Missouri is failing children in foster care. The solution is right there in Jeff City
The critical shortage of staff and resources currently plaguing Missouri’s child welfare system and the historically high number of new children entering the system, as reported in the recent series of articles in The Kansas City Star, shows the inevitable outcome when community-based preventive services for children already in place around the state are not fully utilized. Instead, Missouri is allowing millions of dollars in federal Family First Prevention Services Act transition funds now available to the state to sit idle — funds that could be used to help keep thousands of Missouri children safely in their homes with their families.
The child welfare system in Missouri includes a statewide network of dozens of community-based agencies that partner together to ensure that children facing potentially dangerous situations can live safely with their families or in a foster care environment and receive the services needed to grow and succeed in life. These agencies are often the first line of defense for vulnerable children and families, and they deliver a wide range of services daily that are effective in keeping kids and families together and out of the child welfare system.
For example, Functional Family Therapy is a short-term, evidence-based intervention program in Jackson County that works with 11- to 18-year-old youths who have been referred for behavioral or emotional problems by the juvenile justice, mental health, education or child welfare systems. The therapy focuses on assessment and intervention to address risk and protective factors within and outside of the family that impact the adolescent and his or her adaptive development. In 2021, 88% of young people participating in Functional Family Therapy did not have a law violation during the intervention, and 91% of those who were served by the program remained in the home.
The Families First Prevention Services Act was enacted in 2018 to turn the focus of the current child welfare system toward keeping children safely with their families to avoid the trauma that results when children are placed in care outside the home. To increase the number of children who can remain safely at home with their families, the law provides families with greater access to mental health services, substance use treatment and help to improve parenting skills.
In Missouri, nearly $10 million in transition funding for this act has been appropriated in the state’s budget for the current fiscal year. These funds have not yet been invested in the state’s community-based preventive services. The reasons behind this impasse are multiple, but the bottom line is that withholding this money only exacerbates the well-documented problems now plaguing Missouri’s child welfare agency and shuts off the best solution.
By not investing in these preventive services, Missouri child welfare system problems are getting worse. On the last day of February 2022, Missouri had 14,026 children in foster care. If the state aligned with the per capita national average, it would only have only approximately 7,000 children in its care. This adverse trend will continue until the state fully invests in the community-based services solutions now available.
Getting our state’s child welfare system back on track by maximizing the opportunities offered by community-based agencies will take the collective efforts of our legislators, the Missouri Department of Social Services, community leaders and the public at large. Together, we must invest and partner to protect thousands of at-risk children. Doing anything less will set our state on a path toward even bigger problems in the future.