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Officials tell lawmakers more kids exiting foster care than entering – Daily Montanan

['Darrell Ehrlick', 'More From Author', '- February']

Date: 2022-02-08 00:00:00

As lawmakers and administration officials met to review a Legislative Audit report that shows Montana has more kids per capita in foster care than any other state, it heard that recent improvements may see the trend lines turn.

Still, the Legislative Audit Committee, an interim committee, heard that antiquated computer systems, backlogged courts and staff turnover combine to keep kids in foster care longer than other states. Nikki Grossman, the division administrator for child protective services, also said Montana has made significant strides in helping speed up adoptions and guardianships, which has led to more kids exiting the foster care system in the past three years than entering it.

For more than a decade, Montana has ranked among the top of the states in children removed from families per capita. For years, leaders inside government and beyond had blamed the problem on a high percentage of drug use in those homes. However, analysis by the legislative auditors shows that Montana placed consistently in the middle of rankings in terms of children removed because of drug use. The most recent report showed that through 2019, the average time spent in the foster care system was longer in Montana, typically the result of understaffed case workers and a backlogged court system.

Grossman and Montana DPHHS Director Adam Meier said that new pilot programs in courts have helped to speed up the process as well as a renewed effort on adoption and guardianship by family members, which has begun to turn the trend, something not captured in the report because the statistics for 2020 and beyond were not ready for the audit.

“We do not want kids to linger in foster care, and we’ve focused on making sure we’ve removed obstacles to adoptions,” Grossman said.

She said that frontline workers are also determining more rapidly whether children who are in the foster care program can be reunited with family, or whether there’s a relative that could serve as a permanent guardian.

“If children cannot be safely reunified with a family, then a safe relative is imperative,” Grossman said.

She told the committee that guardianships had increased nearly 8 percent in the past two years and for three years in a row, more children have exited the foster care system than have entered it.

At the hearing on Tuesday, lawmakers expressed concerns that an outdated computer system still run on a disc-operating system or DOS was in need of replacement, and that results throughout the six different districts statewide were mixed. For example, in Region 5, which serves an area in and around Missoula, had results that were substantially better than Region 3, headquartered in Billings. Grossman said that the court system and attorneys, coupled with lower caseloads, result in better outcomes.

Grossman told lawmakers that already some of the audit’s recommendations had been implemented, including a safety committee that was reviewing cases to make sure that case workers were following the model the state has adopted, and that more attention was being given to protection plans and safety plans. The audit found that 64 percent of the cases that were reviewed did not have a completed protection plan, and 40 percent didn’t even have a safety plan.

Grossman said those plans have been reformatted so that they’re a stand-alone part of the process, not just another screen or portion of paperwork to fill out.

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