This is an exciting time for someone who teaches about the legal representation of children in foster care. Florida is currently in the middle of the most public discussion of its system we have ever had, and I am loving it. There has been a full OPPAGA report, four senate committee hearings (including presentations by judges with differing viewpoints), op-eds calling for a change, and a senate bill proposing a new program to provide direct legal representation to older foster children. Whatever happens in the end, this discussion is healthy.

It’s also the culmination of a decade of pent up disagreement about the direction of the GAL Program and how it can best serve children. That shouldn’t have happened. The statute creating the Program requires the executive director to be appointed every three years after publicly advertising the position and publicly interviewing the candidates. Every three years we should have heard competing visions of the Program and a transparent discussion of where it should go next. Instead, a (legally debatable) loophole in the statutory language permitted two governors in a row to re-appoint the current director without that public process. That turned policy into politics. There were people both in and out of the Program who would have applied. Instead many of them are now gone. (Confession: I’m not one of them. Running a statewide agency is not in my wheelhouse.)

Part of having a meaningful debate about the future of child representation in Florida requires having a shared understanding of the existing system. The GAL Program has done a masterful marketing job of making the term “guardian ad litem” synonymous with volunteer advocacy. That is only part of what the Program actually does. This post looks at something I’ve never seen publicly detailed before: how the GAL Program spends its money.

What does a guardian ad litem do in Florida?

It’s helpful to start with a reminder of what a guardian ad litem does in Florida dependency cases. The statutes say that GALs are appointed “to represent the best interest of the child,” but the law doesn’t provide much guidance as to what that means in practice. According to the statutes, GALs in dependency cases must (1) review DCF’s dispositional recommendations and changes in placement, (2) file a dispositional report, and (3) be present at all critical stages of a case or file a written report. GALs also must be appointed to TPR cases and file written recommendations that include the child’s wishes. They also have similar obligations as other parties, such as participating face-to-face in case plan hearings and maintaining confidentiality.

It’s important to say what is not in the statutes creating the guardian ad litem. There is no requirement that the GAL be a volunteer, that the GAL be represented by an attorney, or that the GAL do any independent investigation or appear in court except in TPR cases. The statutes even give the GAL the option of filing a written report of findings and recommendations in most situations. In theory, the statutory duties could be performed by a handful of staff or volunteers in each circuit doing file reviews and a specialized TPR team. This would not be a particularly good system, but it would be a legal one.

The GAL Program is not required by the law to have its current structure. It’s the result of policy choices by its leadership over the last 17 years. Listening to the public discussion this year, it seems the GAL Program has defined itself in four different ways:

A volunteer mentorship program. In hearings and op-eds, supporters of the Program have repeatedly pointed to examples of GALs serving as mentors for kids. We hear about the hours that the volunteers spend with the children, the miles driven, and the money spent. Someone even rhetorically asked at a hearing, “If children get attorneys instead, who will take them to get their hair cut?” The answer should be their foster parents, but that’s a different discussion.

A fact investigation program. The GAL Program talks a lot about the factual information brought to the court through its volunteers. This was the traditional function and major innovation of CASA in the early days. Volunteers had the time to go out and interview everyone, and then the time to sit in court until it was their turn to report. Today we have a lot more investigatory resources and reports coming to the court through professionals, but the barriers to everyone in a child’s life participating in hearings are still there.

A fundraising program. The GAL Program raises and spends money on material items that foster kids need, mostly through its direct support organizations. This includes normalcy items like clothes for prom and services like tutoring or therapy that aren’t covered by other funding sources. I want to note that they don’t pay for all kids’ needs — just the kids who are represented by the Program. I have made requests and been told no until the court appoints them to one of my clients.

A legal advocacy program. The GAL Program has lawyers, advocates in court, and does legal trainings and pro bono recruitment. (Their legal training materials are really good.) The Program doesn’t typically highlight this work when doing public outreach. I’ve spoken to people involved in marketing and fundraising for the Program who acknowledge that donors don’t feel warm and fuzzy about paying for lawyers and paralegals the way they feel about paying for prom dresses. Court puppies and mentorship moments bring in more money than depositions, no matter how outcome determinative they may be. The Program typically only focuses on its legal advocacy work when it is swatting away calls for children in foster care to get attorneys.

At one committee hearing, a speaker supporting the current GAL Program said it has always had to choose between quantity and quality — between representing all children poorly or representing some children very well. That seemed so reasonable at the time he said it: another underfunded charitable organization just trying to survive. Except that the GAL Program is not a charitable organization: it’s a $50 million per year government agency. And its budget tells a much more complex story about the choices that its leadership has made.

What does the Guardian ad Litem Program spend money on?

The OPPAGA report had a statistic that raised a lot of eyebrows, even from people who are supportive of the GAL Program in general. Since 2016 it has received 14% more money but managed to represent 3,500 fewer children. The Program has given no real explanation for the reduction. That high-profile supporter suggested that this was an intentional choice by the Program so that it could focus on higher quality advocacy. The law says that every child must have an advocate.

The OPPAGA report describes the multidisciplinary team model that the GAL Program uses on cases. It consists of a volunteer or a staff guardian, a child advocate manager, and a lawyer. OPPAGA did not give any information on whether this model was being implemented efficiently. The OPPAGA report includes a chart of comparable systems in other states. Florida’s GAL Program had 3.7 times the state funding as the next largest state (which was Texas, and most of its funding came from other sources). North Carolina, the state with a multidisciplinary model similar to ours, spent $986 per child compared to Florida’s $1,600. I have no idea if one program is better than the other, but the Florida GAL Program was supposed to be the model of cost effectiveness. This suggests there are other options out there worth exploring. These are the types of things we should talk openly about.

