State child-welfare data show declines in children in care and other improvements, but placement and court delays remain

At the special meeting the board heard a data briefing from Daniel Herring, who highlighted steady improvements in several child-welfare measures but said persistent challenges remain.

Herring noted the historic high of 11,301 children in care on July 1, 2014, and said the system’s point-in-time count had declined to 6,175 as of the morning of the meeting. He said exits from care trend up around December and that kinship placements have increased to roughly 55–56 percent of entries, a rise from earlier years.

The presentation covered multiple measures: removals and exits by month, frequency of required worker visits, placement stability for children in care 24 months or more, nights spent in state-contracted shelters and adoption/permanency metrics. Herring said the frequency of primary-worker visits and caseload standards are higher than baseline targets in many areas, and he described efforts such as regional roving teams to address counties with staffing shortages.

Board members and staff discussed the limits of existing systems to capture court-related dates: there is not a consistent field across the state case-management system to record when a jury trial is requested or when the district attorney files a termination petition, creating gaps for analyzing whether procedural delays lead to longer foster-care stays. Members proposed adding two fields to PARP/PARB records to capture the date DHS changed case status to recommend termination and the date a termination petition was filed in court.

Presenters also drew attention to small but resource-intensive groups of youth with complex behavioral and placement needs; staff said those children account for a high share of resource use and often require cross-system solutions such as regional mental-health supports or specialized placements.

The briefing concluded with staff encouragement to share positive outcome metrics with local PARPs to support volunteer recruitment and to continue improving data collection so the board and legislators can better target reforms.