1-17-24 Testimony Submitted to House Ways & Means Subcommittee on Work & Welfare
Chairman LaHood, Ranking Member Davis, and Members of the Subcommittee on Work and Welfare:
Thank you for holding this important hearing, Pathways to Independence: Supporting Youth Aging Out of Foster Care, on January 17 and for your clear commitment to better supporting older youth who experience foster care.
The Journey to Success campaign is a policy campaign grounded in data and the perspectives of young people who have personally experienced foster care. The goal of the campaign is to advance policy solutions that improve outcomes for all youth and young adults who experience foster care. These young people face a steep climb in their journey to adulthood, but targeted policy improvements can help to ensure they are prepared to thrive in school, work, and life. The recommendations below are based on data, best practice, and the perspectives of young people themselves.
Journey to Success builds on more than 20 years of data and insights from generations of young leaders with personal experience in foster care who have advocated for policy changes to improve outcomes for young people like them. Time and again, Congress has stepped up to champion legislative reforms on behalf of youth in foster care. We commend Congress for these actions and urge continued reforms needed to spur the positive outcomes we all want for youth in foster care. Seminal achievements in federal policy include:
The Family First Prevention Services Act of 2018 provided federal support for evidence-based prevention services to help more children and youth remain with their families and prevent foster care whenever safely possible.
The Preventing Sex Trafficking and Strengthening Families Act of 2014 focused on improving family connections and lifelong permanency by expanding the adoption incentive payment program to include legal guardianships. This Act also brought needed oversight to the use of AAPLA (Another Planned Permanent Living Arrangement) as a case plan goal to help limit the number of youth aging out without family permanence.
The Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act of 2008 was a landmark achievement in its focus on improving child and youth outcomes in the areas of health, education, and family. This Act authorized federal support for kinship guardianship and adoption assistance, and provided states an option to extend foster care, guardianship, and adoption assistance beyond age 18 – providing timely support to youth during their transition to adulthood. Fostering Connections also provided the first federal funding for kinship navigator programs, required states to make reasonable efforts to keep siblings in foster care together, and established new kinship notification requirements to promote relative placements.
The Foster Care Independence Act of 1999 established the Chafee Foster Care Independence Program - a dedicated federal program that offers states flexible funds to better support youth in making successful transitions to adulthood with services such as mentorship, education support, work and life skills, and specified that efforts to find permanent placement should continue concurrently with independent living skills.
Thanks to these reforms, we have seen encouraging progress towards ensuring the well-being of children and youth who experience foster care. However, troubling outcomes for foster youth remain. As you heard at the hearing, the foster care experience for youth is often marked by frequent placement and school changes, and ultimately leaving foster care without being safely reunited with their families or connected to another lifelong family. In fact, about 20,000 young people age out of foster care – a number that has largely unchanged for more than a decade.
Drawing on lessons learned in the field, Journey to Success is optimistic that targeted federal reforms can spur significant program and practice changes that will improve the lives and outcomes for youth who experience foster care. Due to the hardships many foster youth continue to experience, we believe federal action is urgently needed and the committee’s Title IV-B reauthorization provides a timely opportunity to enact targeted reforms to achieve two desired goals: 1) connect young people to lifelong family, 2) reduce the large numbers of youth who continue to age out of foster care each year on their own without any safety net, and 3) provide excellent services for those for whom permanency is not achieved.
Investing in youth and young adults will lead to stronger families and communities, a ready workforce, and a more vibrant economy. It will also help prevent homelessness, poverty, and incarceration in our communities.
Specific Recommendations for Improving Outcomes for Youth Who Experience Foster Care
Strengthening family ties and family permanence and reducing the possibility of youth “aging out” on their own.
The purpose of foster care is to provide a short-term safety net while attending to the health, behavioral and emotional well-being of children and youth in care. The best outcome for every child in foster care is to return safely home or, when that’s not possible, to be connected to a new permanent lifelong family through adoption or guardianship. Why? Because children do best in families and deserve to have the sense of belonging and love that families offer.
