President Signs Child Welfare Bill Into Law

The President signed The Child and Family Services Improvement and Innovation Act on Friday.  Casey Family Programs released a press release through PRNewswire that provides further detail on the bill, and a link to the press release and some excerpts from it are below for your information.

Link to the full article:  Passage of Federal Foster Care Law Will Help Improve The Lives of More Vulnerable Children and Their Families Across The Nation

The law reauthorizes two important child welfare programs and incorporates improvements to ensure that children can safely remain with their own parents or be supported by other caring adults. The law renews child welfare waiver authority to allow more states to invest in new ways of serving children at risk of abuse and neglect. In addition, the law establishes a process to create child welfare data standards that can help drive further improvement to foster care systems.

In particular, the law:

• Reauthorizes Title IV-B of the Social Security Act, which includes the Promoting Safe and Stable Families Program. These programs are the primary source of federal funding for prevention initiatives that can reduce the need for foster care while keeping children safe with their families. They also support adoption and other programs designed to help more children in foster care quickly return to safe, stable and permanent families.

• Allows more States to apply for Title IV-E waivers. The waiver program gives states greater flexibility in how they spend federal child welfare funds to invest in programs that will improve the lives of children, families and communities. Existing waivers in places such as Los Angeles, Florida and Oregon have helped prevent child abuse and neglect, helped more children remain safely in their own homes and improved the quality of services to vulnerable children and families. Casey has supported expansion of the waiver program as a critical interim step toward a comprehensive reform of the federal child welfare finance system.

• Extends the Court Improvement Program which provides grants to state court systems to assess foster care and adoption laws and reduce the time it takes for children to be placed in permanent homes. The law extends the program through FY 2016. In addition, the law streamlines the program by allowing states to submit one application for each of three court improvement grants instead of three separate applications. The law also makes tribal courts eligible for funding.

• Improves the effectiveness of federal child welfare data by requiring the Department of Health and Human Services to better standardize the type of data collected from states. This will provide and important foundation for improving foster care services by providing administrators, policymakers and the public with more data to make effective policy and practice choices. In addition, the new law will help improve how child deaths are reported by states, allowing better assessment of trends in this area.