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Dramatic Child Welfare Improvements in Illinois
Interview with Jess McDonald, Director of the Illinois Department of
Children and Family Services (DCFS) by Ann Sullivan, CWLA Adoption Program Director
Sullivan: The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services
(DCFS) has made tremendous strides in its adoption program in recent
years. What were the conditions that caused you to make adoption a
priority within the agency?
McDonald: The agency was wrestling with rapid growth, a legacy of
several significant tragedies and their impact on the child welfare
system and a very demoralized work force 4-5 years ago. The one point
of unanimous agreement was that the system wasn't producing the results
it should have been producing.
Q: What did DCFS do under your administration to address the rapid
growth and the related problems?
A: We focused first on establishing a direction for the system. We
did a number of things concurrently, including building partnerships.
We carved out a very broad agenda together with the courts, the private
sector, political leaders and legal advocates that focused on child
safety. The American Humane Association helped the department implement
a Child Endangerment Risk Assessment which has had fairly significant
results in terms of improvements in child safety and better case
decision making.
We then looked at the foster care program and decided we needed to
strengthen our kinship care program. For the last decade, kinship care
has been the core of the DCFS foster care system. The Department has had
the conviction for many years that it is extraordinarily desirable to
involve the communities and relatives in order to increase the
probability that kids will stay close to their schools and communities -
that by doing so you reduce the trauma of placement.
While strengthening the kinship care program and offering more options
to relatives, we also decided to look at getting improved outcomes. We
looked at length of stay and other information such as stability and
safety. Everyone agreed that the children's length of stay should
ideally be no more than two years, but DCFS' average was close to five
years.
Through performance contracting we looked at capacity issues and
increased resources for private agencies so they could do a better job
on permanency. We also looked at the potential for reunification. In
the early 90s DCFS had almost no resources dedicated to reunification -
maybe an average of $500 per family case - we increased that to
approximately $8,000 per family for customized services, depending on
what the family needed and the court deemed be necessary.
We also found that people tended not to talk about permanency in the
DCFS kinship program. Kin families told us that no one had every talked
to them about adoption.
Q: When kinship care first became so prominent many professionals
assumed that relatives would be quite resistant to considering adoption.
You've obviously found that not to be the case.
A: Oh, absolutely not. I remember going out on regional reviews and
looking at children's cases where the children were living with
relatives and legally free for adoption, but there had been no movement
toward permanency. When we asked staff why, they didn't really have an
explanation. We asked them to talk to the families about an alternative
that was available in Illinois called the "delegated relative authority"
which was a precursor to guardianship. Of the 130 families interviewed
in one regional review, only about 10 families were interested in the
delegated relative authority. Most of the others wanted to consider
adoption. No one had ever asked them. They didn't think they were
permitted to adopt.
The key to kin adopting is frankly pretty simple. Ask them. Obviously
there's more to it in terms of practice, but I think DCFS staff in
Illinois were dealing with so many problems the permanency issues got
overlooked.
Q: Court relations are such a stumbling block in so many states. How
did you develop a partnership with the courts?
A: The courts were an essential partner in making the necessary
changes. In the Cook County Juvenile Court system, Judge Salyers began
her position as presiding judge of the abuse neglect division a few
months after I came to DCFS. We immediately began working together on
our mutual problem of getting better results for children who were wards
of the court and wards of DCFS. We regularly talk about what needs to
be added or changed. I make changes in the service system in a way
that's compatible with or directly in response to the wishes of the
court. The court is able to evaluate the quality of services DCFS
provides, and we try to respond to their assessments.
This is a large, urban system, which makes it unique. We've been able
to make some changes regarding permanency for children in Cook County
that people previously thought could only be done in smaller
jurisdictions. For example, in calendar year 1994 when there were
36,900 kids in he Cook County there were only 956 termination of
parental rights actions. In calendar year 1997, the number of kids in
the system had dropped to 35,000 because we had started to move some
kids to permanency, but the number of terminations had increased to 3,
743 and in calendar year 1998, increased to 5,106. If you look at the
adoption numbers, in 1994 there were 663 adoptions, and in 1998 there
were 3,232. For the state fiscal year that ended June 30, 1999 a total
of 5,806 adoptions were completed. From 1994 to 1998, the number of
cases closed by the court in Cook County for reasons of adoption,
reunification, or aging out went from about 4,000 to 10,000. This year
we expect it will be over 13,000.