Indeed, an expansive body of research reinforces what we know to be true: positive experiences and healthy relationships are critically important to setting young people on a course to success in adulthood. For youth in foster care, supportive relationships with adults are not only critical in navigating the unique challenges associated with foster care; they are cornerstones of successful reunification, adoption, and guardianship – the current pathways to legal permanency. In addition to the clear emotional benefits, on a practical level, families also provide the type of guidance and resources that support educational attainment and job retention, as well as meaningful engagement in civic activities and community.
To ensure that every youth has the opportunity to have meaningful, lifelong relationships with adults who love them, we recommend that Congress make policy reforms to promote family connections before, during and after foster care. Specifically, JTS calls on policymakers to provide an array of support for families involved in child welfare, including biological, kinship, foster and adoptive families.
Placement matters. Rebalance the important federal-state cost sharing by providing federal financial participation for all family-based foster care placements. Specifically, Congress should de-link Title IV-E foster care funding eligibility that is linked to the defunct 1996 Aid to Families with Dependent Children program (AFDC), continuing the reforms made for prevention services under the Family First Prevention Services Act and for adoption assistance enacted through the Fostering Connections Act.
Enhance judicial oversight. Courts and judicial officers play key roles in overseeing the case plans of youth and therefore it is important to ensure court personnel are well-trained in their role in reviewing and overseeing cases of youth in foster care to help ensure every effort is made to help foster youth achieve permanency. JTS urges the committee to invest in the Court Improvement Program and specify that youth should be involved to the extent possible in their court proceedings. should adequately support training for judges and court professionals.
Incentivize all permanency outcomes. Expand the Adoption and Legal Guardianship Incentive Payments program to include incentive payments to states for permanency outcomes achieved through reunification. All permanency incentive payments should be equal and equitable.
Grow best practice. Kinship care is best practice due to the multiple benefits to children and youth. Benefits to children include more stable placements and fewer school changes and increased likelihood of achieving permanency. National data show an overall increase in kinship placements and attention to kin connections. Taking this best practice to scale should be a top priority for policymakers and program administrators. positive national trend is increased kinship connections and family-based foster care. One important and timely way to support this trend is through increased investment in kinship navigator programs.
Support and direct resources for peer-to-peer engagement and support through Title IV-B, Chafee, clarifying that IV-E administrative funds can be used for this purpose and by developing a national peer certification protocol that will enable the expansion of peer support programs.
Stable family-based placements are linked to permanency outcomes. Require state child welfare agencies to establish a set of core supports for kin and non-kin foster families to increase placement stability, help retain caregivers and improve child well-being and permanency outcomes.
Strengthen and expand the flexibilities of the Chafee program to support the strong relationships and access to services proven to support a successful transition to adulthood.
The John H. Chafee Foster Care Program for Successful Transition to Adulthood program is a critically important source of support for youth in foster care. Created 25 years ago, it serves children and youth in foster care and those who have aged out between ages 14-21 and supports a wide range of services including educational support, job readiness training, mentoring, life skills training, and wellness services, among other things. Unfortunately, despite tremendous need, fewer than one-quarter of eligible young people receive Chafee services in a given year, and less than half of eligible youth will ever receive a Chafee service during the entire time they are eligible. In addition, Chafee’s menu of services does not reflect the areas older youth say they need help with most: mental health, housing, education, employment, transportation, mentoring, and more. The program also doesn’t prioritize family connections.
JTS calls on Congress to invest in and redesign the Chafee program by:
Help state agencies improve their programming and reach. Increasing the investment in the Chafee program by at least $100 million per year, so that states and communities can provide more services that meet the needs of young people.
Provide access to and continuity of supportive services to youth during their transitional years to young adulthood. Make eligibility requirements more flexible, so that young people up to age 26 can access Chafee services, providing continuity and support that is reflective of their development and consistent with other services such as Education and Training Vouchers and Medicaid health insurance.