To begin to answer these questions, we need to know how the GAL Program spends its money. That’s what this post is about. As a caveat, I want to say that I’m not an accountant or an expert in public administration. My best party trick is making public records requests and colorful charts from the results. I hope someone with the right expertise takes a look at this and continues the conversation.

Here’s a little about the methodology I’ve used. I’ve made choices about how to group expenditures into categories to make them more understandable. I’m also including the expenditures by the direct support organizations (like the Guardian ad Litem Foundation or Voices for Children) because they fundraise on the name of the Program and fund positions and expenses for the Program. If anyone disagrees with this methodology, the source documents are all publicly available. The data in this post comes from the following places:

• A public records request on the GAL Program’s expenditures by object code and category, for both general revenue and grants. I have this for fiscal years 2015-16 through 2019-20.
• A public records request on the GAL Program’s FTE positions. I have two versions of this. One shows the available positions at the end of each fiscal year from 2016 to 2020. The other shows the active employees on February 1, 2020.
• A review of the most recent available 990 tax forms for the direct support organizations that I could find. Some DSOs filed full 990s and others filed short forms, which limited the details available. I tried to use the same functional expenses categories for each, but I had to guess in some cases. The amount that I guessed on was less than 1% of the total budget.
• The Department of Financial Services catalog of State Financial Assistance Programs.
• Legislative appropriations.
• GAL Program reports.

Let’s begin.

The basics

The GAL Program’s annual state appropriations have increased 512% since its creation. In 2003, it was appropriated $10.3 million. In 2020, the amount was $53.5 million. Budget negotiations for this year are not complete, but the House’s budget currently proposes $56.5 million and the Senate’s budget proposes $54.2 for the Program.

Over the same period of time, the number of positions at the GAL Program more than doubled from 320 at its lowest to 748 in 2020. As with any organization, not all positions are filled at any given time. The House’s budget this year proposes 759 FTEs, and the Senate’s budget proposes 723.

The GAL Program’s annual reports typically list a representation rate for that year. More recently the Program has issued performance reports. There’s no public repository of the historical reports, but some are available online. I’m not plotting this data because I have no way of saying how these rates were calculated or whether they used a consistent methodology year to year. The Program claims to have hit a rate of 84% in 2015, at the beginning of the latest expansion, and a recent low of 68% at the height of that expansion. OPPAGA put the rate at around 67%, which is why knowing the methodology is important.

The final group of expenditures is money raised by the Direct Support Organizations and grants received by the Program. The OPPAGA report shows that those funds have increased a lot over the last few years.

A word of caution about the DSOs, however. They raise money for the local programs, and Voices for Children in Miami is the bulk of that money. Voices for Children also receives over $900,000 in state financial assistance from the legislature to augment salaries the organization is paying at the Miami office. The DSO money is therefore not 100% donations.

So, increases across the board but lower representation rates. Where does the money go?

The expenditures

The next chart is the meat of this post. This is an approximation of the GAL Program’s expenditures for 2019-20 based on the records described above. I’ve added 30% to the salaries to account for benefits, which have been removed from the expenses group. OPS employees were converted to an FTE without benefits. I created six categories and tried to consolidate the expense codes as much as possible.

The chart accounts for approximately $53.8 million in GAL Program and DSO spending. About 62% of this pays for that three-person multidisciplinary team: 35% for recruitment, training, and management of volunteers; 21% for attorneys and legal costs; and 6% towards unknown salaries paid for by the DSOs, which I’ll assume go to front-line staff. The rest of the expenditures are local and statewide managerial positions, administrative support, normal organizational expenses like photocopying and insurance, and state financial grants to support two local programs: the Orange County program and Voices for Children in Miami.

What stands out to me is that the GAL Program could probably hit 100% representation if it would pick one thing and stick to it. I said I’m not a public administration expert, but the budgeting choices here seem fairly straightforward. The Program could be a traditional CASA program with money to spare by redirecting the legal staff, top-heavy managerial structure, and some of the administrative positions into recruitment and CAM positions. It could be a pretty large law firm with a more-manageable caseload if it redirected the CASA-model elements into attorneys and investigators (the GAL program attorneys currently handle 100+ cases, which is not good) and streamlined the managerial structure. Or maybe that high-profile supporter of the Program is correct and this is the necessary but imperfect balance of all the faces of the GAL Program. Could it be done better? I’m sure someone with more expertise than me could say. All I know is there is no lack of money to work with here.

Nobody is making a fortune either. Here is the state salary distribution. Bosses and lawyers get paid the most, with case management staff and then administrative staff making the least.

And finally here are the top 10 salaries in GAL-world. The highest paid employees are at Voices for Children in Miami, which also had the highest DSO expenditures and over $2 million in assets, so maybe this is defensible. Only two state employees make six figures, and only seven make more than $75,000.

Name	Title	Annual Rate
Nelson Hincapie	CEO of Voices for Children (Miami)	$                          237,747
Tania Rodriguez	COO of Voices for Children (Miami)	$                          169,914
Alan Abramowitz	Executive Director	$                          127,954
Dennis Moore	General Counsel	$                          116,911
Kristen Solomon	Director of Operations	$                            98,417
Debra Ervin	Administrative Services Director	$                            90,413
Gregory Ramsey	Chief Information Officer	$                            89,673
Thomasina Moore	General Counsel	$                            88,359
Amy Foster	ED at GAL Foundation Tampa Bay	$                            77,962
Laurie Blades	Regional Director	$                            77,250
David Windle	Finance and Budget Director	$                            74,624

Most of the other 709 employees are paid significantly less. When I left the GAL Program in 2011 as a Senior Program Attorney I think I made around $47,000.

In the next sections, let’s take each of the groups above and look at them in more detail. We begin with the core of the CASA model.

