Placement Stability
Children are sometimes determined to be unsafe in their home environment. Until those circumstances that created the safety concerns are removed/lessened the children must be removed from their home. As you can imagine, this creates upheaval and a lack of certainty for these children. In an emergency (as many cases are) the children are placed in a temporary shelter placement. This might be a family foster home, a placement with kin, or in a shelter facility. In the instance of a kin placement, the children should know the kin and feel more comfortable. Foster homes and shelter facilities mean that the children have to get to know strangers as their new caregivers.
Assessment of the specific threats of harm to the child, their vulnerabilities based on special needs, developmental stage and other factors, and the protective capacities of their caregivers begin with the first phone call. If the children cannot be safely returned to their parents within a short period of time, a more permanent sort of setting must be found for them.
Once a more permanent sort of setting is found, the children are moved to that home. This again creates uncertainty, anxiety, and upheaval for the children. Again, the children must adjust to a new home, caregivers, other children, schools, etc. Obviously, the system must look forward to a stable family environment to which they can belong while their parents engage in whatever service plan is necessary for them to return to their parents. If the parents are not successful in making the necessary changes to have their children safely returned to them, we work toward the foster family becoming their permanent family through adoption/guardianship.
Often, children are placed with kin. Unfortunately, sometimes once the kin realize that this may turn into a long-term sort of placement with the extra demands and expenses of caregiving for a child or a sibling group, they determine they cannot cope with those extra demands and the child must be moved into a foster care family.
These scenarios are reflected in the charts below. Everyone wants to minimize the amount of times the children must be moved and be affected by this sort of upheaval and change. The federal government has set a standard of only two placements for each child as being acceptable. The chart below shows how each geographic region is performing within this standard.
The placement stability issues and concerns have been determined to be a priority focus area and are therefore placed in the Dashboard section.
As recommendations/actions are made related to placement stability, additional postings will be added to this section.
The data below includes all children served in foster care (placed out of home for at least 24 hours) during the last year, and for all those in care 12 months or less what percent had two or fewer placements (actual provider or caretaker changes) excluding those temporary placements outlined in the federal guidelines (e.g. runaway, temporary hospitalization, trial home placements, etc.). For areas that utilize an emergency shelter placement, such as the Christmas Box House, this may present a challenge as it means that the child should not have another placement change for at least 12 months.