Update the specified array of youth services to better match those that young people say they need, including peer-delivered services, transportation, and navigation to other existing services such as community-based housing, mental health, parenting support, and workforce readiness.
Improve the effectiveness of the Chafee program by establishing new expectations for agencies to work more closely with youth such as by requiring state agencies to establish and support youth advisory boards where youth and young adults can collaborate to ensure quality programming supports positive outcomes.
Improve communication to youth about available services. Incentivize agencies to develop outreach and communications strategies to raise awareness about available services among foster youth and former foster youth to ensure they can access services.
Promote permanency throughout youth and young adult years. Make healing and family connections a stated priority focus of the Chafee program to promote services and programming for eligible youth that will help eliminate “aging out” as an acceptable outcome.
Improve how child welfare promotes the health, healing, and well-being of children and youth in foster care.
Youth and young adults in foster care often face significant difficulties due to health and mental health issues rooted in their history of childhood trauma. In addition, the experience of entering foster itself is inherently traumatic even when it is necessary for a child’s safety. The ongoing separation, losses, and uncertainty that are endemic to foster care often compound a child’s trauma. The American Academy of Pediatrics finds that nearly 80 percent of children and adolescents entering foster care have one or more serious physical or mental health needs stemming from childhood trauma, and that one third of children and youth in foster care have a chronic medical condition. A substantial body of evidence exists showing that psychotropic medications are overused in lieu of more appropriate and effective treatments, such as peer support and other non-clinical interventions. Finally, young people have widely reported that not only do they face challenges accessing the mental health services currently available, but they are not provided a full array of interventions that can help address trauma, such as non-clinical therapies (i.e. art therapy, movement and non-traditional healing practices.)
The Health Oversight and Coordination Plans, which have been a Title IV-B requirement since 2008, fall short of providing the timely access and coordination of services that are critical to meeting the complex health and mental health needs of many youth in foster care, not allowing them the opportunity to heal and address issues that are likely to impact their future. We recommend the following reforms to make these plans more effective:
Leverage the existing plan requirements to increase much-needed attention on youth mental health. Expand the scope of these plans to better account for the trauma histories of children and youth in foster care and better address their health and mental health needs.
Expand the scope of these plans by renaming them “Health and Mental Health Oversight and Coordination Plans” and specifying coordination with both Medicaid and behavioral health agencies in the development and implementation of these plans.
Require that that the plan include an inventory of the service array and have in place key components of a comprehensive children’s mental health system, including prevention, early intervention, and treatment, including the use of peer specialists; training of caseworkers on connecting young people with therapeutic supports; therapeutic supports and community-based resources that are appropriate for the needs of youth (including meaningful extracurricular activities and wellness support); processes to address privacy concerns; and planning for continuity of care.
Add a requirement that the plan describe how the state agency actively consults with and involves youth and young adults with foster care experience in the development of the plan.
Help more foster youth get the mental health support they need. Improve the array of (and access to) mental health services that are available to meet the complex needs of children and youth in foster care, including peer support and non-clinical services that help build and strengthen family, peer, and community connections.
Create innovation grants through a new program, modeled on the Regional Partnership Grants within Title IV-B, to spur community-based innovation and implementation of effective, engaging, varied mental health treatments and supports – including culturally responsive services – for children, youth and young adults in foster care in order to find approaches that allow them to heal and pursue their goals.
Provide targeted resources to states effectively implement the activities and goals set forth in the plans – allowing them to live up to their potential to improve the array of, and access to, important services that promote their well-being.
In closing, thank you for your leadership and for holding an important hearing to examine ways to improve outcomes for foster youth.
For more information about these recommendations, please see additional policy analysis and research on the campaign’s website (www.journeytosuccess.org) or reach out to the campaign.
Thank you,
Hope Cooper
Journey to Success
hope@journeytosuccess.org