Case Management

Since 2015, the GAL Program has spent approximately $66 million on case management. I’m including in this group the recruitment, training, and supervision of the volunteers. This also includes the CAMs who function as staff advocates and have their own case loads. The Program’s pay plan lists CAMs as either doing the job responsibilities directly or through volunteers.

Every CAM does the job differently, but the main function for those working with volunteers is to keep them on task. A CAM can spend significant time on the phone reminding volunteers about visits, upcoming court dates, and deadlines to submit drafts of reports. They spend time explaining administrative process (e.g., how home studies work) and investigation strategy (e.g., talk to the school counselor not just the principal). The CAMs typically edit the GAL reports submitted by volunteers or write them from scratch for volunteers who cannot or will not do the draft. CAMs go to court or participate in staffings sometimes, especially on contentious cases where the volunteer needs support. At the local level, the CAMs are supervised by the CAM IIs, Program Directors, and Circuit Directors.

About $5.5 million was spent on volunteer recruitment staff since 2015. Some of these staff are hired as OPS. Recruiters hold events in the community, field questions, and coordinate trainings. Turnover in volunteers is a constant for any organization that relies on them. The GAL Program advocacy snapshot for November 2020 showed that about 65% of certified volunteers were active. Coincidentally, that is the same percentage of children the Program represents — another opportunity to reach 100%.

Over time, expenditures on case management have gone up in large part due to a budget increase in 2017-18.

Despite the pay increase, FTEs for case management went down through 2018-19 and rebounded slightly in 2019-20.

Finally, looking only at 2019-20, the CAMs were largely hired in the last five years with a sizeable spike in the last two years. The CAM IIs follow a similar pattern, but there are a number of this group that has been with the Program since it was created in 2004. There are two employees in this group who have been with the Program since its time as a court program.

Lastly, pay for CAMs does increase with time, but really only for those who have been there 10+ years. The newer employees seem to have very flat pay tracks. Those two CAMs making close to $50k are in the 16th Circuit.

Legal Advocacy

Unlike the CAMs and CAM IIs, legal salaries are reversed. Most of the Program Attorneys are classified as “senior,” which comes with a pay bump. Legal expenses are a small portion of the budget, and only a few circuits have designated legal secretaries. In other circuits, administrative staff help with record pulls and filings.

The same decrease in FTEs is seen in the lawyers in 2018-19, before rebounding in 2019-20.

And there was a similar decrease in expenditures. It seems notable that litigation expenses decreased, too. Either those costs got picked up by a DSO or this reflects an intentional shift away from legal advocacy. I’d love to hear more about what happened there.

Most program attorneys were hired in the last few years, but there are some that have been with the Program since its creation. Senior Program Attorney status seems to be based on tenure, but there are two attorneys who may want to ask some questions.

Attorneys also see slightly higher pay over time, but again only if you’re in the right circuits. The rest are one two tracks: Attorney and Senior Attorney, with a few statewide lawyers handling appeals coming in higher.

Administrative Staff

The Program has spent about $24.5 million on administrative costs over the last 5 years. This group is actually three: statewide administrative staff like financial officers or information technology directors, local administrative staff like secretaries and assistants, and all the miscellaneous expenses that every organization has, like copy paper and maintenance. I’ve chosen to lump them together because all of these expenses provide support to the core mission of the Program without providing managerial or front-line services. The bulk of this group is the salary for local administrative staff.

The administrative FTEs saw a drop in 2017-18, mostly at the local level.

There was also a dip in expenditures in this group.

Most administrative staff were hired in the past few years, but some have been with the Program since its creation.

The local administrative salaries show less stratification. The range from from $25k to $40k is not huge, but at least there’s hope of a raise over time.

Managerial Staff

The Program has spent about $23 million on managerial staff since 2015. The Program has a lot of bosses. On the case management side, there are local program directors, local circuit directors, regional directors, and statewide program directors. The legal side is a bit thinner with managing attorneys in each circuit, regional legal counsels, and two statewide general counsels.

Interestingly, there wasn’t a decrease in managerial staff in 2018-19 like we saw in case management and legal.

And there was only a slight decrease in expenditures on management over that time.

Finally, the date of hire for the managerial staff is significantly different than front line and administrative staff. The management, especially the circuit directors, have been around a lot longer — many since the beginning and about half since before the hire of the current Executive Director in 2010. I’ve added labels for the circuit numbers just to show the distribution.

Everything over Time

When you put that all together, you can see the efforts of the Program over time. It did expand expenditures on case management and legal. It managed to keep most other categories constant. Yet it still represented 3,500 fewer children.

However, not every circuit saw the same increases over those years. The largest increase was in Circuit 7 (Flagler, Putnam, St. Johns, Volusia), and neighboring Circuit 18 (Brevard, Seminole). Some circuits came out pretty even. Circuit 16 (Monroe) was the only circuit to lose state funding during this process.

Here are the changes by each group. The changes were largely seen in case management and legal.

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Conclusion

Nothing in these numbers explains why the GAL Program represented 3,500 fewer children over the last four years. The existential question for the Program’s leadership going forward is whether they can actually accomplish the goal of 100% representation. Throwing money at it doesn’t seem to be working. It may be time to try something new.

I wrote last month that if there wasn’t a big jump in the number of kids being removed by October (the typical high-point in Fall removals) then I was going to call the COVID prophecies bunk. And here we are with the October data and…nothing. The October removal numbers came in lower than expected.

[November update: I’m not doing a whole new post for November, because there’s still no surge. You can see the dashboard here.]

Below are the numbers for January 2014 to October 2020, taken right from the DCF dashboards. The grey line is a trend line that calculates the median value for +/- 6 months. And, seriously, if you didn’t know there was a global pandemic that had locked down entire countries, closed schools, and possibly changed the course of history, you certainly wouldn’t have guessed it based on these charts (and I even highlighted COVID for you). The child welfare system experienced some shocks at the beginning, but for the most part it adapted and carried on.

