County Welfare Directors Association

As California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) prepares to leave office at the end of the year, the last round of child welfare legislation under his watch includes a new law to ease the path of relative caregivers under the Continuum of Care Reform (CCR), the major child welfare initiative developed during his time as governor.

A number of news outlets have published articles in the past two weeks about the children and parents separated by Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) as they cross our borders. Some of these articles have referred to the children handed over to contracted agencies and placed into homes as being “in foster care.”

California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) signed a stop-gap measure on Tuesday that will provide emergency funding to caregivers who take in a foster child before completing the approval process. Over the past year, the state’s new approval process for caregivers in the state has led to lengthy funding delays for foster parents and relative caregivers, now collectively known as resource families.

The Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA), which offers a significant restructuring of the multi-billion dollar federal entitlement for child welfare, could not pass the Senate as a standalone bill in 2016.

California Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation on Monday that aims to resolve issues preventing kids placed in out-of-county foster homes from getting needed mental health treatment. About one in five foster youth in California — or about 13,000 youth — are considered out of county, meaning they have been placed in a county other than the one where they first entered the state’s child welfare system.

As California prepares to implement massive changes in how it provides care for foster children, many of the local agencies that will determine the failure or success of the effort — the county behavioral health departments — are completely unprepared to deliver on the promise of improved care.

Thomas leans over his computer putting the final touches on 40 hours of paperwork that encapsulates weeks of thoughtful dialog with his partner, Brett.* Finally, they have completed their applications to become foster parents.

As the state struggles to provide enough foster homes, California advocates and policymakers say one major challenge has been a lack of childcare for foster parents. For first-time foster parents Irene Barraza and Amy Saucier of Oakland, adding a new child to their home forced them to come up with creative solutions to balancing childcare with work.

This week, the California Child Welfare Co-Investment Partnership released a summary of their recent research and analysis efforts, entitled “Crossover Youth: A Shared Responsibility.” The first two sections of the report begin with two statistics on California youth: first, “there were 496,972 reports of [child] neglect and abuse in 2014, with 81,391 substantiated,” and second, “there were 101,531 young people referred to juvenile probation in 2014.”