Children and Youth Services Selected to Participate in Second Phase

Cumberland County — Children and Youth Services was recently selected to participate in the second phase of the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Court’s permanency initiative, according to Director Wendy Hoverter.

The county joins 13 other counties in this statewide effort to improve outcomes for children placed in substitute care.

“With enhanced judicial oversight and strength-based, family-led practices, our overriding goals are to keep children safely in their homes, return others to their homes, and when staying or returning home is not possible, quickly find the best alternative permanent home for every child,” state Supreme Court Justice Max Baer, a former administrative judge of family court in Allegheny County, said in a press release issued by Cumberland County.

Baer is guiding the efforts on behalf of the Supreme Court.

The permanency initiative focuses on three practice areas: family finding, family group decision-making and family development credentials.

The high court expects the initiative will reduce the number of children adjudicated as dependents and in court-ordered placement; reduce the time children spend in the foster care system; reduce the number who re-enter care; and reduce the dependency case load on the courts.

Other outcomes may include reducing the cost of children in care, the need for residential and institutional placements and increase child placement stability, according to the release.

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Reporter’s Notebook, The Sentinel

Supreme Court Initiative to Improve Lives of Dependent Children Shows Early Progress

HARRISBURG — On Thursday, August 27 at 11:40 am in Room 60, EWing of the State Capitol Building, Sandra Moore, Administrator of the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts’ Office of Children & Families in the Court is scheduled to testify before the State House Committee on Children and Youth regarding the Supreme Court’s statewide initiative to improve the lives of dependent children.

Your coverage is invited. The hearing begins at 10 am.

The Court’s initiative, known as “The Permanency Practice Initiative,” strives to safely:

  • Reduce the number of children adjudicated as dependents and in court-ordered placement
  • Reduce the time children spend in the foster care system
  • Reduce the number of children who re-enter care
  • Reduce the dependency court caseload
  • Reduce the cost of children in care
  • Reduce the need for residential and institutional placements, and
  • Increase child placement stability.

Also testifying with Sandra Moore will be Dauphin County Common Pleas, Dependency and Orphan’s Court Judge Todd Hoover; Dauphin County Commissioner George Hartwick, III; Allegheny County Children’s Court Administrator Cindy Stoltz and Chester County Department of Children and Youth and Families Director Keith Hayes.

“The early results of our efforts are very promising,” Moore said. “We are finding additional extended family members who are becoming lifelong connections for the dependent children and counties are already beginning to report reductions in the number of children in foster care.

“By quickly moving dependent children into permanent family settings, we not only significantly improve their chances to succeed; we significantly reduce the cost of institutional care for the counties, thus saving tax dollars for other valuable county children and family services.”

Statewide Foster Care Initiative Sees Results in Montco

Amaris Elliott-Engel, The Legal Intelligencer

Less than a year after the state Supreme Court started an initiative to reduce the number of children in foster care, Montgomery County has reduced the number of children being placed outside of their homes by 20 percent, Laurie O’Connor, director of the Montgomery County Office of Children & Youth, reported.

Montgomery County also has increased the number of children who have a permanent resolution to their dependency cases by returning children to their families or placing children with new families through adoption or permanent custodianship, O’Connor said.

The federal standard for “timely permanency” for children is one year, she said.

“Our outcomes or performance measures have been better this past year than they have ever been before,” O’Connor said. O’Connor’s office handled 1,058 investigations last year and a caseload involving 798 families in the fiscal year that ended June 30.

Montgomery County is one of 13 counties undertaking the second phase of the state Supreme Court’s permanency practice initiative.

The drive to improve the outcome in dependency cases was started by Justice Max Baer, the liaison justice for family court issues, in partnership with the state Department of Public Welfare’s Office of Children, Youth and Families. The initiative kicked off last September with trainings with a national expert on helping social workers find relatives and other loved ones who will commit to supporting children in foster care.

Fourteen other counties have committed to the first phase of the initiative, and still more counties like Philadelphia County across the state are implementing portions of the plan, said Sandy Moore, the administrator of the Supreme Court’s Office of Children and Families in the Courts.

Moore said statewide data is not yet available on the efficacy of the initiative because counties joining in the dependency case improvement goals only started entering data into the state’s dependency case management system late last year.

For counties to be officially part of the initiative, they must implement three practices: hold conferences with family members and a mediator to help families take over from social workers and judges in making plans for the best care of children subject to dependency proceedings; reach out to a wide network of family members to participate in the family group decision-making; and train social workers from the public sector and the private sector to help families be more self-sufficient, Moore said.