Below is the exact same set of numbers with the normal seasonal variations taken out. This lets you see what is unusual. You can see that abuse calls in April 2020 were unseasonably low, but they got back up there. If you look at Hurricane Irma in 2017, you’ll see that the whole system took a pause — calls, removals, and discharges were all lower that month. But the pandemic seems to have only temporarily reduced calls, delayed some exits to September 2020, and pushed removals into an abnormal pattern that is reflected by that saw-tooth line starting around September 2019. What COVID didn’t do: impact the out-of-home care population hardly at all.

It looks like discharges had a rebound in September, clearing out cases that had stalled due to lack of court and closed services. You can see the bump in all three types below: reunifications (17%), adoptions (34%), and guardianship (27%). The adoption number should be put into context, though — the adoption trend line is dropping, suggesting things are slowing down, but only time will tell if that trend continues.

If I were to write a short factual statement on how COVID affected Florida’s statewide numbers, it would be this:

Florida’s been in a very gradual contraction period for a few years, due in large part to a reduction in the number of kids entering the system. The trend was 1,428 kids removed per month in February 2016 and 1,128 in February 2020. When COVID hit, removals got thrown off their normal schedules, but the trend line remained the same. Discharges had been very stable before COVID and were slightly down going into 2020. COVID dropped discharges a lot more, from about 1,100 per month to 960 per month. We saw a huge spike in discharges in September, but we need to do more to get the trendline back up.

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Not everywhere in Florida had the same experience

Florida’s system is a patchwork of community based care agencies, and they rarely move in lockstep. Some agencies did in fact experience dips and surges not seen in the statewide numbers. I made a charts for each of the 19 CBCs. And, I’ve included a short factual statement you can make about each of them based on the numbers. The big takeaway is that across the state COVID had way more impact on discharges than removals, but mostly it had little effect at all on the out-of-home care population. (A more sophisticated analysis would look at the demographics and reasons kids came into care during COVID and test for shifts there — this is not that.)

If you want to go through the data in more detail (down to the county level), you can do so at this dashboard I made.

One important note: COVID significantly affected the quality of life of kids and families in the system by denying in-person visits, reducing court access, closing schools, and a million other ways. The DCF dashboard numbers don’t measure those things. These charts are only about how COVID affected the core system metrics of removals, discharges, and overall population.

Another important note: I’m not including the hotline calls for two reasons. First, DCF does not report hotline calls by CBC, so the info is not readily available. Second, the number of hotline calls have very low (almost no) correlation to actual removals.