Q: What was happening to your Child Protective Services caseload
during that same period of time?
A: CPS reports have gone down about 1-2% per year, but the drop in
reports is modest compared to this huge drop in the number of children
going into placement. It can't be explained by the slight reduction in
the number of CPS reports.
Q: I've been hearing concerns that children are being moved to
adoption too quickly, without adequate family reunification services.
Has the pendulum swung too far toward adoption?
A: No, not really. I'm not quite sure what to think of critics who
get what they ask for. They wanted permanency for children in the
system. Let me be clear that DCFS is focusing on the kids with very
long lengths of stay.
Another critical statistic that people often miss is the change in how
many kids are coming into care. In calendar year 1994 in Cook County,
for example, 9,991 kids came into foster care. In calendar year 1998 it
was only 4,440. This calendar year we expect this number to be 3,000 or
less.
Q: That's a dramatic change. Is it because you're expanding family
preservation services?
A: The reason fewer kids are coming into the system is because we have
significantly restructured our intact family services. We're serving
children in their homes; we've cut in half the rate of disruption of
intact families into placement.
To do this, we've dropped worker caseloads from 30 to 80 cases to 6-10
families maximum. We are now working with the community and the families to get
the emergency resources families need to keep children out of the system
instead of bringing kids into foster care.
Q: Are you also putting additional resources into postadoption
services to support the increased number of adoptions?
A: Absolutely. We've expanded our post-adoption service system. We
have a statewide adoption preservation system that has had budget
increases every year. I was doing some forecasting for the governor's
office recently, and we have a chart that shows that within the next
12-18 months we will have more children in active guardianship and
adoption than in foster care, residential, and independent living.
Within three years we will have over 32,000 kids in adoption or
guardianship. It's time for the public sector to re-think its
challenges. In the future our real challenge will be not to fix the
foster care system, but to support adoptions. In view of these
anticipated changes, we will be putting together an adoption task force
to look at the challenges we're facing, and see how we can do a better
job. As the children get older, they need supports that the system
isn't providing. There's a whole range of supports that families may
need at some point following adoption; these services need to be in
place.
Q: Some agencies resist increasing adoptions because they think their
subsidy costs are going to skyrocket with this multi-year commitment.
How would you respond to that?
A: If agencies are doing reunification work and families are being
reunified quickly, that's one thing. But if an agency is providing
foster care services, there is no way that an adoption costs an agency
more than keeping a kid in foster care. If money is the only thing
pushing the system, then you definitely want to get a kid adopted. If
permanency is your objective and you've ruled out reunification, then
adoption or guardianship is the best option. I cannot conceive of a
responsible child welfare system taking any other position. It is
simply wrong to think that it costs more to support an adoption than to
keep kids in foster care. From a programmatic point of view, how in the
world can we say this is the right for the children?
Q: What do you see as the major challenges in the next 3-5 years?
A: Supporting adoptions by providing more postadoption services, of
course, and recruitment. We will continue to work for permanency for
kids who are hard to place. We now require that every child free for
adoption be listed on the state adoption exchange. Our challenge will
be to develop adoption recruitment strategies that will offer every
child the opportunity of an adoption. I take the approach, frankly, that every
child wants a family and our job is to try and find a family for that
child. Maybe we can't do that for every child, but it won't be for want of trying.
Q: Of your top three initiatives, can you name one that you believe
will be most valuable in the future?
A: If I were to try to list the top three initiatives that have really
mattered to DCFS, and will matter in the future, accreditation would be
one of them. Accreditation has been incredibly valuable in DCFS.
Everywhere we've done accreditation, both with our staff and private
agencies, they agree. Accreditation, although not widely supported
initially, has been an extremely effective tool for improving morale and
the sense of professionalism in our offices. Agencies that have gone
through it say there's nothing quite like seeing the staff when they
find out that they've met some of the highest standards in the field.
Some of our most critical judges say they see improvement in the work
done by DCFS staff because of accreditation. Within another year, I
think, we'll have the whole system - both public and private agencies -
accredited. We're very close.
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