By Mary K. ReinhartThe Republic | azcentral.com The Republic | azcentral.com Tue Dec 11, 2012 11:39 PM
Arizona’s child-welfare agency is cutting basic services to families and imposing new guidelines that could limit use of other programs in budget-cutting moves that could keep children in foster care longer, according to documents obtained by The Arizona Republic.
Among the documents is a recent memo that blames the cuts in services on a projected multimillion-dollar budget shortfall at state Child Protective Services.
“The department has experienced multiple factors contributing to not being able to keep within our budget,” the e-mail from a CPS administrator said.
“These factors have all driven up the costs to the department, which is not allowing the department to keep within our budget and is affecting the service delivery on our cases, particularly visitation, parent-aide services and transportation costs.”
The state is delaying some services for months and requiring upper-management approval for what just weeks ago had been standard appointments with mentors known as parent aides. The funding problems threaten to limit supervised visits between parents and their children.
Child-welfare experts say the changes could make it harder to reunite families and further increase the record number of kids in foster care. Attorneys for children and parents say CPS in some cases is disobeying court orders requiring more frequent visits for their clients.
The budget tightening also could jeopardize federal child-welfare funding, which is dependent upon states making “reasonable efforts” to reunite families before officials can terminate parental rights and begin adoption proceedings.
That means the state must show that parents had the opportunity to participate in substance-abuse treatment or mental-health treatment and get other assistance to correct the problems that caused their children to be removed.
Until that reasonable-effort standard is met, the child remains in foster-care limbo.
Sen. Linda Lopez, D-Tucson, said she’s alarmed by the sudden budget adjustments. At least one Tucson social-service agency plans to lay off 30 people, she said, and others may follow.
“The immediate issue is getting the resources in place so that these agencies aren’t laying off the people who can support reunification,” Lopez said.
“None of this makes sense to me in terms of doing what’s best for the kids. To me, this seems like grounds for some sort of legal action. We’re not fulfilling our responsibility as the guardians of these children.”
State officials acknowledge a current-year CPS budget gap of up to $35million, about $27million of it because of the growing number of foster kids and the need to place more children in group homes and shelters.
The state has seen a 25 percent increase in the number of kids in foster care this past year, hitting a record 14,500 children last month, as worker caseloads continue to be two and three times state and national standards. The influx and a shortage of foster homes mean more children are living in group homes and shelters, which cost the state up to four times as much as placing kids in foster homes.
Officials maintain the shortfall has not led to any reduction in services to families, including supervised visits and parent-aide services. They say the budget gap will be filled with $20 million in federal block-grant funding intended for a variety of social services.
But internal memos and interviews with service providers, attorneys and others show parents and children are limited to one visit per week even though Maricopa County Juvenile Court judges routinely ordered two visits weekly for babies and children 3 and younger.
CPS also has drastically reduced the use of parent aides, who had been supervising most weekly parent-child visits. That task that now falls to CPS case managers and assistants, known as case aides, even as the number of foster children continues to rise.
“It’s true that there’s no reduction in dollars, but there is a reduction in services if you look at the fact that everybody isn’t able to get services,” said Ron Carpio, a vice president for TERROS, which runs the Families FIRST substance-abuse program in Maricopa County. “They can’t keep up with the visits.”
Impact on kids, agency layoffs
Regular visits are fundamental to reuniting families, and child-welfare experts say the service reductions and delays threaten to lengthen the time children stay in foster care and jeopardize their ability to return home or become part of a new, permanent family.
The abrupt policy changes announced last month primarily affect children removed from their homes because of suspected abuse or neglect and have had ripple effects throughout the system.
Some service providers recently laid off dozens of workers, and others are planning for it because the state last month stopped sending them new cases for parent aides. CPS now requires most new CPS cases to go through the state-funded Families FIRST substance-abuse program so parents can begin treatment before other services are put in place.
TERROS has seen nearly 1,000 clients since the fiscal year began July 1, double the number the state budgeted for the year that ends June 30.
“We are over our capacity,” Carpio said. “Somebody has underestimated the costs associated with keeping our kids safe. We just can’t continue like this.”