Agency	What that agency can probably say about the data
Big Bend CBC	We’ve been in a slow expansion for years, but our removal and discharge rates have remained fairly constant. COVID rose our removals a little, but not much. Our discharges have always been slow, but they picked up in this summer in small part because we entered more guardianships than usual. Our rising out-of-home care population trend hasn’t changed.
Brevard Family Partnership	We’ve been in an expansion period since 2018. Our removal numbers are normally pretty volatile from month to month, but the overall trend has been stable over the years. COVID may have raised our removal trend from 46 to 54 kids per month starting in August, but it’s too early to tell if that will last. We had low discharge rates before COVID (34 per month) and really struggled with reunifications at the beginning through September. We may be back on track.
ChildNet Broward	We’ve been in a contraction since 2016, and our removal rate has been decreasing throughout that time. Removals came in really low at the beginning of the summer, but rebounded in July and seem back on track. Reunifications over the summer stalled a bit, but overall things have been stable.
ChildNet Palm Beach	The pandemic hit at an odd time for us. We had a small expansion from October 2019 to November 2020 and were already clearing that out when COVID struck. Removals had already been down since December 2019 (60 per month) and stayed low after that (52 per month), with a small bump in June. Discharges have steadily decreased and COVID didn’t really change that.
Children’s Network of SW Florida	What pandemic? Our removal trend numbers haven’t budged since 2018 and discharges have been steady for a year. We reunified a bunch of kids in April and lagged a little on guardianships and adoptions, but it all came out in the wash. Especially since we did a ton of adoptions in October.
Citrus Family Care Network	We’ve been in a contraction period for about five years, so when our removals came in low at the beginning of summer it wasn’t that unusual (they were about 10 removals under the trend, so…). The dip was mostly seen in teenagers. COVID really mucked up our discharge patterns, mostly by shifting adoptions into months we don’t normally see many of those.
Communities Connected for Kids	Our numbers have been going down for about a year, largely by reducing removals and keeping our discharge rate very constant. COVID didn’t really change any of that, except maybe reunifications have been experiencing starts and stops. We didn’t do any adoptions in March and they’ve been a little lower (6 per month lower) since the pandemic. On the flip side, we normally do about 1 guardianship a month and since COVID we’re up to 5.
Community Partnership for Children	We’ve had very stable out-of-home care numbers since about October 2018. Removal numbers stayed constant through COVID, but our discharge rate took a huge hit starting in July, mostly as a result of reduced guardianships and adoptions. The result was that our out-of-home care count trended up for the first time in a while.
Eckerd Community Alternatives	We have been in a very slow expansion for a long time. That was flattening out slightly before the pandemic, but COVID sped it up. Removals continued to trend down. Discharges were slower over the summer, but shot up in September and October. The result was that our out-of-home care numbers trended down for the first time in a while.
Eckerd Community Hillsborough	After a very large expansion, our numbers have been flat since 2017. Removals had trended down for that whole time, but there was a spike in June and July during the pandemic. We’re still waiting to see if that’s a blip or changes our direction. We had a significant pause in reunifications in August, with a sharp rebound in September. Our trend line on discharges is still decreasing.
Embrace Florida	We’ve been in a very slow expansion for a few years now. COVID hit our removal numbers hard — down 44% in April — but then reverted back to the trendline by June. Exits have slowed very slightly. We were able to keep reunifications moving, but adoptions were a little up and down. The pandemic had almost no effect on our number of kids in care.
Families First Network	The pandemic took time to affect us. At first, our removals were pretty normal, a little lower at the beginning and then a little higher in the summer, but nothing out of the ordinary. Recently they dropped a lot. We’ll have to wait and see if that’s a blip. Our exits were fairly stable overall, but reunifications definitely were up and down a lot more than normal. Adoptions and guardianships were fairly normal (except that we did zero guardianships in March), but then dropped in October. Something seems to be slowing us down.
Family Integrity Program	We’re a very small CBC, so our trendline numbers are always less stable than larger areas. We entered the pandemic on a downswing in out-of-home care population, but our numbers went back up through the summer and might even be decreasing again. Removals were pretty normal at the beginning of COVID, but dropped off significantly after a spike in June. Discharges — especially reunifications — were very slow until August and seem to have leveled off a bit.
Family Support Services	Our out-of-home care numbers have been stable for years, and then the pandemic hit. It didn’t affect our removals much, but discharges took a dive from about 55 per month to 36 per month. We have only rarely used guardianships since July 2017, and COVID didn’t change that (like in other areas). We reunified a lot of kids in April, but then the numbers went down. We kept our adoptions up (no surprise), but they’ve dropped slightly since August. The result is that our out-of-home care numbers are trending up for the first time in a while.
Heartland for Children	Unlike a lot of other areas, COVID did reduce our removals from 65 per month to about 43 per month. The biggest drops were in ages 1-4 and 5-12. Our discharges became a lot more erratic, but we’ve managed to maintain our trendline of 61 per month. (We did a ton of guardianships right at the beginning of the pandemic that cleared out a lot.) As a result, our out-of-home care numbers are going down for the first time in years.
Kids Central	We had a small contraction starting around June 2019, but it had already begun slowing due to reduced discharges. That didn’t change in COVID. What did change was our removals — they went up for the first time in a while, which means our out-of-home care numbers are going up, too. Only time will tell how permanent this is.
Kids First of Florida	We are a smaller CBC, so we see a lot more movement in our trends than larger areas. We had a small expansion through 2019 that had mostly cleared out when COVID struck. Despite coming in a little low during March and April, our removal trends stayed the same at 15 per month. But, our discharges dropped from 16 per month to 12 per month. That was enough to slightly raise our out-of-home care number. Only time will tell if that’s permanent or a blip.
Partnership for Strong Families	We’ve been in an expansion since 2019, largely because our discharge trend dropped a ton at the end of the year from 52 per month to 36 per month. (That had nothing to do with COVID.) Removals have trended up slightly, but really it’s the discharges that are driving our numbers right now. We cleared out 55 kids in September, mostly backlogged adoptions and guardianships, but that wasn’t enough to move the trend.
Sarasota Y / Safe Children Coalition	Our numbers have been remarkably stable over the last four years and COVID didn’t really change that. We removed way more kids than expected in March, but removals were fairly stable after that. Discharges were somewhat low during the summer, but rose a little by Fall. Adoptions have fallen off slightly, and our reunification rate has become somewhat erratic.

I started this post a few days ago and hoped it would be my last COVID post. But with the numbers going up and states entering back into lockdowns I’m worried I’ll be staring at these numbers for a long time to come. Be safe.

I haven’t written about the COVID numbers for a few months because there hasn’t been much new to say. We’ve needed more time to tell if the initial shocks in April were a blip or a new normal. We now have 6 months of data to compare and the answer looks pretty clear to me.

It also looks pretty clear to DCF, which tweeted out this thank you to teachers for calling in more cases on kids.

Calls to the Florida Abuse Hotline have been steadily increasing and are almost back to normal levels – no doubt a testament to the vigilant teachers and school personnel who are reporting suspected abuse, neglect, and abandonment among their students. Thank you! pic.twitter.com/BN4X8DFWuA

— Florida Department of Children and Families (@MyFLFamilies) October 13, 2020

That’s a very odd thing to thank people for, along the lines of “thanks for calling 911!” or “thanks for reporting so many forest fires that we investigated and discovered were not actually a fire at all!”

Before we get to the numbers, a quick reminder that foster care numbers are time-series data, along the lines of the stock market, ice cream sales, and average temperatures. Here are three important components of time-series data that this post will reference:

1. The seasonal ups and downs are the changes that happen, on average, every year at around the same time. For example, an ice cream stand may do 250% more business every summer, and the firecracker industry may have two or three spikes per year. When you’re interested in what’s normal, the seasonality is interesting. When you want to measure what is abnormal (like a pandemic) you remove the seasonal variation from the data to get a smoother graph and a clearer picture.
2. The long-term trend is also measured and removed. If ice cream sales have been going up 10% a year for the last decade, that is interesting but should be factored out when determining whether you had a good month. In the child welfare graphs below I’ve used a 12-month median to determine the trend line. A smaller window would result in a jumpier line, and a bigger window would give a smoother line.
3. If you take out the seasonal and long-term trends, you’re left with the remainder amount. This shows how far the value is outside of what you expected. If you’re asking whether something was an anomaly, you could look here to see if anything stands out. The graphs below look for spikes that are four or more standard deviations from the mean. That means they are very, very unlikely to be normal variations.

So now, with six months under our belts (masks?), let’s see what the numbers show. The full dashboard down to the county level is here. This post is a summary of the statewide numbers.

