Where are children placed outside of their kin and community?

When children can live with family and in their own communities, they experience greater placement stability and maintain family connections and cultural traditions. We use a simple indicator called Adverse Placement Score (APS) to help states quickly identify areas where this is not happening. Using administrative data, we track the percentage of children who are not placed with kin and are instead placed in any of three settings: (1) congregate care, (2) separated from siblings, or (3) far from home. APS is used at the state or county level to gauge system performance, and it is broken down regionally, by demographic, and by each adverse placement category, to highlight specific areas with gaps in needs met.

How do children move while in care?

Traditional placement stability measures make it challenging to apply strategies because they don’t disaggregate between different types of moves that children experience. We apply a framework to distinguish between moves that bring children back to their communities and moves that don’t so that states can develop data-driven strategies to ensure most moves keep children with family and in their communities of origin.

Which resource homes are available?

Recorded resource home placement preferences are often overstated, making it difficult to plan for recruitment and effectively place children. We look at placements taken by each foster home to help states identify (1) which homes have been actively taking placements (i.e. true foster home capacity), (2) which homes had overstated preferences or were underutilized, and (3) which homes need targeted interventions or additional support.

We have worked with partners to explore a number of issues, including racial disparities in placement, kin placement stability, and time to permanency. Contact us to design a custom analysis that meets the needs of your state!