Ensuring Children in Foster Care get the Supports They Need: Innovating Our Way to Solutions

One goal of BUILD’s six-part webinar series, Moving Away from Family Separation: Cross-Systems Strategies to Support Young Children and Families at Risk of Child Welfare Involvement, is to highlight successful state strategies. Sponsored by the PN-3 Capacity- Building Hub at BUILD, the series will cover several strategies, including those that focus on infants and toddlers, who are removed from their homes at more than double the rate of children ages 4 to 17. This blog focuses on the first webinar in the series, entitled Two Systems, One Vision: Quality Early Care and Education for Children in Foster Care. It highlighted Arkansas’s efforts to ensure young children in the child welfare system get the support they need to thrive.

Ensuring Children in Foster Care get the Supports They Need: Innovating Our Way to Solutions

Research shows that young children involved in the child welfare system face significant risks related to their social-emotional, behavioral, and mental health development. However, when these children have access to high-quality early care and education (ECE), they experience improved developmental outcomes and greater school readiness.

Despite this, data from 2019 indicates that only 43.7% of young children in foster care are enrolled in ECE programs. This raises important questions: Why is this the case, and what can be done to change it? Researchers in Arkansas are actively seeking to answer these questions and implement strategies that could inspire other states to take action for the benefit of children in foster care.

An October 2024 webinar sponsored by the PN-3 Capacity- Building Hub at BUILD, entitled, Two Systems, One Vision: Quality Early Care and Education for Children in Foster Care, focused on Arkansas’s efforts to ensure young children in the child welfare system get the support they need to thrive. Presenters Sheila Smith, Ph.D., from the National Center for Children in Poverty, and Todd Grindal, Ed.D, from SRI International, described a project – a partnership among SRI International, the National Center for Children in Poverty, the University of Arkansas Medical Sciences, the Arkansas Department of Education and the Arkansas Department of Human Services – in which they are using a “learn, innovate, and improve” model to understand the barriers to and facilitators of access to high-quality early childhood programs and help the workforce care for children who demonstrate signs of trauma. Nikki Edge, Ph.D., from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, presented the high risk for poor behavior and learning outcomes children in foster care experience because of trauma and separation from primary caregivers. In addition, she discussed the need to reduce expulsion through Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation (IEMHC), a topic that will be explored in a future blog.

The Barriers

The project Todd and Sheila discussed found that enrollment in high-quality ECE is low and that, as Todd noted, “When [foster parents] do enroll, the programs they enroll in are of low quality.” But this is not because they don’t care about the quality. As reported through interviews and surveys, they care deeply. One parent said, “It’s like we have biological children…and sometimes it’s like, if that was the only spot that they have in a daycare setting that takes those vouchers, would I send my own kids there? No. Sometimes you’re just kind of between a rock and a hard place.” Todd added that for foster parents, high-quality child care and ECE are “not a nice to have, but a must have [as they] need to be employed outside of the home.” But by and large, foster “families are on their own in this search…checking websites to find programs that have a sufficient level of quality to serve children in foster care…and take vouchers and have openings. Finding a place that will take their voucher has led them to experience some form of hardship. They’ve missed work and experienced some financial strain.”

Sheila added that another common theme among foster parents and ECE directors was that serving children in foster care requires expertise in trauma-informed care. One parent said, “Most of the providers are untrained, freak out, and discipline most of the time.” A director said, “I love these babies. But I’m the first to say I’m just not equipped. We need some mental health people in this building. We need trauma sensitivity training.” As a result of foster parents’ challenge with finding high-quality care and education, more than one-third of them have turned down a DCFS request to take a child four or more times due to concerns about finding care.

Innovations

Sheila noted that the project has uncovered challenges and resources to address them and strategies they will test in the coming year. First, they plan to partner with Child Care Aware (CCA) to help foster parents’ search for high-quality care. This strategy includes providing information about CCA to foster parents, including during the trainings in which they are mandated to participate, establishing processes for referrals from caseworkers to CCA to enable them to reach out to foster parents and offer assistance proactively, and also encouraging CCA to help foster parents access Head Start, Early Head Start, and state preschool programs, which tend to be among the highest quality in Arkansas.

Another strategy is to support faith-based child care providers in becoming eligible to serve children in foster care. This will involve providing information that dispels myths about accepting vouchers and participating in the QRIS, including information that lets them know that there’s flexibility in the content of their curriculum and some other requirements, and offering TA from a specialist with experience helping faith-based providers.

Suggestions for Other States

Todd and Sheila recommend the following:

• Partner with organizations that work with foster parents to learn about barriers they face in finding ECE and the kind of assistance they’re currently getting. Learn about strategies already used in your state or community regarding quality and trauma-informed care.
• Try to learn more about young children in foster care in your state and their participation in ECE, whether they’re in high-quality programs, inclusive programs, or Head Start/Early Head Start. You might want to obtain the Head Start Performance Information Report (PIR), showing how many children in your Head Start programs are in foster care.
• Shine a spotlight on the benefits of access to high-quality ECE for children in foster care, especially if you are concerned that this issue needs more attention in your space.
• Collaborate with ECE, child welfare agencies, and other partners, including the foster parent community, to learn, innovate, and try out new strategies.
• If children in foster care haven’t been a topic much in your circles, that’s a real opportunity to highlight the benefits of early care and education for these children and invite folks from another system to your system.

Bridging Cross-System Communication Challenges

ECE providers who are serving children in foster care are unintentionally often left completely out of the communication loop about what’s happening in a foster care case. They tend not to know enough about the history of the children they’re serving, if reunification is nearing, if the case is coming to adoption, or if changes in visitation schedules and court appointments will lead to daily disruptions in the child’s life and the program. Nikki discussed a communications toolkit created with the support of Arkansas’s child welfare and early education agencies that ECE and child welfare teams can use when working together to meet the needs of a child in foster care. One of the most important elements of the toolkit is the simplest – just a letter from these agency leaders saying, “We support the sharing of information in the best interest of the child.” The toolkit provides tips for the questions appropriate for ECE providers to ask, ways to share their updates with the court and with case workers, and ideas for how to support children who are leaving a program. Todd noted another important reason for building collaboration into the system: “One of the challenges is that people in this field do change jobs, case workers come and go, people working in a part of an agency move. [We need to focus on] how we can make sure that collaboration continues [regardless of all the changes].”

States Can Make It Happen

In an ideal world, children wouldn’t be involved in the child welfare system. But until we enact policy that provides the supports that will prevent child welfare involvement, we must, at least, ensure children already in care receive high-quality ECE and trauma-informed care. With over 700 people from 47 states, the District of Columbia, and abroad registered for this webinar, the strong desire to improve access to ECE for foster children, improve cross-systems alignment, and learn more about ensuring trauma-informed strategies are used in classrooms is clear. Other states should follow Arkansas’s lead and “learn, innovate, and improve” their way to better support and outcomes for our most vulnerable children.

For more information on the cross-systems collaboration between child welfare and other early childhood systems, check out the resource collection on BUILD’s website. It includes recent reports and articles and recording and archived materials from BUILD’s webinars.