First, something that the pandemic impacted a lot: institutional abuse reports

If you believe in a direct correlation between abuse calls and safety, then the lockdown orders undeniably made one set of kids safer: the 500-600 kids per month who are allegedly abused by their schools, daycares, summer camps, churches, and other institutional caretakers. This isn’t a situation where the numbers dipped because of a lack of “eyes on the child.” The “eyes” are the abusers in these cases.

Below you can see that the number of institutional abuse reports was down 58% in April 2020, 44% in May, and then started to rebound. The trend line (in blue) had been pretty steady since 2014, and may have even started dipping a little in 2019. The pandemic significantly changed the trend — and I suspect the number won’t completely rebound because fewer people are sending their kids to institutional care settings.

The reduction in calls on children in their homes wasn’t nearly as drastic

Looking at the institutional abuse calls puts the in-home abuse calls into better perspective. Yes, they went down in April (24%) and May (13%) but then they headed back up. The trend line wasn’t much bothered by these dips. I’d call this a V-shaped recovery. The next six months will tell whether that slight increase in September is just a rebound or a new trend. The pandemic dip was a blip.

A trend that wasn’t affected at all: removals

The number of removals per month has trended down since 2016. During that period the largest single month decrease was September 2017 during Hurricane Irma (down 19%). April 2020 came close (down 15%). By summer, though, removals were back above the trend line. And most importantly, the trend line itself didn’t budge.

This is the time to mention that the child welfare system is very bad at its core job of identifying and getting help for kids who need it. The system relies on citizen reporters, as opposed to, say, random home checks of everyone with kids or, say, having such amazing services that people voluntarily call for help instead of having to be sued by the state to accept it (imagine!). These reporters notoriously over-report cases in some communities and under-report them in others. Even the cases that are reported typically don’t result in a removal (only 5-6 removals per 100 alleged victims), and somewhere between 40-50% of investigations result in no indicators of child maltreatment all. Investigating those cases is a waste of time, results in needless trauma to the family, and takes away resources and attention from kids who really need help.

So how did calls to the abuse hotline go down but removals not budge? One possible explanation is that the calls that got skipped would have largely fallen into the “no findings” group. Another explanation could be that DCF weakened its risk thresholds and removed kids who normally they would not have. Yet a third possibility is that the lower investigation caseloads resulted in deeper investigations and kids being removed who would have been overlooked before.

It could be some combination of all three.

There’s some evidence that DCF’s risk threshold changed. For example, removals in April 2020 decreased most for kids aged 5-12 and 13-17. The same level of decrease didn’t happen for newborns or toddlers. These removals were based on calls made in February and March, before the pandemic , so you can’t blame the callers on this one. The investigators’ decision making seems to have change. Teens had a very sharp rebound in June that wasn’t seen in the other age groups.

Below you can also see that neglect-type maltreatments (e.g., inadequate supervision and housing) saw greater decreases — relative to their normal ups and downs — than abuse-type harms. Some maltreatment removals rebounded over the summer (e.g., sexual and physical abuse), and some saw very little change over time at all (e.g., drug abuse and domestic violence). Not shown here, domestic violence removals went up a little in the Northeast Region and stayed flat everywhere else.

I should note that removals typically rise 7% in October and then are down through the end of the year. If the predicted wave of removals doesn’t appear by October, I don’t think it’s ever happening.

Discharges are more complicated

The discharge rate has been very flat for a while. It arguably started trending downward in mid-2019 and continued trending downward through the pandemic. You can see some green spikes that look like corrections but the general trend is downward.

Breaking that into exit types, reunifications trended downward and hit their lowest point in May when most courts were shut down (down 20%). They were then down all summer. There appears to be a U-shaped rebound, but we won’t know for sure until we get more information.

Guardianships took a huge hit in March when courts first closed down, but have more or less corrected. Guardianships have been on a downward slide for a while (which I think is very bad policy), and the pandemic didn’t do anything to change that.

Adoptions took a big enough dive to affect their trend line, going from about 321 per month to 243 per month. We need more time to see whether the correction is U-shaped or whether we get a new normal L.

Well-being measures mostly improved

If you thought the pandemic would lead to worse well-being measures in foster care, you would have been wrong. Most of the measures have actually improved, with the slight exception of the number of kids getting timely dental care.

• The percent of kids abused during in-home services is the second–lowest ever reported = 4.55%.
• The rate of abuse of kids in out-of-home care is the lowest it’s ever been = 6.3 per 100,000 bed days.
• The percent of kids abused again within 6 months of closing services is the near the lowest it’s ever been = 3.49%
• The percent of alleged victims not seen within 24 hours by an investigator is the lowest it’s ever been = 6.76%.
• The percent of investigators with more than 20 open investigations bounced back a little but is still historically low = 1.93%
• The percent of kids placed outside of their removal circuit is pretty flat = 17.04%.
• The percent of kids receiving timely dental services bounced up slightly but is still pretty low = 80.75%.
• The percent of kids receiving timely medical services is a little elevated but not by much = 95.31%.
• The percent of kids with kinship care as their first placement has gone up a lot to 62%.

And this next one is my favorite, so I’m showing the graph. The statewide number of placement moves per 1,000 bed days in out-of-home care was the lowest it’s ever been (3.53). Black children had the most stability they’ve seen in the last 13 years (3.9) and the pandemic erased an 8-year trend of increasing instability for Black children in care. It’s not surprising that making caregivers bear more costs from placement instability (i.e., risks to their own health) and reducing placement departments’ willingness to accept placement change requests had a net positive effect for kids.

So that’s it. The pandemic didn’t crash the system. It made some of it better. One more month like this and I think we can call it stabilized.

