.

If we can collectively create a swell of coverage leading into and out of the convening on the 15^th, my bet is that we will have greatly eased access to juvenile dependency courts for future journalists.

But the real opportunity here is that by living up to the ideals of our profession, we have an honest chance at improving the lives of children.

I am not so stupid to think I have I all the answers, so I am directly soliciting your help.My cell phone number is 510-334-8636; I am waiting for your call and look forward to your suggestions and guidance.

Sincerely,

Daniel Heimpel, Director Fostering Media Connections

Former Foster Youth Running for Florida Senate

By: Ryann Blackshere

Ashley Rhodes-Courter is running for a Florida State Senate office in a race nicknamed by the Saint Petersblog as the “David and Goliath of Senate races.”

She will play the role of David.

Rhodes-Courter, 26, is running against Jack Latvala (R), 60, who held the seat from 1994-2002 and won it again in 2010.

“It will be a challenge but someone has got to face him,” said Rhodes-Courter.

Facing challenges in nothing new to her.

Placed in foster care at age three, Rhodes-Courter lived in 14 foster homes. She says many of her foster parents were felons, and physical and sexual abuse were present in the homes. She was often separated from her brother, who was also in care.

“My experience in foster care definitely wasn’t glowing,” said Rhodes.

Light came into her life when she turned 12, and was adopted from a children’s home.

“I was really fortunate to have that family that stuck with me though thick and thin, and find that permanency and support system that many youth don’t have,” said Rhodes-Courter.

Her support system came just in time for her high schools years, when all she could think about was getting to college. But college costs money, a lot of money, so Rhodes-Courter searched and applied for writing scholarships and any opportunities that would financially support her higher education.

She applied to an essay contest at the New York Times Magazine, which asked contestants to write about a day that changed their life. She picked her adoption day, and wrote about how terrifying of an experience it was.

Her essay,  “Three Little Words,” won the contest. And after she graduated from Eckerd College in St. Petersberg, Fla., the essay became a published memoir.

“I realized what happened to me wasn’t right and there are a lot of kids these things happen to, said Rhodes-Courter. “I knew it was an issue bigger than myself.”

She now travels internationally to speak with child welfare leaders and professors and youth about the realities of the foster care system. Her next stop, she hopes, is the Florida State Senate.

Among the issues Rhodes-Courter would like to focus on are replacing deep education cuts to provide full education coverage for students in the public school system, and full access to health care, especially reproductive health care, for women.  Using the example of her adoptive family which owns a small business, she wants to invest more in Florida’s businesses and renewable energy sources.

“I’m only 26, but I think I have the passion and determination to stick this out,” said Rhodes-Courter.

While on the campaign trail, she has been juggling lots of things. She and her husband have three foster children at home, all under the age of three; they have had 12 children since they began fostering two years ago. She is also in her last year of online graduate work at the University of Southern California School of Social Work, and she is pregnant with her first child, due election week this November.

But Rhodes-Courter says despite the amount of responsibility she has now in her personal life, she feels a great responsibility to keep advocating for youth and keeping Florida government in line with the needs of its youngest residents.

“Our legislation has moved away from what children and families really need. We’re cutting the education budget and mental health budget,” said Rhodes-Couter. “I’m hoping to be a representative of what the needs really are in Florida.”

If this election doesn’t turn out the way of David’s biblical battle, Rhodes-Courter says she will keep running in future elections.

“There are too many people that need to be heard to quit. There is definitely more advocacy and work that needs to be done.”

Ryann Blackshere is a multimedia journalist with Fostering Media Connections.

Youth Services Insider: 2013, the Dawn of the American Impact Bond?

by John Kelly

A continuing resolution for the first months of fiscal 2013 is all but a certainty, which means federal allocations for juvenile justice (and pretty much all other discretionary youth accounts) are not going to see increases in the near future.

If you’re looking for some optimism in the world of funding, take heart in the fact that 2013 will be the pioneer year for social impact bonds (SIB) in the United States. And the American experiment will begin with juvenile justice.

Social impact bonds, simply put, allow governments to let private dollars do the start-up work on good ideas and reward only success. Investors and philanthropists come up with the funding to initiate a new project, and, if said project achieves stated goals, the government pays them back with interest.

Will the bonds emerge as a breakthrough in human service reform? That remains to be seen. Here’s a rundown of how we arrived at the dawn of the American SIB experiment.

March 2010: An organization in the United Kingdom called Social Finance launches the first social impact bond in collaboration with the British government. The group pulled around $8 million in investment money, mostly from charitable organizations accustomed to giving money away.

The funds are routed to fuel The One Service, which exists for one reason: helping prisoners exiting Britain’s Peterborough Prison prevent a return trip to the criminal justice system. The One contracts with several area social service groups focused on rehabilitation services, therapy, job training, and family and youth services.

The proposition is simple, but not easy. If the re-conviction rate of prisoners is 7.5 percent less than that of a control group established for this project, the British government will pay back the Social Finance investors with interest.

A higher variance in re-conviction rates will yield an even bigger reward for the investors. But if the re-conviction rate is within 7.5 percent of the control group, the British government does not have to pay the investors back.

