Category: Admission Trends

In May 2011, Chapin Hall researchers released a study that used FCDA data to produce an epidemiological and developmental snapshot of infants in foster care. The research showed that infants are a growing proportion of first-time admissions to foster care. It also showed that infants experience foster care differently from children who enter care at older ages. For example, children who enter care as infants spend a longer amount of time in foster care; are more likely to exit to adoption; and are particularly vulnerable to developmental risk factors such as physical neglect, poor health, caregiver substance abuse, and others. Meeting the needs of infants in foster care requires developmentally appropriate interventions delivered in the right dose. This Recipe is the first in a 4-part series that uses the web tool to explore infants’ experience in care and how to target opportunities for improving their outcomes. Here, in Part 1,… Read more >

Among other changes, the Fostering Connections law introduced new requirements for casework with older foster youth. It also established new reporting requirements regarding youth aging out of care. In light of these changes, monitoring the number of children who are at risk of aging out and providing them with the services they need are pressing issues for foster care systems today. In this Recipe I explain how to use the web tool to determine the number of youth entering care in your jurisdiction who are at risk of aging out within five years. This Recipe will take you about 10 minutes to complete. In addition to the web tool, it requires a spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel.   Question: In recent years, how many children entering care in my jurisdiction were at risk of aging out within five years of entry? Has that figure changed over time? [Note: This… Read more >

As you know, different populations of children don’t always experience foster care in the same way. That’s why it’s so important to stratify your population—to take a measure of the whole group, and then break the results down by those child- and case-related characteristics that might make a difference in the outcome. One of those characteristics is admission type—whether the spell in question is the child’s first spell in foster care, or whether that spell is a re-entry after a prior discharge. Springboarding off my earlier post on length of stay, this Recipe will show you how to break length of stay results down by admission type in order to see whether children entering care for the first time have similar lengths of stay as children returning to care.   Question: Do children entering foster care for the first time stay in care as long as children re-entering care? On… Read more >