Florida DCF’s numbers are out for June and, in terms of investigations and removals, they were spectacularly normal. The predicted wave of removals isn’t here yet, if it’s ever coming at all. To the contrary, the system is struggling to discharge kids, as reunification and adoptions have both significantly decreased. We also have our first look at medical care, dental care, placement stability, sibling separation, and other measures that DCF only reports quarterly. Go ahead and form your own theory about what happened on those before you read on. You might be surprised.

Here are the details.

There were 10,054 initial in-home abuse calls accepted in June 2020. That is only 230 calls below June 2019, making it a fairly normal summer. You can see in the chart above that June calls have been dropping since at least 2016. The rate of decrease actually slowed this month, coming in at 11% above the seasonal trendline. That bump could be due to delayed calls from April and May or the drumbeat of media stories about how people need to report. The short version: people can’t say that calls are down this month, but I’m not quite ready to say they’re rebounding either.

Looking at the pipeline effects, with fewer calls in April and May, there were fewer investigations to close in June — though some investigations may have also been closed faster due to reduced workload. The number of verifications also went down while the number of removals rose slightly. None of this is particularly unusual, except it happened to occur during a pandemic.

And that’s the takeaway thus far: we haven’t seen the drastic increase in removals that people whose jobs depend on caseloads keep predicting. The chart below shows that there has been a gradual but steady decrease in removals since around 2016. June was about 2% up, which is right with the trend.

Now that we have more data for context, it appears that April 2020 was our lowest month for removals, as everyone was getting adjusted to the lockdown. That dip of 15% in April was still less than Hurricane Irma in November 2017, which shut down four of the five regions and reduced removals by 19%. There was a slight rebound in 2017, but it came two months later and quickly leveled out.

Meanwhile, we are seeing lower numbers of kids exiting care across the board. Total exits were about 18% below the trendline. Reunifications were 14% below, and guardianships were pretty even. Adoptions in June, typically one of the biggest adoption months right before the end of the fiscal year, were down a whopping 42% from the expected value. I’ve got a few theories on why. First, trials have been postponed, which could reduce the number of kids free for adoption. Countering that, though, appeals usually take 4-8 months, so we should still be clearing out adoptions from December 2019 to maybe March 2020. Second, the summer adoption campaigns that normally result in lots of adoptions happening all at once probably got paused this year. All those adoptions may wind up spread over the summer months more evenly. The lower rate of adoptions for June isn’t a headline — yet.

New this month, we have data from DCF reports that are run quarterly. Take a look at the DCF chart below. The pandemic seems to have solved placement instability. We don’t yet know why that is, but I suspect foster parents were less likely to ask for a kid to be removed, and agencies were less likely to act on requests that were made. Whatever the reason, the decrease in placement changes happened statewide. The Southern Region hit the 4.12 moves per 1,000 bed days standard for the first time in five years. It will be interesting to see if we can hold these numbers down.

The lockdown appears to have significantly disrupted dental care. Note that the measure covers the entire quarter and looks back seven months, so some of these kids may have gone to the dentist prior to the lockdown.

The lockdown only slightly reduced medical care. Maybe more kids wound up going to the doctor with suspicious symptoms, or maybe the expansion of telehealth made it possible to see a doctor without going in. The window here is 12 months, so maybe we’ll see a dip next quarter if the lockdown continues.

As far as the other reports, there was no noticeable change in the percent of kids placed in their removal circuit, seen by case managers every 30 days, sibling groups placed together, or just about any of the other quarterly reported measures. You can review DCF’s dashboards here.

You can play with the dashboards I created for these posts here and view the data by region, CBC, circuit, or even county. Until next month, be safe.

The May numbers are out and they begin to show how the pandemic is affecting things later in the pipeline from investigation to removal. Remember that investigations take about 60 days from intake. Intakes were down 6% in March and 16% in April from their expected numbers based on historical trends. Closures on investigations in May, however, dropped nearly 34% from the expected trend. That suggests investigations may be taking longer to close. Meanwhile, verifications were down 22% from trend, and removals were only 7% below trend.

Having removals come in 7% under the trendline is very normal. It happened in November 2019 and didn’t make headlines. This suggests that the reduction in intakes was more heavily weighted toward low-risk cases that would not have resulted in a removal anyway. DCF only verifies about 15% of calls and only removes about 4-6% children under investigation, so a reduction in frivolous cases is a win for everyone. We need to wait another month to see how the remaining March-April intakes come out.

On the back-end, exits from care are still very low. They were 40% lower than last year and 20% below the trend line. Reunifications and adoptions were both down. Courts should probably set a few rocket docket days to hear the cases that are pending an uncontested reunification, adoption, and guardianship.

Looking ahead, intakes in May dropped about 33% from 2019 levels, or 9.9% below trend. That puts us back to 2010-level numbers, and it’s still too early to say whether that is an anomaly or a new normal.

You can explore the numbers all the way down to the county level using the dashboard.

Here are the statewide details for this month.

Intakes were down about 9.9%. It’s very hard to put that decrease in context because the intake numbers started behaving oddly in mid-2019. The “turn” may have predated the virus, but we’ll only know if this was a dip or a new normal with more time. The numbers for April have been adjusted up to -16.3% (from -26.5% last month) based on the new data. That’s still hurricane levels low.

Investigation closures were down 34%. We are starting to see the pipeline effects of the lockdown. Intakes were low in March, so closures — which take up to 60 days — are predictably low in May. Based on the numbers of intakes in April, closures should be down even more in June.

Verifications were down 22%. Verifications have been steadily decreasing for years. The fact that verifications didn’t drop as much as closures suggests (but definitely doesn’t prove) that the lockdown resulted in a larger percentage of lower risk cases from being called in. It doesn’t fully prove that because we can’t say how the pandemic affected DCF’s perception of what should be verified.

