CASE MANAGEMENT
Q: Let’s start with the children. About how many foster children has Walden placed into homes? What are the age ranges?
Beth: Last year annually we served about 600 foster children. You can add about 150 emancipated foster youth to that. Overall, about 750 foster children and young adult. On any given day we have between 275-280 kids in care. We serve kids that are infants to emancipation which is 18 and that varies; depending on their high school graduation. But with the passing of AB12, which is raising the age to 21. We don’t get a lot of infants in San Diego, but in our LA offices and Riverside offices we get more infants; infants and toddlers.
Q: I’ve written a previous article stating that the foster care system as a whole does not have enough social workers due to budget restraints (see foster children). What is Walden’s Social Worker to child/family ratio?
Beth: We are mandated by the State because we are a private agency, foster family agency. We are mandated to have a ratio of no more than 1:15 (1 Social Worker to 15 kids). That’s a daily average. Occasionally, let’s say you have a sibling group. You may have a Social Worker that has 16; that would be for a short period of time. The daily average has to be 1:15. Right now, we are not at that high of ratio.
Q: What is the practice at your office for recording family problems, issues, (documentation)?
Beth: We are mandated to report certain things that go on; abuse and neglect we have to do a report that goes to the County and Community Care Licensing. If a family or someone loses their job; or if life happens as you will, then work with them. It’s sometimes a documentation issue and sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s just a normal family issue. If parents were getting a divorce, there really wouldn’t be anything that we would document per se except that we would switch the license to just one parent. In the home study we go to the family history and their life style; we do that in the beginning. We do an annual home study update that talks about any changes. If something happens in the family, for instance, a family consistently or has multiple times forgotten to give the child their med, we have to do the incident report that goes to the County and to the State, and then we would do a corrective action plan with the family. We would do a retraining. We would retrain them on medication. We would do something like that.
Q: When a child goes into the home, how do you know that a child fits that family?
Beth: I guess you never a hundred percent really do. We go based on what the family tells us, what they are looking for. We go by gender, age range, and behavior. They give us that information, and where they would be best suited. We also use the Casey Foster Family Assessment. It’s a questionnaire. The person that does the home study does one and the parent does one. They then merge the answers and you see any potential red flags of who they may not work well with and what their strength and weaknesses based on this small assessment. Our Social Workers are in the homes weekly. You get a good idea as to what is going on. When the kids have been with us for a certain period of time and everything is stable they can go every other week. The majority of our kids are seen weekly.
Q: How do you determine a case plan for the family?
Beth: We have a team approach. We have quarterly meetings that involves the County worker, our Walden worker, the family, the child, a therapist if a therapist is involved. A lot of times we get input from teachers that don’t come to meeting but we get their input. If there’s a mentor, or a CASA, they come. We get input from a behavioral consultant if they have one. We use the team approach in affecting the child and family needs. And we certainly want input from the kids and the family. They are the experts, right? I think when you lose sight of that, that’s when you get into trouble.
Interview Continued:
IV -Topics: (1) Resource Management (2) Court Processing (3) Emancipation
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