by Priscilla Martens, Executive Director, NFPN
Due to funding crises in state budgets, child welfare agencies are now considering cutting services, including Intensive Family Preservation Services (IFPS). Is cutting IFPS a good way to save money? National Family Preservation Network (NFPN) doesn’t think so—here’s why.
NFPN is the primary national voice for the preservation of families through Intensive Family Preservation and Reunification Services. Our belief is that children deserve to remain safely with their families when possible and that all efforts must be made to reunite children with their families when it is safe to do so. NFPN provides the vision, leadership, training, tools, and resources to assist policy makers and practitioners to build on a family’s strengths so children can be protected and nurtured at home. As such, we are vitally interested in government policies and funding of IFPS.
Intensive Family Preservation Services have been widely used, replicated, and studied for over two decades. There is general agreement that these services
- have an excellent safety record in keeping families together,
- provide a wide array of services with emphasis on building skills,
- improve family functioning,
- free up child welfare caseworkers to work with families whose children are in out-of-home placements, and
- report high levels of satisfaction from program participants.
So, what would be the rationale for cutting these services? Let’s review some of the most common reasons:
- Share the pain.
Under this rationale, all state-funded programs are cut by a certain percentage. This practice seems to be the favorite fall-back position of government. Families, organizations, and businesses make cuts in their budgets based on priorities and cost effectiveness. Jack Welch, head of GE for over 20 years and arguably the best CEO of the twentieth century, increased salaries of his best employees during tough times. In tight times, we need to maintain and increase services that are cost effective, not cut them.
- IFPS services don’t prevent out-of-home placement of children.
In the most comprehensive study ever conducted of intensive family preservation services, a researcher compared 1200 children in North Carolina who had received IFPS services in the past five years with 110,000 children who had not received these services. IFPS outperformed traditional child welfare services in every case by reducing the number of placements or delaying placements. When multiple risk factors were present, IFPS was increasingly effective at preventing placement when compared to the rest of the child welfare system.
- IFPS programs don’t save the state any money.
A researcher has calculated that IFPS programs are cost effective at a placement prevention rate above 22 percent. Most IFPS programs nationwide have a placement prevention rate of 70 to 95 percent. Thus, IFPS programs are very cost effective. IFPS saves $3.00 on placement services for every dollar spent providing IFPS.
- There won’t be any noticeable difference if IFPS programs are cut.
States that have drastically reduced IFPS services have seen increased out-of-home placements and negative consequences that include scrambling for temporary placements for children on a nightly basis, increased abuse and neglect in foster homes, failure to investigate serious cases of abuse due to lack of staff time, high turnover of staff, and a sharp increase in the number of child deaths. Illinois, Maine, New York City, and Washington D.C have experienced these tragic consequences in their child welfare system. After instituting reforms aimed at reducing out-of-home placements, both Illinois and New York City have seen a marked turnaround. In fact, saturation of IFPS in a region or state has consistently demonstrated improved management of child protective caseloads, reduction of child deaths in the system, and costs savings as also witnessed in Alabama, Michigan, North Carolina, and Missouri. Intensive Family Preservation Services are an essential component of the child welfare system because they
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provide for close monitoring of high risk families while teaching skills to family members in order to help them make needed changes,prevent unnecessary placement to free up scarce foster and adoptive homes for children who do require temporary or permanent placement,reduce caseloads and thus provide incentives to lower the turnover rate in caseworkers,
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allow caseworkers more time to work on permanent plans for children who cannot return home, and
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fulfill federal mandates requiring states to make “reasonable efforts to preserve and reunify families” before children are placed in foster care.
IFPS programs provide a safety release valve for the highly pressurized child welfare system. Removing this valve or weakening it will likely result in an explosion in the child welfare system. Cutting IFPS services during a budget crisis is not only a bad idea; it takes us in exactly the wrong direction. IFPS funding should be increased during a budget crisis. Then, every family receiving IFPS will have close monitoring while learning a better way of handling problems. Every caseworker will have one less family during the IFPS intervention needing regular visits or an out-of-home placement. Every supervisor will have one less family requiring a permanency planning staffing. Every administrator will find one less name appearing in the newspaper in which a child “known to the system” has died. And every legislator will know that the most intensive, cost-effective services that can keep a family together have been provided.
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