Removals were only down 7%. That’s well within normal ranges for removals. This is the strongest indication yet that the pandemic resulted in fewer low-risk cases being reported — with the same caveat that we don’t know how DCF’s risk analysis changed. Removals per 100 victims went up a little, again suggesting that more low-risk cases were removed from the investigation pool.

There’s been a lot of discussion about homebound children and sexual abuse cases, and sure enough removals were up for sexual abuse (+23%), inadequate housing (+14%), and inadequate supervision (+10%). That could mean more egregious sexual abuse cases or less risk-tolerance from DCF. Removals came in lower than expected for physical abuse (-11%), drug abuse (-7%), and domestic violence (-3%). All of these, however, were within normal ranges, meaning we saw similar ups and downs throughout the last 16 years. The removal of Black children was down 7.7% in May and 22% in April. That April number was very low.

Discharges from care were down 20%. That’s very low. Courts are starting to get back up and running, so this number should go back up over time as cases that were ready to close get put on the docket. Here are the numbers by permanency type: reunifications were down 13%, adoptions were down 13%, and guardianships were flat.

That’s it for now. The full dashboard lets you see the numbers all the way down to the county level.

We are finally starting to see what impact a nationwide quarantine will have on the foster care system. DCF handled 18,894 intakes in April, which was the lowest number in at least a decade. You could call that 40% lower than last year, or you could say that it’s 26% lower than expected, given that the numbers have been on a downward trend anyway. Either way, as you can see in the full dashboard, we’re beyond hurricane numbers, which typically give a month of lower intakes and then a return to normal. We are instead moving into something unprecedented: what happens if the foster care system doesn’t get new kids?

Ins and outs

For context to the numbers below, I want to give an analogy. The foster care system is a pipeline. Kids come in through the front and leave out the back. Governmental policies, more than anything else, determine the rates at which kids enter and exit. Over the decades, various federal and state administrations have prioritized removals, adoptions, reunifications, in-home services, licensed placements, family placements, and a slew of other policies that had the primary effect of changing the rate of kids coming in and the rate of kids going out.

The middle of the system is like a firehose. If you push water into the hose faster than it can exit, then your hose will expand and eventually burst. If you don’t keep enough pressure in the hose, the water will sit and become stagnant. Pressure comes from pumps and valves and other mechanisms that keep things moving.

Putting that water hose in child welfare terms, the policies around permanency timelines, judicial review, and funding limitations are designed to keep kids moving through the system. The policies around placements are meant to provide enough flexibility that the system can expand and contract without suffering serious shocks.

The most significant expansions and contractions in systems have largely been a result of intentional governmental policies. Since the acculturation of Americans to mandatory child abuse reporting from the 1960s through the 1990s, there has been a steady stream of reports, but not always a consistent level of governmental response. People have built careers, contracts, and budgets around handling a certain number of cases or children per month. Foster parents make work decisions based on the board rate, and programs hire staff on the reasonable assumption that every child who leaves will be replaced by a new one.

A lot of discussions have centered on the question of whether kids will be left in unsafe homes due to the pandemic. I think that’s a valid question. We don’t know whether those 26% of calls would have resulted in removals or not. We don’t even have a good baseline, because we don’t know how the pandemic will change the rates and nature of child maltreatment. We have reason to believe financial insecurity raises the risk of abuse and neglect, but we also know that income inequality and racial disparities impact the numbers by targeting certain families for scrutiny. We have no idea what happens when everyone goes through social and financial trauma at the same time.

The pandemic also raises a second question of what happens to the system if people don’t call cases in and that steady stream of kids suddenly dries up. Will investigators start removing children on facts that would have otherwise gotten a pass? Will the system hold onto existing children longer to minimize the time that beds stay empty? Will programs close or change their focus to take in different kids? Will foster parents not take one child because they had built their home’s budget around two or they now have their own families to look after? Will children who had been bounced around before suddenly find stability when there is no other child waiting to take their place.?

We have never in modern history had a prolonged supply-side shock to the child welfare system. How it responds will tell us a lot about how it works.

Here are the numbers for Florida.

Intakes were down 26.5% from the expected rate. You can see that the March numbers have been adjusted up to -4% because they don’t look so low compared to the new trend. The numbers were down in every region of the state.

Verifications were normal, maybe even a little up (+1%). They’ve been going down for a very long time. That dip in December 2019 predates any serious talk of pandemics. I have no explanation for that. Verifications follow this pattern everywhere except the Southern and Northeast Regions, where they were flat.

Removals were down 19%. There’s usually a two-month lag between an intake and a removal. These investigations would have happened during the pandemic, but the calls likely came in right before it. We are still seeing hurricane levels here. Removals for physical abuse (-30%), inadequate housing (-11%), inadequate supervision (-18%), and sexual abuse (-14%) were all significantly down. Drug abuse (-4%) and domestic violence (-6%) removals were low but normal.

Removals per 100 intakes were normal (-2%). Again, these removals are based on intakes that came in right before the lockdown. We will be watching this number over the next months to see what happens.

Exits were low-normal (-5%). This will also be interesting to watch.

Reunifications were normal (-1%). But, you can see that drop-off getting ready to happen. If that line jumps back up next month, we’re continuing our normal downward trend. If it falls off even more, we have something new happening.

Guardianships may be back to normal (-0.4%). You can see that guardianships took a huge hit in March, but hopped back up in April. Again, that is either part of the old decrease or it’s a new normal. Only time will tell.

Adoptions recovered (+3%). I suspected that judges would handle the adoptions that got postponed, and that seems to be what happened. Those cases were already ready, so it’s easy to just set the one final hearing. We do not yet know how the pandemic will affect the permanency timelines of cases that come in now.

The full dashboard is available here. You can check the numbers for your region, CBC, circuit, or county. You can also see the breakdown of how removals are different for different maltreatment types. I hope you’re doing well in these strange times.