The State’s Auditors of Public Accounts (APA) released an extensive report on the Department of Children and Families (DCF) today, chronicling the findings of an audit conducted into DCF’s kinship care practices from 2018-2022. By and large, the report found that while DCF has made meaningful strides in its kinship practices, it has fallen short of meeting its aspirational goal of placing 70% of children in kinship care.
“Our audit identified internal control deficiencies; instances of noncompliance with laws, regulations, or policies; and a need for improvement in practices and procedures that warrant management’s attention,” read the report’s introduction.
Kinship care is defined in the report as “full-time care of children by relatives or close family friends when the child’s parents are unable to provide care.” DCF is the department responsible for determining when kinship care is applicable for children removed from their parent’s custody and is mandated by state law to identify and notify relatives who could potentially serve as the child’s foster parents within 30 days of the child’s removal from parental custody. Per the APA’s report, DCF has fallen short of achieving that mandate.
“Identifying a relative or fictive kin is the first step towards engaging them as a kinship foster parent,” read the report. “While DCF has practices to identify kin, we found the department does not systematically monitor whether it conducted a comprehensive search and identification of relatives within the required 30 days of the child’s removal.”
From 1991 to 2022, DCF was placed under a court monitor as a result of a 1989 lawsuit that accused the state’s child welfare system of failing to meet the needs of children placed under its care. During this time period, DCF entered into a consent decree, or a settlement agreement that laid out standards and benchmarks of care that DCF would need to meet. One of these standards was that DCF must conduct and document “a comprehensive search for maternal and paternal relatives, extended formal or informal networks, friends of the child or family, former foster parents, or other persons known to the child” in 85% of cases.
The APA found that DCF as a whole met this 85% standard but that this success varied significantly among DCF’s regional offices. In 2018, it found DCF’s Hartford, Milford, New Britain and New Haven offices as falling short of the 85% goals, while DCF’s Danbury, Manchester, Middletown and Willimantic offices exceeded them, meeting this goal in 100% of their cases.
In 2023, the APA found that half of DCF’s regional offices failed to meet this standard. It also found that DCF failed to provide the proper case notes in placement cases, which obfuscates the ability of auditors to determine what efforts were taken by DCF to locate potential kin. Ultimately, APA concluded that DCF had inadequate procedures and monitoring in place regarding kinship placement.
“DCF search efforts may not identify relatives and fictive kin, and children may remain in non-kin foster care for a longer period,” said the report. “Placement Resource Search data would not accurately portray DCF’s search efforts.”
APA recommended that DCF develop new strategies and policies to standardize its procedures in kinship searches and that it should better document the efforts it takes to locate and contact potential kinship providers. DCF strongly disagreed with the APA’s findings.
“We do not agree with this finding,” read DCF’s response. “The data cited in the report shows consistent search for relatives during the audit period. The audit seems to conclude that the outdated 85% threshold is the barometer for determining whether each individual office consistently searched for kin.”
The APA also found that since 2018, DCF has made “little change” in improving its initial placements of children into kinship care. In 2020, DCF announced a goal of placing 70% of children into kinship care, but APA noted that it did not set a target date by which this goal could be achieved.
“Good business practices include updating benchmarks and goals when necessary,” read the report.
APA noted the “historical progress” made by DCF in recent years; DCF consistently met its prior 40% kinship placement goal from 2018 through 2022, a drastic improvement from the 24% rate at which children’s initial placements were with kin in 2011. From 2018 to 2022, APA found that DCF made 44% of its initial placements with kin, putting it above the national average. Regardless, APA recommended that DCF create “a specific, deadline driven implementation plan with measurable outcomes and supportive tools to meet its strategic goal to increase kin caregiver placements.”
Again, DCF responded in disagreement with the finding. In its response, DCF asserted that there is “no national standard” set as high as 70%, and that only one other state has set a 70% aspirational goal.
“The Department is meeting the goal of placing at least 40% of children with relatives at the time of their initial placement and has consistently performed above the national average in placing children with relatives,” read DCF’s response. “While we have not yet met our own aspirational goal of 70% of all children in care residing with relatives, we remain committed to that goal and have continued to trend in the right direction.”
