Support the Placement of Youth in Permanent Nurturing Families with Their Siblings

What Can Policymakers Do?

• Require that child welfare agencies take action to ensure that all young people leave foster care to their family, legal guardian, adoptive parent or a caring, committed permanent adult. Exiting the system without a permanent family is correlated with a range of negative outcomes in young adulthood, such as early pregnancy or parenthood, criminal involvement, homelessness, unemployment and dropping out of high school.[1] A California law requires that child welfare agencies take action to ensure that no child leaves foster care without a lifelong connection to an adult.[2]

• Provide subsidized legal guardianship and kinship care as options for permanency.[3] Relatives may be willing to care for youth but may be hesitant to adopt for many reasons, and young people in foster care may not want to be adopted but are unable to live with their parents. Subsidized legal guardianship allows biological relatives to serve as legal guardians for youth while receiving financial assistance. Likewise, kinship care is when a relative or other adult in a youth’s life assumes his or her care without formal adoption. These options recognize that a family need not be adoptive to be a supportive and permanent option for youth. Illinois, Tennessee and Wisconsin offer financial subsidies to legal guardians that are comparable to the subsidies they could otherwise receive as licensed foster or adoptive parents.[4] Virginia’s Senate Bill 35 created a Subsidized Custody Program for children in foster care whose custody has been transferred to a relative. The subsidy will include a one-time special need payment, services for the child and a maintenance subsidy equal to the foster care rate.[5]

• Reduce the overreliance on congregate care and place young people in family settings in their communities whenever possible. Overreliance on congregate care is costly for young people and for taxpayers. Youth in congregate care often do not fare as well as they do in family settings and institutional placements are three to five times the cost of family-based placements. [6] Thus, savings from congregate care reduction could be diverted to community-based services to improve permanence and other long-term outcomes for youth. Four jurisdictions—Maine, Louisiana, Virginia and New York City—undertook Casey Family Programs’ approach to rightsizing congregate care and achieved results that spurred system-level reforms.

• Make all efforts to place siblings together. The Fostering Connections legislation requires that reasonable efforts are made to place siblings together; when this is impossible, facilitated quality visitation among siblings is required unless safety is an issue. Legislation in Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Minnesota, New York and Washington requires child welfare agencies to describe all efforts made to keep siblings together and/or to provide reasons for siblings’ separate placements.[7]