The project demonstrates well the allure of SIBs to both sides. Major donors, corporations and foundations can take a large philanthropic stake in social services with some hope of seeing returns instead of simply granting the money. Governments can guarantee payment for a venture that is socially productive and potentially cuts the cost of the safety net, with no risk of throwing away taxpayer funds on an ineffective project.

Interim results on the venture won’t come out until 2014, although Tina Rosenberg of the New York Times wrote in June that the anecdotal evidence is cause for optimism.

February, 2011: President Barack Obama introduces his fiscal 2012 budget, which includes $100 million to fund seven social impact bonds for “among other areas, job training, education, juvenile justice and care of children’s disabilities.”

It is the first such mention at the federal level of social impact bonds. Congress did not bite on appropriating funds for the proposal, but the administration recently encouraged states to include SIB concepts in their plans for child welfare waivers.

January  2012: The Massachusetts Executive Office for Administration and Finance (EOAF) issued a request for responses for two SIB projects, one seeking to address chronic homelessness and another to address recidivism among juveniles leaving the state’s Division of Youth Services (DYS) facilities.

Three quarters of the youths that age out of DYS custody are convicted of a crime within five years and 67 percent are incarcerated again, according to EOAF Secretary Jay Gonzalez, figures that likely come from the last state juvenile recidivism study in 2006.

DYS Commissioner Ed Dolan said the agency maintains supervision of all incarcerated juveniles from their release until age 18; some deemed “youthful offenders” are monitored by DYS until 21.

“It’s two to three years after [they leave custody] that they get disconnected, and don’t have reasonable adults in their lives to help them out,” Dolan said.

Financial advisory firm Third Sector Capital Partners will serve as the intermediary in charge of drawing private investment for the venture, and the state recently selected two local nonprofits – Roca and Youth Opportunities Unlimited – to carry out the work.

The entities are still negotiating the benchmarks for repayment and reward, said Ryan Gillette, social impact bond manager for EOAF.

It will most certainly focus on “making sure people are not going back to jail,” Gillette told YSI, so re-conviction and re-incarceration rates will be prominent.  The state also hopes to tie incentives to employment and educational attainment outcomes.

August 2012: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announces that the city would engage in an SIB arrangement with Wall Street behemoth Goldman Sachs, which would put up $9.6 million to lower the recidivism rates of adolescent males returning to the city from Riker’s Island. Goldman has tapped social services provider MDRC to run point on the project.

Goldman gets its money back if the project reduces recidivism by 10 percent; larger reductions mean up to $2.1 million in profit. It is similar to the Massachusetts project with two noteworthy differences:

-The age of jurisdiction in New York is 15, which means that most 16- and 17-year-old juveniles here have been convicted and incarcerated as adults. Many of the teens on Riker’s Island are housed in the same adolescent unit, but still: it’s a prison, not a juvenile facility.

-Goldman isn’t exposed to losses in the same way Massachusetts investors will be. Bloomberg’s own foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, is providing MDRC with a $7.2 million loan guarantee, which it can use to pay Goldman back if the program fails to yield the desired reductions in recidivism. That means the worst Goldman could really do here is lose $2.4 million.

“Yeah, we don’t anticipate there will be the level of protection there is in New York” for Massachusetts SIB investors, Gillette said.

Harvard professor and social impact bond expert Jeffrey Liebman called the New York arrangement “perhaps the most interesting government contract written anywhere in the world this year.

YSI humbly submits that it would be a lot more interesting if Goldman wasn’t covered on the back end.  Surely, other corporations and foundations will not receive that consideration from governments interested in SIBs, because there are exactly zero leaders of government in the country with Bloomberg’s combination of personal wealth and benevolence.

-John Kelly is the editor of The Chronicle of Social Change

Youth Services Insider: Time for New Numbers on Adoption Disruption

by John Kelly

Youth Services Insider was able to attend a recent roundtable discussion on prevention the disruption of adoptions involving children in foster care. The conversation started on that subject, but grew to include discussion other aspects of adoption policy.

Following are a few thoughts from the discussion, which was led by former foster youth and child welfare researchers.

How big is the problem? Who knows?
Twenty-eight years ago, University of Maryland School of Social Work Dean Richard Barth completed a study in California aimed at projecting how many adoptions of foster children are disrupted. There’s a few ways a disruption occurs, but the majority of times it entails new contact with the child welfare system or a youth running away from home.

“In California, we went to each county and asked them if they could give us a list or some information about what the disruption rates were,” Barth said in an interview the week after the roundtable. “Some counties had spreadsheets ready, and some didn’t have a clue.”

Barth and his colleagues then asked if the agencies could contact the families where disruptions occurred, and ask if they’d agree to an interview with researchers. Ultimately, he said, just over 100 families agreed to discuss their experiences.

Barth’s team found that about 14 percent of adoptions disrupted. Since then, two studies in Illinois, conducted in the 1990s, found similar rates. And while the federal government helped spur a rise in adoptions out of foster care with financial incentives in the Adoption and Safe Families Act in 1997, it has never required states to report on the success of those adoptions.

