Last week, Arizona’s Department of Child Safety was awarded nearly $10.5M in federal funding to provide much needed and long-awaited pandemic relief to older and former foster youth up to age 27. These supplemental funds were provided by the Supporting Foster Youth and Families Through the Pandemic Act, passed late last year as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, and are the result of advocacy by young people from across the country who lobbied Congress to provide direct financial assistance to youth with experience in foster care—most of whom have been left out of prior stimulus measures. While not new, hastened by the pandemic, the concept of providing direct, no-strings-attached cash payments to young adults who have aged out of foster care is taking root.   

Prior to the pandemic, many young adults were already relying on their parents and relatives for housing and financial support well into their twenties and that trend has increased sharply during the COVID-19 crisis. With high rates of unemployment, stagnant wages, and high housing costs, the path to financial independence for young adults is fraught with obstacles that are nearly impossible to navigate without the help of family. But that is exactly what young adults who have aged-out of foster care must do. In Arizona, about 900 foster youth age-out of foster care each year. They can choose to participate in extended foster care through age 20, but on their 21st birthday lose state financial support and must fend for themselves. “The government functions as their parent, and then swiftly extinguishes financial support, depriving foster kids of the safety net that so many of their peers increasingly find necessary. This added disparity compounds the systemic disadvantage that foster kids already endure, and puts them at heightened risk for poverty, homelessness, and incarceration,” say Mark Courtney & Shanta Trivedi in the recently published piece The Case for Providing Guaranteed Income to Kids Aging Out of Foster Care.  

Citing research that shows remaining in foster care after age 18 increases the likelihood of positive outcomes in adulthood and decreases the likelihood of poor outcomes, Courtney, a professor at the University of Chicago who has spent decades studying the experiences of former foster youth, and Trivedi call upon states and localities to provide a regular stipend to young people as they transition from foster care to independent adulthood. Guaranteed income programs, like the one for former foster youth currently being piloted in Santa Clara County, California, provide direct cash payments to individuals with financial need. Though targeted by need, these payments are not contingent on unemployment or encumbered by other requirements. Recipients can use the funds flexibly to meet their most pressing needs in the moment—groceries, rent, transportation, education. Importantly, because guaranteed income programs are not contingent on the recipient being unemployed, they facilitate participation in the job market which is critical for former foster youth who don’t have family supports for back-up when they need help paying for rent, food, healthcare, and other basic needs.  

Hastened by realities laid bare by COVID-19, the idea of guaranteed income for former foster youth is gaining traction in the child welfare community and beyond. Last week, a bill was introduced in California to take the Santa Clara pilot program statewide, and new polling shows that nationwide a majority of voters favor a guaranteed income program for young adults transitioning from foster care.  

Source: Data for Progress and The Lab https://theappeal.org/the-lab/report/guaranteed-income-for-kids-transitioning-out-of-foster-care/

Even prior to the pandemic, many young adults relied on their parents for financial support—a trend has increased precipitously during COVID-19. But young adults who have aged-out of foster care don’t have a similar support system, and without it struggle. Arizona has made important investments in its extended foster care program in recent years, but that still leaves many exposed to dire outcomes like homelessness, incarceration, and poverty at age 21. Making needs-based financial support available to former foster youth would provide a lifeline for vulnerable young people and help them successfully transition to independent adulthood.

Thanks to the advocacy of thousands of young leaders throughout the nation, including Fostering Advocates Arizona, the latest federal stimulus package, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, contains much-needed COVID relief for young people transitioning from foster care.

Key provisions in the package include:

• Moratorium on Exits from Foster Care Due to Age: No young person can be required to leave foster care because of age (i.e., they turned 21) and young people who “aged-out” during the pandemic and are still under age 22 must be allowed to re-enter foster care. The moratorium is in place through September 30, 2021, the end of the federal fiscal year.
• Increased Funding and Expansion of the Chafee Foster Care Program: The John H. Chafee Foster Care Program for Successful Transition to Adulthood provides funds to states for material and other supports for current and former foster youth, such as direct financial assistance, meeting basic needs, housing, education, and employment support. The stimulus package provides $400M in additional funds, approximately $10M of which will flow to Arizona. The new law also removes the state match requirement, increases the upper age of eligibility to age 27, and lifts a 30% cap on the amount of funds that can be used to provide room and board to young people who are between the ages of 18 and 27 and who have experienced foster care at age 14 or older. These provisions are in effect until the end of the federal fiscal year 2021.
• Provisions to Notify Young People and Streamline Access to Assistance: Importantly, states must notify young people about expanded Chafee eligibility and services, the moratorium, and the ability to re-enter care if under age 22. States may not require that young people show that their need for assistance is directly related to the pandemic if it would be administratively burdensome or otherwise delay or impede the ability of a state to serve foster youth.

