New Report Recommendations on DCS
Children’s Action Alliance (CAA) Newsletter:
July 7, 2015
Last week the Arizona Auditor General released an independent review of the Department of Child Safety conducted by The Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago. Chapin Hall reviewed 9 basic functions of the child safety system and found 7 to be at high risk for blocking success – including the lack of preventive services, few pathways of care, and weak services to link children with permanent homes.
The report notes a lack of clarity for the agency.It describes numerous operational ambiguities that lead to inconsistent decision making and contribute to children entering foster care and staying away from a permanent family longer and longer. The report affirms the widespread observation that the severe loss of both prevention and response resources due to budget cuts continues to have a dangerous impact on children and families. The report recommends a variety of actions going forward, including:
Establish and use clear safety assessment protocols and better standardize processes at the hotline and investigations- Support Healthy Families Arizona
- Install other in-home services to meet the needs of families that do not require foster care
- Increase the number of attorneys and examine the payment strategies to improve legal representation for children
- Continue to increase the size of the work force.
- Reduce entries into foster care and decrease the time until permanency
- Develop key outcome goals and report metrics on progress toward those goals
- Promote regular communication and engagement with foster parents, birth parents, foster youth, and advocacy communities.
- Partner with law enforcement in ways that identify family needs without criminalizing parents
Establish and use clear safety assessment protocols and better standardize processes at the hotline and investigationsChildren’s Action Alliance calls on Governor Ducey to take leadership on these steps – for the Department of Child Safety and beyond. The new report makes absolutely clear that simply recruiting more foster families and more volunteers alone will not fix the problems in the system or achieve our goals for child safety.
Click here for CAA’s essential DCS charts and graphs.
Category: Child Welfare