Illinois is generally considered to be one of the better states at handling adoptions. But even if we assume the national rate is really been steady at 14 percent since the 1980s, that means there are a whole lot more adoptions disrupting than there used to be.

The number of adoptions from foster care exploded during that time period – from 28,000 in 1996 to 50,000 in 2011. So now, it would be 14 percent of a much bigger pie.

Barth called at the roundtable for a new study to get underway this year and to be ready in time to mark the 30th anniversary of his initial venture.

How would he structure this iteration, we asked Barth on the phone a week after the discussion? He said the best approach might be to find between six and ten states that have some capacity to track children post-adoption. Massachusetts and Illinois are pretty much able to do so now, he said.

The trick would be finding a common way to follow an adopted child out of, and then back into, a system. A big challenge to that, said Barth: in most cases, “their names change” when they get adopted.

YSI mentioned that the Chronicle had, in a recent Knight Foundation grant competition about data, pitched the idea of using social security numbers to follow adopted youths. The theory being: only a youth who was adopted and then had a new child welfare case initiated afterward, would have a SSN show up twice.

“Social security numbers are not in all the [state] databases,” said Barth. “If you got adopted, say you’re 17 now and adopted at 3 in 1998, it is very unlikely that your SSN was entered” before the adoption.

Social security numbers are “much more routinely used” now by agencies, he said, but they are loath to divulge them and risk youths falling prey to identity theft.

Medicaid numbers are issued to most youths in the system, he said, so that might be a better or safer way to use data as a trace on adoptions.

Regardless of the trace identification method, Barth points out that this would only reveal the youths who made further contact with child welfare systems after an adoption. It would not include some of the youths who run away from adoptive homes or children who were placed into residential treatment directly by their adoptive parents.

Either would constitute a disruption, he said; following ID numbers would capture neither.

What is being espoused now might not be working
Barth expressed a similar dim view of the knowledge base around what works to keep adoptions from disrupting.

“Casey Family Services did a big study on its post-adoption services” in Maine, Barth said. “They couldn’t come up with any real evidence that the services had an impact.”

Residential placements are an option that adoptive parents will often pursue on their own, said Barth; indeed, he mentioned at the roundtable that he put his own adoptive daughter in a residential care facility after she threatened his wife a number of times.

Years later, he said, he commiserated with other adoptive parents about how foolish a choice it was. The data on “residential care is pretty bleak, there’s almost no evidence it works and some evidence that some kids get worse.”

Actually, the more accurate take is that the net effect of residential care is zero, Barth said in the phone interview: some adopted foster kids do thrive in the setting. So it may be worth examining what factors into successful residential programs: what are the characteristics of youths who thrive there? What type of program components have the greatest benefit?

Barth also said that efforts should be made to establish a standard, national home visitation screen. James Williams, a former foster youth from South Carolina, agreed. He discussed his experience being adopted by unstable parents that would quickly abuse him, landing Williams right back in foster care.

“Whenever youth go into adoptions, there should be more adult visits,” said Williams. “My adoptive parents had a record of domestic violence. It’s insane when you think about how badly systems want to get kids out. They’re willing to put [youth] with anyone.”

Inform Kids
Based on the experiences of the four former foster youths on the panel, systems generally listen to children’s views on adoption. The problem, according to 23-year-old Tawny Spinelli, is that very little is done to shape the view of children about the possibilities of adoption.

“When I was approached about adoption, I was 13,” Spinelli said at the roundtable.  “I had already had seven different placements with seven different families, some relatives some others. If I don’t belong with other families, why would an adoptive family work?”

But nobody helped her think through that quandary, and her initial reaction was to say no. And nobody brought up adoption with her again until her foster parent mentioned the prospect casually when she was already 17.

Connection to birth family: option, not mandate
Marchelle Roberts, one of the foster care alumni who spoke at the roundtable, said  that little effort was made to keep her connected to relatives when she was still in foster care, and then after her adoption was finalized.

“My adoptive family made me who I am today,” Roberts said, “but I want relationships with any fellow siblings or uncles, etcetera, that I can.”

Ashley Lepse, also a former foster youth, said she was forced to visit with her biological mother even though she did not want to and was on a path from foster care to adoption. Lepse said the mandate was what she disliked, and agreed with Roberts that every foster and adoptive youth should be able to find and seek out their biological family members if they choose to do so.

John Kelly is the editor of The Chronicle of Social Change

Bachmann on Being a Foster Mom, the Foster Youth Caucus and Uninterrupted Scholars

The day before Congress went into summer recess on August 3rd, Representative Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) sat down with FMC’s Daniel Heimpel to discuss her experience as a foster mother, the formation of the Congressional Caucus on Foster Youth as well as the Uninterrupted Scholars Act.

The bill, which would ease access to foster kids educational records, had been introduced by Bachmann, and Caucus co-founders Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif), Rep. Tom Marino (R-Penn.) and Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) on March 31st. The Senate followed suit on August 2nd.

- Daniel Heimpel