The Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) of 1997 was passed in response to a growing national concern about the extended periods of time that children spend in foster care. ASFA mandates tighter timeframes and establishes three goal areas for child welfare systems--attaining safety, permanency and well being for children in care. ASFA requires the development of outcome measures in each goal area on which all states must report and changes the procedures for federal reviews of public child welfare systems. These requirements, in combination with the mandates of other relevant legislation and regulations, substantially change the way child welfare systems are to be managed.

Federal legislation also provides for the development of three major child welfare data collection systems--NCANDS (National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System), AFCARS (Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Report System) and SACWIS (Statewide Automated Child Welfare Systems). It is now possible to use data to evaluate performance in child welfare programs and to establish clear measures of success. However, if these federal mandates and systems are to inform practice, child welfare professionals must put them to use.

To support that aim, the Children's Bureau, Administration for Children and Families, funded the Institute of Child and Family Policy at the Edmund S. Muskie School of Public Service, University of Southern Maine, to develop an approach to training that integrates ASFA mandates with the effective use of child welfare data to support decision making at both the case and system levels. Working collaboratively with child welfare agencies, the Muskie project team will develop, deliver and disseminate a train the trainer curriculum for public child welfare managers and supervisors. The curriculum will enhance their capacity to understand and implement the mandates of ASFA and strengthen their ability to use data to improve outcomes for children in the system.

This project began in September 2000 and will last for three years. The workplan for the three years is summarized below:

• In Year 1 of the project the project team will collaborate with the Kentucky child welfare agency and a national multi-disciplinary advisory council, to develop an ASFA implementation 'promising practices' analysis, create ASFA implementation competencies and design a curriculum to train child welfare managers and supervisors on data use and ASFA implementation skills.
• In Year 2, in collaboration with at least three state child welfare agencies (Kentucky and two others), the project team will field test, evaluate and revise the core curriculum.
• In Year 3 the project team will implement a national dissemination plan that provides intensive training of trainers in ten additional child welfare agencies, briefs ACF regional office staff, establishes a peer to peer consultation capacity and customizes the core curriculum to promote utilization by institutions of higher education that train child welfare professionals.

One of the Year 1 tasks was to develop an analysis of 'promising practices', in other words to determine what activities worked the best for child welfare agencies and courts as they supported staff in implementing ASFA. To collect this information the project team polled child welfare agencies and selected court improvement project personnel to determine what administrative, training and organizational activities they have already undertaken to implement ASFA. This report presents the initial findings from the poll that will be used to inform the curriculum development.

This report includes an Executive Summary that provides a brief description of the entire report. The Introduction describes the curriculum development project and the role the 'promising practices' play in the development of the curriculum. The Methodology section describes how the poll was conducted, the design of the instruments to collect the data and the approach to data analysis. The Results section summarizes the data that we collected and presents remarks from respondents that illuminate the 'promising practices'. The Concluding Remarks section highlights the lessons learned from the poll and the value of the 'promising practices' analysis to the development of the curriculum itself. The Appendices include documents showing frequencies, samples of the poll instruments and a listing of the individuals who participated in the poll.

Please visit the website for this project, http://www.muskie.usm.maine.edu/asfa, to view or download this report, a full description of the project and the individual state poll results.

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