The Act contains additional provisions to assist transition-age foster youth during the pandemic as well as provisions related to supporting child welfare systems more broadly. (Click here for a summary prepared by the Juvenile Law Center.)

CAA applauds Fostering Advocates Arizona and their peers across the country for their advocacy and persistence in ensuring that the needs of transition-age foster youth during the pandemic are met and calls on the Department of Child Safety to leverage the expertise of these young people as it plans for and implements the new law.

Kinship families are the backbone of Arizona’s child welfare system and kinship families are struggling. These two statements have never been truer than they are today in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis. Each year in Arizona, thousands of relatives provide loving homes for children in foster care, and many, many more step-in to care for children informally and prevent their entry into foster care. In Arizona, there are over 200,000 children living in kinship families—families in which grandparents, other relatives, or close family friends are raising children with no parents in the home. Over 7,000 of these children are in “formal” kinship families, meaning they are in foster care and have been placed with their relatives by the Department of Children Safety and over 130,000 children are in “informal” kinship families, meaning they are not involved in the foster care system. Kinship caregivers tend to be older, are disproportionately Black or Native American, and are also more likely to be impacted by the pandemic and die as a result.

COVID-19 is both exacerbating the challenges of existing kinship families and creating new kinship families. During state fiscal year 2020, the percentage of foster children placed with kin in Arizona jumped from 45% to 51%. Nationally, the pre-pandemic rate of kinship foster care was 32%. While data is not currently available, there is good reason to suspect that the rate of informal kinship care is also increasing due to the health crisis. These families, for whom there is little to no public financial support available, were already struggling to make ends meet before COVID-19. The pandemic has heightened their vulnerability.

Survey results included in Facing a Pandemic: Grandfamilies Living Together During COVID 19 and Thriving Beyond, a recent report from Generations United on the state of kinship families, found:

• 38 percent are unable to pay or worried about paying mortgage or rent
• 43 percent fear leaving their home for food
• 32 percent arrive at food pick-up sites after they have run out of food
• 30 percent have no caregiving plan for the children if the caregivers die

CAA is partnering with Arizona Grandparent Ambassadors and Kinship Caregivers to increase supports available to kinship families during the pandemic and beyond. This upcoming legislative session we will ask Arizona lawmakers to increase the Kinship Stipend provided to relatives caring for foster children and to make “child-only” TANF benefits available to informal kinship families. Kin step up everyday to care for Arizona’s children and it is time for Arizona to step up for kin.

With stay-at-home orders in place and schools largely shuttered since March due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many in the child welfare community are concerned about undetected child maltreatment due to a lack of mandated reporter eyes on children. Many are also bracing for a surge in reports to the DCS hotline once schools fully re-open that could overwhelm Arizona’s child welfare system. However, recent research from Chapin Hall finds that a surge in child maltreatment reports is unlikely and concludes that the real threat to child safety from COVID-19 is not the decrease in mandated reporting but the increase in economic stressors.

Analyzing national reporting data, researchers found that while educational personnel report the most cases of child maltreatment, they detect the smallest number of child maltreatment victims. In 2018, education personnel were responsible for 20% of “screened in” reports (hotline calls that are assigned for follow-up), but only 11% of these calls were substantiated for child maltreatment. Not surprisingly, reporting by educational personnel were found to be the most likely to show seasonal variation associated with school openings and closings. This is a pattern seen throughout the country and here in Arizona.

But what may be surprising is that these seasonal fluctuations in reporting do not impact the rate of substantiation. While the number of reports from teachers drop during the summer months, the rate of substantiation remains steady. Moreover, when children return to school each fall, hotline reports from school personnel typically return to baseline rates rather than over-correcting with a seasonal surge. “Thus, it is unlikely that the dramatic reduction in hotline reports due to school closures will produce a rebound of substantiated maltreatment,” the authors conclude.

