SACWIS Data from Carver County Minnesota
Carver County started using Structured Decision Making in 1999. In 2005 the County began a direct consulting relationship with Andrew Turnell, co-author of Signs of Safety; A Safety and Solution-Oriented Approach to Child Protection. Years later it is still often a temptation to rush in with a court order or 72-hour hold whenever our safety assessment indicates children are in danger. Yet the graph to the right shows us that many foster care placements can be avoided whenever we are able to slow down enough to discuss our safety assessment with the parents and offer them a realistic opportunity to implement safe alternatives.
In a county where the total population has grown from 54,455 people in 1993 to 91,042 at the 2010 census, this simple change has brought the average number of all of the children in the County’s care, including children’s mental health and correction’s placements, below our pre-9/11 placement numbers and to an 18 year low. This graph would be significantly more pronounced if it didn’t include the 20 youth, on average, ages 18-20, in care in 2011. Ten years ago it was rare for youth to remain in our foster care system after their 18th birthday. At present one out of three of our “children”in care are legal adults.
With fewer children entering foster care, we are also terminating parental rights less frequently, transferring custody to relatives slightly less often, and we have fewer children remaining in care longer than 12 months. The graph on permanent foster care to the left doesn’t show a column for 2011 or 2012. The last recorded court order for permanent foster care occurred in 2010. As a result of improved skills for partnering with parents and family members, and fewer children entering care, we are also filing fewer court petitions. Although our placement and permanency numbers are still notably better than before we began implementing theSigns of Safety approach with Structured Decision Making, our data in all of these areas has clearly trended upward in the past couple of years. It may simply be that this trend follows the number of child maltreatment assessments completed each year. After several years of declining assessment numbers during a challenging economic time, we had for a time grown increasingly optimistic that our efforts were actually reducing child protection reports and assessments.It may also be that we tried too hard to reduce our use of court and placement before we had strong enough safety plans and networks in place to support our decisions. It may be that our efforts created pushback. For example, the County Attorney’s office went from two juvenile attorneys to three, rightwhen we started reporting significant reductions in filing new court petitions. It likely shouldn’t be a surprise to us when under these circumstances the newly appointed lead juvenile attorney became the strongest local antagonist of our Signs of Safety framework. It may just be part of our learning curve. In the absence of a clear vision for effectively using the Signs of Safety map to guide the work through the life of the case, for example, we discovered we were using the map in ways that detracted from a clear focus of building on strengths to overcome the dangers. We saw a similar trend in 2006 when our enthusiasm for our new safety planning approach contributed for a time to increased incidents of six and 12 month repeat maltreatment. We recognized the impact, carefully increased the rigor of our safety plans, and have over time reduced the number of children in out-of-home placement while steadily improving our six and 12 month safety record. During the past 5 years we have had one or fewer incidents of six month repeat maltreatment per year.
During this time many other significant changes have occurred that can’t be easily graphed from the data in our statewide automated child welfare information system. As a result of the “what are we worried about” column in our Signs of Safety map we are consistently gathering detailed descriptions of all of the harm, danger, and worries we can identifythroughout the lives of all of the children who come into our system. Instead of initiating services to keep the reported incident from occurring again, our safety plans address all of the identified dangers and worries. This change has made us acutely aware of the chronicity of child maltreatment and we are increasingly focused on long term and lasting safety. We began having an evening receptionist in our outpatient mental health program call families after case closure to get feedback about the impact of our services and the family’s satisfaction. We are pleased to report that abouteight of every ten families are highly satisfied with the relationship they had with their social worker and the assistance they received. We believe this is a significant improvement, although we don’t have comparative data. We see many more families keeping in touch after their case is closed, stopping by to see the social worker when they are in the area, sending Christmas cards, and calling and asking for advice and assistance. We can see that our social workers are more confident. They are ever more strength-based and optimistic in the office, even in the midst of the most challenging circumstances. Almost all of our social workers report increased satisfaction in their work.
Finally, the most encouraging data trend we have identified so far is the consistent decline in the number of determinations of the need for protective services we are making each year. This determination is made in every family investigation, family assessment, and facility assessment. It must be entered before the assessment workgroup can be closed in the system. It is a decision that is informed by and highly correlated with the family’s risk level as determined by the Structured Decision Making risk assessment tool that we have been using for the past 12 years. Yet even as our assessment numbers have gone up, we have continued to identify fewer high-risk families every year. If we really have cut the number of high-risk families we are identifying in half over the past 6 years, then clearly we are making solid progress toward our goal of eliminating child maltreatment in Carver County.