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| INTRODUCTION
PROJECT DESCRIPTION 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 establishes three goals for child welfare systems--attaining safety, permanency and well being for children in care. Additionally, ASFA requires the development of outcome measures for each goal, defines state reporting on progress toward achieving outcomes and modifies 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 Information 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, in collaboration with the Commonwealth of Kentucky Department of Community Based Services, to develop a trainer’s guide to support a curriculum that integrates ASFA mandates with the effective use of child welfare data to support decision making at both the case and system levels. This 3-year project, which began in September 2000, is now in its third and final year. In Year 1 of the project the Muskie project team collaborated with the Kentucky child welfare agency to conduct a phone poll of 47 child welfare agencies and issue a report of the findings, 'Building the Child Welfare Team Promising Practices 2001 Phone Poll Results’ , published in May, 2001, create ASFA implementation competencies and design a core curriculum to train child welfare managers and supervisors on data use and ASFA implementation skills. The curriculum, ‘Bringing Together the Child Welfare Team’, was designed to help child welfare supervisors, managers and senior administrators implement the requirements of ASFA by ensuring that clients needs are assessed quickly, that individualized services are available and delivered promptly and that the agency systems support effective child welfare practice. In Year 2 the Muskie project team updated the ‘promising practices’ phone poll and field tested, evaluated and revised the core curriculum in collaboration with: the Commonwealth of Kentucky Department of Community Based Services; the Department of Children, Youth and Families, New Mexico; Cuyahoga County Children and Family Services, Cleveland, Ohio; and the Division of Children and Family Services and the Training Partnerships, Wisconsin. The ‘Bringing Together the Child Welfare Team’ curriculum became available for use by child welfare agencies in the fall of 2002. In Year 3, the current project year, the project team again updated the ‘promising practices’ phone poll, sponsored a Training Roundtable Conference to identify best practices and criteria for high performance training systems that support achievement of organizational mission, goals and objectives, provided intensive training of trainers to nine child welfare agencies on the ‘Bringing Together the Child Welfare Team’ curriculum and customized the core curriculum into a five set training series and a course syllabus.
This report, Building the Child Welfare Team: Results of the 2003 Adoption and Safe Families Act Phone Poll, presents findings from the third ‘promising practices’ poll conducted by the Edmund S. Muskie School of Public Service. Project team members polled representatives from 37 child welfare agencies and 4 court improvement projects and asked them to identify the skills staff need to implement ASFA and how meeting the requirements of ASFA has changed the way the agency does business. The report includes:
The project team will distribute the Building the Child Welfare Team: Results of the 2003 Adoption and Safe Families Act Phone Poll report to respondents, child welfare agencies, court improvement projects and other interested entities and publish it on the project website (http://www.muskie.usm.maine.edu/asfa). We hope this report provides the child protective community with information and ideas about administrative practices that have proved helpful to individual child welfare agencies as they work to meet the challenge of implementing ASFA. Please visit the website for this project to view or download this report, the 2001 and 2002 poll reports and a full description of the project. Individual state by state poll results from 2001, 2002 and 2003 years can also be found on the project website.
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