The next point raised by the APA was the inconsistency at which DCF subcontracted “caregiver support teams” (CSTs) met timeliness and performance monitoring goals. CSTs were created by DCF in 2014 to provide clinical support to foster families, and seven nonprofits have been contracted by DCF since then to act in this capacity. It found that these subcontractors failed to meet timeliness goals for three categories, initial meeting with families, the drafting of assessment plans, and transition and discharge plans, in 40% of cases. The report also noted that while timeliness compliance increased throughout the audit period, DCF also extended the deadlines of its timeliness goals during the period.
“Contractors improved upon their timeliness during the audited period due in part to changes extending the deadlines,” read the report. “For example, intake used to take seven days (52% noncompliance) but changed to 14 days (21% noncompliance).”
The APA listed the reasonings provided by DCF for delays in initial meetings. 58% of these delays were attributed to the foster families themselves, 22% were caused by a lack of CST capacity or availability and 7% were attributed to a failure of DCF to process the case in a timely fashion.
APA also again noted discrepancies in performance by region and noted a discrepancy in CST performance by ethnicity. Auditors used five different metrics by which to measure CST’s performance; clients who met treatment goals, cases which could be treated with the child in home, placements that have remained at six months (to measure stability), and client satisfaction.
The report found that 85% of clients met their treatment goals, that children remained in their foster homes during 88% of CST interventions, and that 77% of children remained in the same home by their 6 month follow up. 99% of caregivers responded positively when asked about their satisfaction with the CST program.
Despite these promising statistics, the APA claimed that these statistics may be the result of cherry picking.
“While overall outcomes in this area appear positive, we found that large amounts of missing data could affect these conclusions,” read the report.
APA noted that clients who were black were 5% less likely to meet treatment goals than other clients, and said that DCF did not “systematically use data to assess caregiver support team performance and often relied on anecdotal information as a basis for performance.” APA also claimed that DCF “did not appropriately evaluate contractors or utilize penalty provisions available in contracts for not meeting any of the agreed upon performance measures.”
Ultimately, APA recommended that DCF assess why contractors are not meeting deadlines and implement performance measures in their contracts, revise client outcome measures to include objective benchmarks, assess any racial disparities in treatment outcomes, regularly meet with contractors to discuss performance measures, and include assessments of the achievement of these measures in annual provider evaluations. Again, DCF did not agree with the APA’s findings, and especially disagreed with the claim that it doesn’t use data to measure subcontractor performance.
“This portion of the finding is overly broad and appears to apply to all contracted agencies not just the CST program,” read DCF’s response. “The Department’s contract management system relies on data as well as individual meetings with providers to monitor contract compliance and solicit input from providers and our clients to inform opportunities for contract revisions to better meet client needs.”
DCF also defended its changing of the 7-day timeframe for which CSTs are expected to conduct their initial meetings with families.
“Caregivers are juggling a myriad of issues related to accessing services and meeting the children’s basic needs immediately following what is often an emergency placement,” read DCF’s response. “It is difficult for them to accommodate another in-home service within the 7-day timeframe, and CST providers must balance honoring family voice and meeting the strict contract requirement of timeliness.”
In addition to these findings, the report found also found inadequacies in CST data, inconsistencies with CST’s operating capacity and contractual expectations, inconsistent record keeping regarding CST referrals, and that DCF failed to promptly respond to the auditors’ information requests, among other findings. Ultimately, the APA concluded that it found “deficiencies in internal controls, apparent noncompliance with laws, regulations, contracts and grant agreements, policies or procedures, and a need for improvement in management practices and procedures.”
In a statement issued after release of the auditor’s report, DCF Commissioner Jodi Hill-Lilly said the state has “significantly improved” since the audited time period, which ended in 2022.
“We have met multiple times with the state auditors to understand their findings and provide information on how our practices have improved over the six year span of which this audit evaluated,” Hill-Lilly said. “We believe a number of issues identified in the report will be resolved when our new computer system, CT-KIND, is fully operational in 2025.”
Hill-Lilly said that Connecticut places roughly 50 percent of foster youth with “individuals they have a prior relationship with,” compared to a national state average of 38 percent.
“Connecticut remains very proud that we are one of the leading child welfare and wellbeing jurisdictions in the country to place youth into kinship homes to lessen the trauma they experience while being separated from their parents,” Hill-Lilly said. “We look forward to continuing to enhance our practices to best serve children and families across Connecticut.”
**This article was updated with comments from DCF Commissioner Jodi Hill-Lilly**
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