However, this conclusion doesn’t mean that COVID-19 is not a real threat to child safety and well-being. The researchers also analyzed data to understand the relationship between external stressors related to COVID-19, such as the rise in unemployment and child maltreatment. They found that these stressors elevate the risk of child maltreatment, corroborating prior research showing that large-scale economic crises lead to financial loss, stress, and general hardship which are risk factors for child maltreatment.

Arizona should heed this research and redirect our focus from increasing mandated reporting to preventing child maltreatment by supporting and stabilizing families during and after the pandemic.  As we move into the next state legislative session, if we want to prevent an increase in child maltreatment and a spike in our foster care population due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is essential that policymakers prioritize meeting the basic needs of children and families.

Fostering Advocates Arizona (FAAZ), a group of young leaders with lived experience in the child welfare system, conducted two surveys during the pandemic: one of foster and former foster youth ages 14 to 26 and one of adult providers and allies.

Some of the results:

• Over 1/3 of young people reported that the health crisis had a negative impact on their educational progress.
• More than half reported struggling with safe and stable housing and their service providers and allies listed housing at the top of the list of requests for assistance and at the top of list where resources were lacking.
• Two-thirds of young people reported that they were struggling or starting to struggle to pay their bills.
• Two-thirds reported a reduction in, or loss, of employment and providers reported that helping youth navigate filing for unemployment benefits was a highly requested service.
• Just over half reported they are experiencing some level of food insecurity.
• About one-third of young people said they were starting to struggle with their social-emotional health, while providers/allies reported deep concern for the social-emotional well-being of youth.

A national level report from The Field Center at University of Pennsylvania found similar results on the challenges faced by transition-aged youth during the Coronavirus pandemic. In July, Governor Ducey directed $500,000 dollars in federal COVID-19 relief funds to the Department of Child Safety to support the housing needs of youth aging out of foster care and kinship foster families. FAAZ and CAA are urging federal lawmakers to take immediate action to address the crisis being faced by young people transitioning out of foster care during this crisis:

• Establish a moratorium on “aging out” of foster care to ensure no young person is cut off from critical housing and support services during the public health emergency.
• Increase funding for the John H. Chafee Foster Care Independence Program to ensure young people have access to supports, such as housing, food, and cash assistance, and increase flexibility to allow more of these funds to cover housing costs for foster youth.

The results of the national and Arizona surveys reveal the toll that the crisis is taking on young people transitioning from foster care because of gaps in the social safety net and service structures. CAA and FAAZ are advocating to fill those gaps.

Be sure to check out Pivot to Positive a new and ongoing series of fact sheets written by and for transition age foster youth to help them navigate the COVID-19 crisis.

The disproportionate impact of COVID-19 and the current manifestations of the nation’s troubled history of systemic racism has sparked outcries to not just reform, but to reimagine the criminal justice, health care, and education systems. Those same calls are also being heard in the child welfare community. These efforts center around supporting children within their families and communities to prevent child maltreatment as well as the compounding trauma and negative outcomes that stem from family separation when a child enters foster care.  

The child welfare system across the United States, and here in Arizona, disproportionately impacts families and communities of color. CAA’s refreshed Measures of Child Safety Report includes new data documenting this disproportionality. Black and American Indian children in Arizona are disproportionately likely to be reported to the Department of Child Safety (DCS) hotline and to be removed from their homes and placed in foster care. While four percent of children in Arizona are Black, 16 percent of children in the state’s foster care system are Black. In other words, Black children are in foster care at a rate four times greater than their representation in the general population. Once in foster care, Black children are less likely to be placed with kin and more likely to be placed in congregate care settings such as group homes. American Indian children are under-represented in both exits from care to reunification and adoption.

While documenting and understanding the scope and extent of racial disparity in the child welfare system is an important and necessary step in beginning to address the problem, it is not new information to system-actors and it is certainly not news to children, families, and communities of color. Nor are the calls to address racial disparity in the child welfare system. What is new is the large chorus now calling for the transformation of the child welfare system. Earlier this month, the U.S. Children’s Bureau, Casey Family Programs, the Annie E. Casey Foundation and Prevent Child Abuse America® announced Thriving Families, Safer Children a first of its kind effort to fundamentally rethink child welfare -transforming it from a reactive child protection system to one designed to support child and family well-being and prevent child maltreatment and the unnecessary separation of families. The time is now for Arizona to join these efforts, rethink its approach to child protection, and reimagine an equitable child welfare system that supports children within their families and communities.