The initiative also asks county courts to conduct three-month reviews, instead of six-month reviews, for every child in foster care.

The biggest problem in the first months of the initiative were the counties that started off too fast and wanted to apply new practices to every child their office had contact with, Moore said. Moore said her office is encouraging counties to implement the practices for a smaller subset of cases in the beginning.

Ultimately, the dependency case campaign is seeking to show that additional judicial oversight through the three-month reviews makes a difference in reducing the time children spend in foster care and the number of children who enter foster care in the first place, Moore said.

“We are almost positive it will,” she said.

Adams County President Judge John D. Kuhn said Adams County had already implemented family group decision-making conferences several years ago. Family group decision-making is now being used by the county’s adult probation office, juvenile probation office and county prison, Kuhn said.

The county’s dependency case stakeholders were interested in expanding the mechanisms that help families create their own solutions and solve their problems “without necessarily having to rely on the government to do that,” said Kuhn of his county, which is another county participating in the second phase of the permanency practice initiative.

Doing three-month case reviews is very resource-intensive, Kuhn said. Yet the judge estimates the county is now doing three-month reviews in 90 to 95 percent of the county’s dependency cases.

Having more frequent reviews by a judge pushes families to stay dedicated to the goals set for them, so they don’t become lax and scramble at the last minute before a six-month review to show they have been working on the goals set for them by the court, Kuhn said.

“More frequent reviews keep everybody on the top of the case and hopefully shorten the time the court and the youth agency need to be involved in the family,” Kuhn said.

Kuhn conducted 284 dependency hearings in 2008. Adams County has 87 children in care, said Kathy McConaghay, administrator of the Adams County Children and Youth Services office.

When 12 employees from McConaghay’s office came back from an encore permanent practice initiative training held just two weeks ago, employees were already able to implement their training on how to find kin for children in foster care who hadn’t been previously known to case workers, McConaghay said.

O’Connor and McConaghay said the implementation of the initiative in their counties wouldn’t have happened without the increased involvement of a family court judge.

In Montgomery County, Common Pleas Judge Paul W. Tressler is spearheading the court’s involvement, O’Connor said. Tressler is on vacation and was not available to comment for this story, according to his chambers.

Funding for the initiative is entirely from federal grants from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, so Pennsylvania’s budget woes haven’t affected the continuance of the initiative, Moore said. Besides the annual trainings held on a regional basis, the initiative also is paying for computers and printers for the counties participating in the initiative so county officials can print orders in the courtroom for families appearing for three-month reviews, Moore said.

One of the three trainings held this year as part of the permanency practice initiative was in Luzerne County. The judicial scandal in Luzerne County started off with juvenile family court cases, not dependency family court cases, Moore noted, but “I was very pleased that Luzerne applied to be a phase-two county.”

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13 Additional Counties Join Initiative to Improve Lives of Dependent Children

HARRISBURG — As part of a statewide initiative to improve the lives of dependent children, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania will hold three training sessions in August featuring Kevin Campbell — a nationally known youth permanency expert and creator of Family Finding, a strategy aimed at finding lost or forgotten individuals willing to provide lifelong support for abused and neglected children.

More than 160 judges, state, county and private sector children and youth professionals from surrounding areas (see attached) will be attending training sessions scheduled for:

  • August 4 and 5; at the Rustic Lodge, 2199 Oakland Avenue, Indiana, PA
  • August 6 and 7; at the Adams County Department of Emergency Services, 230 Greenamyer Lane, Gettysburg, PA
  • August 11 and 12; at the Ramada Inn, 20 Public Square, Wilkes-Barre, PA

Each session will run from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm. Your coverage is invited.

State Supreme Court Justice Max Baer, a former administrative judge of family court in Allegheny County who is guiding these efforts on behalf of the Supreme Court, said, “With enhanced judicial oversight and strength-based, family-led practices, our overriding goals are to keep children safely in their homes, return others to their homes, and when staying or returning home is not possible, quickly find the best alternative permanent home for every child.”

The August training sessions are the second phase of the Supreme Court’s effort to provide Family Finding training throughout the state. Officials in 14 counties attended phase one training sessions held in September 2008.

Sandy Moore, Administrator of the Office of Children & Families in the Court (OCFC), said, “Family Finding combines common sense, good social and detective work, and the use of technology to seek out extended family members for dependent children.”

“Early results of this training are very promising,” Moore added. “A review of 40 dependency cases in phase one counties indicated that through Family Finding methods 1767 additional family resources were identified. Of those, approximately 250 became new lifelong connections for the dependent children.”