Federal-level child welfare priorities center on supporting foster youth, families

Key Takeaways

Child welfare experts outlined current priorities at the federal level, including better supporting foster care youth who age out of the system and recruiting more foster parents, at NACo’s Human Services and Education Policy Steering Committee meeting Feb. 21. 

During this Congress, the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Work and Welfare is focused on the John H. Chafee Foster Care Program for Successful Transition to Adulthood, which serves older foster youth, ages 14 and older, according to Cheryl Vincent Freiman, majority staff director of the subcommittee. 

More than 15,000 youths in foster care age out of the system each year, Freiman noted.

Foster youth who are aging out of the system “are one of the most vulnerable populations in our country — homelessness, early pregnancy, all of these issues that we’re seeing,” Freiman said. “And the Chafee program is really designed to try to help and support them through that kind of transition.”

Congress provided $400 million in additional funding to the Chafee program during Covid, but the program hasn’t gone through significant reform since it was established in 1999, according to Freiman. The Government Accountability Office found that some of the funding for the program’s Education and Training vouchers were not being drawn down by the states, so the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Work and Welfare is looking into why that is, when there’s such an established need for them, Freiman said.

“The idea is ‘Let’s not just have this be on autopilot,’” Freiman said. “Let’s really take the feedback from states, counties, stakeholders, youth with lived experience, and try to make the program as effective as possible.”

Last year, First Lady Melania Trump’s “Fostering the Future for American Children and Families” executive order outlined educational and employment pathways for youth transitioning out of foster care, including increased access to education and training vouchers.

“It’s a very high-profile focus on this one specific subset of the population and what kind of supports they need,” Freiman said. “So, we really feel that’s an opportunity to have that vision about where we can go and also, at the same time, having bipartisan conversations about what the solutions are.”

Legislation introduced this session by members of the House Ways and Means subcommittee would increase the cap on individual education and training vouchers to $12,000 from $5,000 and allow for more flexibility on how the vouchers are used, so that foster youth could use the vouchers to pursue alternative career pathways outside of a four-year college, such as for trade school, according to Freiman.

The Home for Every Child initiative, which the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) launched last year following the executive order, is working to better support foster parents in the hopes of achieving higher retention rates, according to Ryan Hanlon, associate commissioner for ACF’s Children’s Bureau. 

Child welfare research shows that if 100 new foster families are recruited, 50% of them are going to drop out in the first year, and another 50% are going to drop out in year two, Hanlon noted.

“You are constantly recruiting, almost like a revolving door, of new foster parents,” Hanlon said. “And you’re training them, which can be time-intensive and expensive, and you’re continually needing to find new foster parents. We want to help address that.”

There’s not a one-size-fits-all solution for the initiative’s overall goal of achieving a foster home-to-child ratio greater than 1:1 in every state, because different localities have different needs, but ACF’s priorities include improving prevention services, finding more permanent living solutions for foster youth and focusing on kinship care and community partnerships, according to Hanlon. 

ACF is seeking feedback from those working on the ground, and the agency wants to work with states and localities to share data across levels of government that can help inform best practices, he noted. 

“It’s a federal initiative, but our success or failure is only going to be determined at the local level,” Hanlon said.