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Funding flexibility helps keep Florida children safe and out of foster care
Florida’s flexible funding demonstration program has achieved record success in finding adoptive families for foster care children, while ensuring more children are kept safely with their own families. Children's Home Society of Florida (CHS) President and CEO David Bundy participated in a work session of the Senate Foster Care Caucus on August 27 and recommended expansion and extension of critical funding beyond 2011.
On behalf of the National Crittenton Foundation, Children’s Home Society of Florida (CHS) President and CEO David Bundy participated in a work session of the Senate Foster Care Caucus on August 27 to describe how Florida’s flexible funding demonstration program has achieved record success in finding adoptive families for foster care children, while ensuring more children are kept safely with their own families and out of foster care. Without natural or adoptive families, foster youth who “age out” of care are less likely to earn high school diplomas or GEDs, and more likely to experience unemployment, homelessness, teen pregnancy or incarceration.
Based on Florida’s success, Bundy recommends the extension of Florida's critical, Title IV-E flexible funding beyond September 30, 2011, and the expansion of the flexible funding model so all states have the ability to implement the type of changes seen in Florida. Further, Bundy urges Congress to consider fundamental reform in the financing of child welfare through alignment of funding to reduce administrative costs and the replacement of eligibility linkages with funding based on a child’s need. Additional recommendations include provision of technical assistance to states, creation of a clearinghouse for innovative practices and identification of new ways to increase flexibility in funding.
“Foster care should be only a temporary protection for children and the ultimate goal must be stable, permanent homes for all children,” Bundy said. “Foster youth “age out” of care at age 18 in Florida and between 19 and 21 in other states We must raise awareness of and promote solutions for these older children who leave foster care and find themselves without support.”
Since 1998, more than 200,000 young people nationwide have aged out of foster care. Many would have been able to stay safely with their own families had flexible funding existed to allow the delivery of services that specifically addressed their families' challenges. Today, 463,000 children in America are in the foster care system.
Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley and Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu established the Senate Caucus on Foster Youth to provide a forum to increase awareness of foster care, generate ideas for preventing negative outcomes and create opportunities for success for older youth in foster care.
About Children's Home Society of
Florida
Created in 1902, Children's Home Society of Florida (CHS) is the
second-largest private not-for-profit in the United States and Canada
accredited by the Council on Accreditation and is the oldest statewide
provider of services to children and families in Florida. CHS services
include foster care, adoption, child abuse prevention, emergency
shelters, residential group homes, independent and transitional living
for teens, parent education, counseling, mentoring, and treatment for
developmentally disabled children.
News release: PRWeb
31 August 2010