The parent-aide restrictions, announced to providers at a meeting with CPS administrators Nov. 19, are expected to create a bottleneck of cases as hundreds of visits formerly facilitated by contract workers become the responsibility of state caseworkers and aides.
CPS workers typically assigned a parent aide to help facilitate visits and referred parents to Families FIRST for treatment and urinalysis. Drugs or alcohol play a role in about 80 percent of CPS cases. Substance-abuse experts say it’s important to get parents into treatment while giving them the incentive of seeing their children frequently.
“This means they’re not going to be getting the visits they should be getting,” Carpio said. “It just makes them angry. And I don’t think it motivates them to start services.”
Other cost-saving measures outlined in an e-mail to CPS workers that was given to providers include: limits on bus passes for teens who are working or receiving a subsidy to live on their own; limits on certain drug screenings; and additional qualifications for family-preservation services, which are intended to keep children in their homes.
‘An agency under siege’
Department of Economic Security Director Clarence Carter told The Republic that his agency “must begin to learn to live within our means.” He said it’s too soon to consider asking lawmakers and Gov. Jan Brewer for a midyear budget increase.
“For a long time in this agency, the Child Protective Services system was allowed to spend whatever it needed to spend, and the rest of the agency would make it up,” Carter said in an interview. “We have requested a budget that we believe allows us to manage this system.”
In response to additional questions about the policy changes, department spokesman Tasya Peterson said in an e-mail: “No service reductions have been made or are planned in child welfare for this fiscal year, though the department continues to evaluate the efficacy of services across the entire spectrum of child welfare and will make any necessary adjustments as appropriate.”
Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Eddward Ballinger, who presides over the county’s Juvenile Court, said CPS doesn’t have enough money and needs to request more from state lawmakers.
“It’s terrible. ... It’s basically an agency under siege,” Ballinger said. “They’re not the bad guy. They’re just broke.”
Ballinger said the four judges who hear dependency cases in a specialized program to more quickly move children younger than 3 through the foster-care system continue to require at least twice-weekly visits for families.
But attorneys who represent families and children in Dependency Court say that often doesn’t happen.
“The problem seems to be that even when the judges are ordering it, CPS still isn’t doing it,” said Chris Phillis, director of the Maricopa County Office of the Public Advocate, which represents parents in CPS cases. “There needs to be some sort of consequence put on CPS.”
More work for caseworkers
The department maintains that there have been no limits placed on visits between parents and children. But a Dec. 2 e-mail from the Attorney General’s Office obtained by The Republic said the department could provide only weekly visits supervised by case managers or case aides, regardless of the child’s age or the family’s progress toward reunification.
In the e-mail to assistant attorneys general, Laura Giaquinto, chief counsel for the protective-services section, asked that attorneys “support the department legally (at court) that the department is in a position to provide visits to parents 1x/week supervised by either a case aid or a case manager.”
“This applies to ALL cases ... baby courts and older children,” Giaquinto wrote. “Please provide the feedback on how the courts are accepting/not accepting these arguments/visitation parameters back to me so I can provide this feedback to the department so they can continue to monitor this area closely.”
The memo also says the department is “being judicious” in its use of parent aides because not all families are ready to accept the mentoring and coaching the aides are supposed to provide. The aides, however, took a huge load off case managers and case aides because they supervised visits, CPS workers say.
CPS and providers agree that not every parent needs parent-aide services. But service providers said that their contract negotiations with the DES included certain expectations and that they hired staff this summer to accommodate that.
At Jewish Family and Children’s Services, a steady stream of about 40 new CPS cases a month dried up to nothing in mid-November. The agency last week laid off 14 employees.
Linda Scott, vice president for children and family solutions at Jewish Family, said she understands the need to tailor programs to families but is concerned that TERROS and CPS case managers won’t be able to pick up the slack. “I do not want to be pointing my finger at Child Protective Services. The people I work with on the front lines are trying very hard to do the best they can,” she said. “But I’m very sad for my staff. And I’m very worried about families who may not get the services they need.”
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