July 2012, Advocates for Children of New York: Over the last decade, child welfare agencies and advocates have begun to recognize that the students they serve need access to greater educational opportunities, and that education is critically important to child wellbeing, permanency planning and a successful transition to adulthood. In particular, best practices research has consistently identified education advocacy as an effective strategy to improve school stability and educational outcomes for this population of vulnerable youth. This report offers insights from one program, called Project Achieve, which pairs Advocates for Children of New York (“AFC”), a non-profit that provides education advocacy to low-income students in New York City, with local foster care and preventive services agencies. The report explains how Project Achieve works and examines its long-term impact on the children and families served by these agencies, the people who work there and the city’s child welfare system itself. Link to Report
Tag Archives: Foster Care
Neighbor to Family Sibling Foster Care Model
California Evidence-Based Clearinghouse for Child Welfare: The Neighbor To Family Sibling Foster Care Model is a child-centered, family-focused foster care model is designed to keep sibling groups, including large sibling groups, together in stable foster care placements while working intensively on reunification or permanency plans that keep the siblings together. The program uses a community-based, team-oriented approach, including foster caregivers and birth parents as part of the treatment team. Trained and supported foster caregivers are key to the model’s success. Neighbor To Neighbor professionalized this key role by placing these trained foster caregivers on the payroll with salaries and benefits. Foster families, birth families, and children receive comprehensive and intensive services including individualized case management, advocacy, and clinical services on a weekly basis. Link to Program Description
Aging out of Foster Care: Important Information for Teens
Children’s Law Center, Washington DC: List steps that youth aging out need to take to successfully age out of care. Some resources are D.C. specific but the action steps listed have general applicability. Link to Information Sheet
The Michigan Department of Human Services (MDHS) Health Oversight and Coordination Plan
December 7, 2011: In Michigan, the modified settlement agreement, Dwayne B. v. Rick Snyder et al. emphasizes the importance of MDHS monitoring the provision of health services to foster children to determine whether they are of appropriate quality and are having the intended effect. This MDHS Health Oversight and Coordination Plan is developed to establish continuity of health care for children in foster care and to ensure a comprehensive and coordinated treatment approach by all professionals involved in their care.
MDHS is committed to improving the delivery of health care services to children. The Health Oversight and Coordination Plan ensures forward movement to improved health care delivery while an infrastructure is put in place to sustain these efforts and yield an improved health care delivery system that meets the physical and mental health needs of every child in foster care. MDHS will continue to monitor best practices and propose changes to the MDHS health plan when new strategies provide promising outcomes. Link to pdf Plan
Kids’ Share 2012: Report on Federal Expenditures on Children Through 2011
2012, Urban Institute: This sixth annual Kids’ Share report examines federal expenditures on children in 2011, when the temporary boost in federal funding to address the recession was dwindling, yet states and families were still struggling to recover from the recession. This report provides in-depth analysis of dozens of federal programs and tax provisions that allocate resources to children and places these expenditures in the broader context of the overall federal budget. Includes: foster care, adoption assistance, social services block grants and other social services expenditures. Link to pdf Report
The Therapeutic Preschool: An Intensive Intervention for Traumatized 3-6 Year Olds
Summer 2012, Infant Crier, pp 4-8, Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health: A certain number of children with significant challenges need continuing intervention past age 3. They and their parents have trouble making the transition from intensive home-based therapy to more limited or no services during the preschool years. For children, the difficulties of this transition show up as behavioral and emotional problems in childcare or Head Start programs that are not organized to provide therapeutic support. How might services be organized? Treatment would be organized to stress helping preschoolers master self-regulation difficulties by providing them with experiences of mutual regulation with parents and other adults. In addition, more intensive services would be available to preschoolers with significant histories of neglect, abuse, trauma, and loss. Discusses the Building Blocks Therapeutic Preschool program in Oakland, California. Many of the kids at Building Blocks, probably most at any given time, do not live with biological parents; they live instead with relatives and foster parents. Nearly all of the children have significant histories of early trauma and neglect. Link to pdf Infant Crier Issue