Families are diverse, and so are children's needs. For children in the child welfare system, there are many layers of regulations that serve to protect the family and child. These regulations can be challenging to navigate when a child is referred to early intervention services. The authors describe how their coordination team collaborated with…

Integrated data systems are often used to inform decision making at the top tiers of local or state government. Policymakers use analyses based on large numbers of integrated data system (IDS) records (from which personal identifying information has been removed) to understand the overlap between cases that receive services from different systems…

Art classes are often sites for students with academic, social, emotional, and/or behavioral problems. Some school administrators and counselors recognize the benefits of art education and place students at-risk in art education classes. Most often art therapy is not part of coursework within art education programs, so K-12 educators have minimal…

This report provides information for administrators, researchers, and student support staff in local education agencies who are interested in identifying students who are likely to have near-term academic problems such as absenteeism, suspensions, poor grades, and low performance on state tests. The report describes an approach for developing a…

This report documents the efforts underway in 12 states and localities to tackle the enduring problem of African American, Native American, and Latino families faring worse than others being served by the child welfare systems. The publication, produced by Center for the Study of Social Policy (CSSP) as part of the work of the Alliance for Racial…

Several systemic factors contribute to the lack of stability and educational opportunities for students in foster care, including lack of transportation to the school of origin (or the schools they enrolled in when they first entered foster care), difficulty enrolling in new schools and transferring credits between school districts, gaps in…

When the sexual abuse of children is revealed, it is often found that other nonabusing adults were aware of the abuse but failed to act. During the past twenty years or so, the concealment of child sexual abuse (CSA) within organizations has emerged as a key challenge for child protection work. Recent events at Pennsylvania State University (PSU)…

During and after the American Civil War, individual state governments, faced with numerous economic demands, struggled to meet the needs of soldiers and their families. Among other pressing questions, they had to decide what to do with the massive number of dependent children orphaned by the war. In order to protect children, it became more…

Communities face powerful challenges that require powerful solutions: a high-school dropout epidemic, youth unemployment, teen pregnancy. In an era of limited resources, those solutions must help communities to achieve more with less. A new kind of community collaborative--an approach that aspires to significant community-wide progress by…

This study was designed to establish a caseload standard for child welfare workers. Understanding reasonable workload expectations for child welfare workers is a cornerstone of quality service provision and the recruitment and retention of qualified workers. Because of the analytic complexity of this question, qualitative and quantitative methods…

This paper serves as the introduction to the State Children's Cabinets and Councils Series, a set of reports intended to capture and organize the decisions and experiences of more than 20 children's cabinets and councils and present them against an emerging set of expectations about what the public and policy makers could and should expect from…

This article examines whether running away from home mediates the link between child maltreatment and later delinquency and victimization in adolescence. Specifically, the authors tested the hypothesis that childhood physical and psychological abuse increase the risk of a child's running away from home by the time of adolescence. Running away from…

This article describes differences in perceptions of the child welfare work environment among Title IV-E educated individuals who remain within public child welfare and those who sought employment elsewhere after fulfilling a legal work commitment. Job satisfaction, emotional exhaustion, and personal accomplishment were predictive of staying…

Babies and young children in the child welfare system have a high prevalence for physical, cognitive, and social-emotional delays--and often don't have access to the services and supports that could make all the difference. This is the book that will help professionals go beyond abuse prevention and ensure comprehensive healthy development of…

"Medicaid undercount" occurs when the number of people enrolled in exceeds the number estimated to be eligible for the program. One hypothesis proposed for this phenomenon has been inadequacies in the estimation of the number eligible for benefits, including health insurance status reporting error. This paper presents a methodology for…