High level of evidence

Of children in out-of-home placement, children with the following characteristics experience greater difficulty being reunified with their families and greater chances of reentering care:

• Children with health problems or disabilities

• Children with multiple placement moves (often as a result of behavioral issues)
  

Data analysis. Compare rates of reunification for:

• children with identified disabilities and children with none;
• children with more than three placement moves and children with fewer than three;
• children with mental health diagnoses who have fewer placement moves and more placement moves.

Psychosocial functioning. Provide mental health services to children and families before, during, and after reunification to equip children and parents to handle behavioral issues as they arise when the child returns home.

Special education. Connect parents with special ed advocates to ensure that children receive appropriate timely IEPs and services.

Support. Link families to support groups for children with similar disabilities.

Respite. Provide respite services for families.

Consult. Work with disability advocacy groups to understand how to better facilitate permanent, timely placements for these children.

Poverty and inadequate housing are the most common predictors of placement in foster care and of foster care reentry.

Children living in poverty are less likely to be reunified than those not living in poverty and more likely to reenter care

Collaboration. Increase collaboration with substance abuse, mental health services, and TANF workers in the area served. Establish liaisons or move services in-house.

Joint trainings. Have joint trainings in which child welfare, TANF, anti-poverty, substance abuse/mental health providers are made aware of ASFA timelines for treatment and in which these allied professionals can communicate about available resources.

Parents with more support from extended family members are less likely to have their children reenter care.

Medium level of evidence

Including kin in making permanent plans for children has been shown to contribute to successful reunification.

Commitments for support. With parents' permission, include any and all extended family members from the beginning of the case planning process. Get concrete commitments from family members as to ways they will support the permanency plan. Invite kin to write letters to the family about their strengths and ways they would like to support them.

High level of evidence

• Early and accurate family assessments are favorably associated with reunification and lowering recidivism rates.

• Post-reunification services are associated with lower re-entry rates.
  

Assessments. Assess the average time to completion of initial assessment in your agency.

Thoroughness. Assess thoroughness of workers' assessments through case review.

Pair workers. Pair more skilled workers with less skilled workers in completing family assessments.

Risk assessment. Determine which families are at greatest risk of recurring maltreatment using a risk assessment tool (very poor families; families with very young children; families with substance abuse problems; families in which a child has a disability or health problem). Allocate intensive services based on a triage of most in need to least in need.

Post-reunification services. Casework to provide post-reunification services. Involve advocacy groups, social work schools, TANF offices, churches/synagogues, etc. in getting/creating these resources.

Very short stays in care (less than three months) can result in reentry It is likely that many families cannot make necessary changes in this brief time period.

Data analysis. Look at your average time to reunification. If the median time to reunification is less than six months, look at your reentry rates to see if these reunifications are disrupting.

Data analysis. Run reunification comparisons by worker, area, etc. Which workers or areas are reunifying families fastest? Slowest? Which are the populations predominantly served in which areas (or by which workers)? What hypotheses explain variations in performance?

Data analysis. Which lower risk, lower resource-intensive families (exclude those with substance abuse or poverty as the main issue) are not being reunified? Determine whether this is due to worker, area, services, insufficient adoptive or foster placements, etc. Increase targeted efforts to improve reunification rates for these families.