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JUVENILE • Aug. 10, 2006
More Data Will Help Dependency Courts

Forum Column

By Miriam Aroni Krinsky

      Recall for a moment what time was like when you were in grade school. A three-month long summer vacation stretched ahead like an eternity. A school year seemed to last forever. Many of us packed more experiences, events and personal growth into our first-grade year than we now do in a decade.
      The clock ticks more slowly for children than it does for adults. For a child, each passage of time is filled with experiences that will be either savored or missed, but can never be repeated. At minimum, a year in foster care may mean an overlooked birthday, time spent away from familiar surroundings, and missed moments with friends and family. More often, it translates into multiple placements, falling behind in school and further emotional loss.
      Dependency courts are responsible for ensuring that children's rights to safety, permanence and well being are met in a timely and complete manner. But we must consider, in evaluating how well our courts and legal system are performing, whose clock is measuring the word timely. We should not be satisfied until dependency courts operate on Children's Standard Time.
      Too often a lack of data prevents children living in foster care from returning home or otherwise moving into safe, permanent and loving families as quickly as we would like. Judges may not be able to see the forest for the trees. They may have information on specific cases, or their own dockets, but neither they nor court administrators have access to the tools or systems needed to gather and report the bigger picture so they can undertake to critically assess and thereby improve court practices and outcomes for children in their care.
      To identify sources of delay, courts need to have a way to rank their own performance. They need to know, at minimum, how often cases are reviewed within established time guidelines and how long it is taking from the time a petition is filed for children to be returned home or settled in permanent families. Long periods of uncertainty put added pressure on children and families, further adding to the stresses associated with being in the foster care system.
      Children may suffer lifelong damage from drifting among a succession of temporary foster care placements. Courts need to know how well they are performing in providing permanent homes for already vulnerable children. As one former foster youth related, "I would think if I was adopted as a young child, I would have been with one family, and I would have grown to know that family instead of bouncing around and being so angry." Another related the pain and anxiety of not knowing where they would be placed next. "Everyday, I used to come home and see if my bags were packed," he recalled.
      Information about who foster children are, how they are moving through the system, and whether they are receiving critically needed services also must be available if we wish to hold courts accountable for meeting their responsibilities. Often children have multiple and complex needs and need specialized services. Yet this information is not quantified in most locations.
      "Where could I start if I didn't know how many children I had in the first place? How would I know if this method or this protocol was being successful in achieving an outcome if I weren't able to track the children or track the outcome?" observed Nancy Salyers, former presiding judge of the Cook County Juvenile Court's Child Protection Division. "Court administrators must be able to track children's progress, identify groups of children in need of attention, and identify sources of delay in court proceedings."
      The American Bar Association, the National Center for State Courts, and the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges have developed guidelines for court performance and outcome measures by which courts can assess their own performance in accordance with the goals of the Adoption and Safe Families Act. The guidelines, published in "Building a Better Court: Measuring and Improving Court Performance and Judicial Workload in Child Abuse Cases," address two of the most critical and challenging areas of court reform: court performance measurement - increasing court accountability through enhanced performance measurement - and judicial workload - assessing judicial workloads to ensure that judges have enough time to make timely, thorough and well-considered decisions for children and families.
      Court performance outcome measurements can help state courts ensure timely and appropriate permanency decisions for children unable to return home; improve judicial decision-making; and improve the overall fairness of child abuse and neglect proceedings for all involved. Judges who use this information have been able to shorten the time children spend in foster care and move them to safe, permanent homes more swiftly.

      The national, nonpartisan Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care also recommended that dependency courts be equipped with the tools they need to analyze caseloads, assess their performance, and identify issues in the courts and populations of children that need special attention. The Pew Commission called upon state courts to adopt the proven court performance measures and make that information publicly available.
      Recognizing that state court resources are limited, the Pew Commission recommended federal appropriations to help state courts build their data capacity. This year, Congress responded to that recommendation. Under the Deficit Reduction Act, state courts can now apply for two new Court Improvement Program grants. One grant provides funds to courts for data collection and analysis, strengthening the courts' ability to meet the needs of children in foster care in a timely and responsive way. The second grant provides funds for training judges, attorneys and other legal personnel in child welfare cases and cross-training bench officers with child welfare agency staff. Over the next five years the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families will distribute $100 million through Court Improvement Program grants to state courts.
      Data collection and analysis grants will help courts and child welfare systems improve their collection and sharing of relevant data. State courts may use the grant in various ways including development of comprehensive computerized management information systems for abuse and neglect cases; automated data exchange between the courts, the child welfare agency and other entities; and identifying and correcting state law and policy barriers to data collection and analysis.
      Guidance issued by the federal government in regard to the new grants recognizes the need for judicial leadership in this area, but the courts cannot turn this corner alone. It is thus not surprising that federal regulations require state courts applying for these grants to establish "meaningful and ongoing collaboration" among state and local courts, state and local child welfare agencies, and Indian tribes through institutionalized, high-level state task forces or commissions. Most important, the collaboration is expected to result in changes that lead to measurably improved outcomes for the children and families that the state is serving.
      Here in California, we are making progress down this track. The Court Blue Ribbon Commission on Children in Foster Care is providing new collaborative leadership and building momentum for positive change within our state. It is heartening to note that one of the Blue Ribbon Commission's first actions was to create a Data Collection and Information Sharing Committee, ably chaired by Judge Dean Stout, to address the need for and development of an enhanced court data- tracking and case-management system to improve outcomes for children and families in our state.
      Half a million children in foster care are watching the clock tick away their childhood. The dependency court system needs to operate on Children's Standard Time, adopt court performance measures, and engage in data and case management techniques that will move children into safe and stable families as quickly as possible. A delay of even a month or a week or a day in having a permanent, loving family is an eternity for a child - and it should seem that way to us, as well.

      Miriam Aroni Krinsky is executive director of the nonprofit Children's Law Center, which represents abused and neglected children in the Los Angeles dependency court system, and of Home At Last, which encourages action on the recommendations of the Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care.