Oklahoma Receives Child Welfare CFSR Final Report

OKLAHOMA CAPITOL— Oklahoma just received its final report from the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services Children’s Bureau regarding an on-site the Child and Family Services Review conducted in August 2007. The HHS Children’s Bureau uses the CFSR process to review services to children and families involved in a state’s child welfare system, according to officials at the Oklahoma Department of Human Services.
The CFSR report is part of a continuous quality improvement process shared between the federal government and various components of each state’s child welfare system. It includes a state’s court system, prosecutors, social workers, educators and health and mental health professionals, all of whom are involved in different areas of a state’s child welfare system.

The CFSR process was established nearly a decade ago by the federal government with input from many of the states. The goal is to set in place a state-of-the-art review and standards system to raise the service performance levels for the nation’s child welfare systems. The CFSR is continuously evolving itself as the state of the nation’s child welfare system needs change to meet current practice standards.

The CFSR process is intended to examine a number of aspects of a child welfare system: from the courts, to the availability of professional services, to prosecution of cases and the availability of foster care.

The first round of federal reviews began about 7 years ago. Only 7 states have received final reports from the HHS Children’s Bureau on the second round of the reviews, which began in 2007. The CFSR contains 20 categories of scores. To be in compliance with any CFSR assessment standard, a state most score 95 percent or higher on the standard. The sample size reviewed during Oklahoma’s on-site visit was a total of 65 cases, and not all cases were applicable to each category.

Oklahoma’s scores were neither the best nor the worst in any category among the 7 states receiving scores to date. Oklahoma did receive passing scores on 5 of the 7 site-based “process scores” which tied it for second among the states having received scores to date.

Oklahoma’s complete report and an executive summary are posted on the OKDHS Web site at www.OKDHS.org, under Library - Reports.

STRENGTHS—

• Outside of its dedicated employees working in the state’s child welfare system, Oklahoma’s strengths lie in its information technology systems, its monitoring of care, the rates at which children move through the system and its commitment to adoption for children into permanent homes, as oppose to long-term stays in foster care.  Oklahoma was the first state in the nation to have a federally approved Statewide Automated Child Welfare Information System (SACWIS) and remains 1of only 6 states with such a system.  The system is commonly referred to as KIDS (not an acronym).
• Oklahoma has a proven visitation frequency for children in foster care. According to a December 2005 HHS Office of Inspector General study, Oklahoma was 1 of only 5 states (Colorado, Utah, South Carolina and Florida) that could document a 90 percent or higher monthly visitation rate of foster children by child welfare staff.
• Oklahoma is well below the national average for the amount of time children spend in foster care. In Oklahoma, the average length of time children have been in care is 21.2 months. The national average is 28.8 months.  This success is also tied to the commitment Oklahoma has made to adopting children from foster care. More than 1,000 children have been adopted from foster care each year for many years. This is one of the highest per capita adoption rates in the nation.

CHALLENGES—The challenges and needs for improvement in child welfare have mostly to do with the volume of children in foster care, the need for staffing not only with social workers, but the courts, counselors, attorneys, substance abuse service providers and other professionals who seek to help families recover.

Oklahoma has lower per capita income than the national average.  Therefore, the state has more children, per capita, living in poverty.  Poverty often is a major contributor to abuse and neglect. This means, more children per capita are placed in foster care by the state’s courts.  This increases the demand for foster care and the families needed to provide such care. Often foster parents adopt the children placed in their care. This increases the pressure on the system to find new foster families.

Oklahoma has 90 days from the date the final report is issued to prepare a Program Improvement Plan. The plan will be submitted to the HHS Children’s Bureau for its review and consideration. When approved, the plan will be activated by Oklahoma and monitored for compliance by state monitors and HHS Children’s Bureau reviewers.

Oklahoma has made significant improvements in its child welfare system during the last decade. On behalf of the state, OKDHS has a long-standing, positive working relationship with its federal and regional partners and state officials anticipate a strong collaborative relationship in the effort to continue to improve Oklahoma’s Child Welfare system.

Some of the improvements will require funding such as reducing caseloads with more workers, improving foster care rates and improving the availability of prevention services so that some children can avoid entering foster care.

Many of the pending improvements will come under the leadership of Gary Miller, who assumed the duties of Oklahoma’s child welfare system as director of the OKDHS Children and Family Services Division, March 3. Miller most recently retired from the judicial bench as Canadian County Associate District Judge, where he served for 15 years. While on the bench, Miller handled hundreds of child welfare cases and has held a number of state-level judiciary positions that impacted the delivery of services to Oklahoma’s children and families.

His legal experiences have given him and intimate knowledge of the complex dynamics involved in children and families at risk. This knowledge will be invaluable as Oklahoma crafts its Program Improvement Plan response for the HHS Children’s Bureau, and even more valuable as Oklahoma initiates its PIP.

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