Building Community Partnerships (BCP) Update

Regionalizing our practice has become a focal point at this time for this strategy team. There are many benefits of regionalization including the community and the social workers getting to know one another and increasing their understanding of the resources in a particular community. This would allow workers to better service the community both in the area of prevention and intervention.

Celebrating Families III

Orange County Children and Family Services recently held a third recognition event for families that have successfully reunified by completing their case plans and having their children returned to their care. This event was so successful, that it is now occurring on a quarterly basis. The next event will take place on February 22, 2006 from 6:30-8:30. To nominate parents for this event and for further details, please contact Patty Nichols-Prell at (714) 704-8059 or e-mail her at patricia.nichols-prell@ssa.ocgov.com

Healthy Tomorrows

The Healthy Tomorrows program has been extremely successful working with five schools and the Therapeutic Art Center in Santa Ana. This program has worked with the various principals to determine each schools specific needs. The program serves hundreds of adults and children, recruiting both adult and teen volunteers to implement support? and educational modules to address these needs.

Community Forums

Community Forums are being held on a quarterly basis to advise and gather community feedback on the redesign of the child welfare system. The most recent of these forums was held on October 19th at the Santa Ana Police Department Community Center. The topic was Substance Abuse and the Child Welfare system. The discussion included three themes:

First, child safety, permanency and well being is best addressed by first completing an assessment and treatment of alcohol and other drugs. Sid Gardner, President of Children and Family Futures noted that in 2004 an estimated 40% of child welfare parents were in need of treatment of alcohol or drug related issues.

Second, families need to be engaged and empowered to more fully participate in their case planning using a strength-based approach and provided coordinated community based support and services when they need it. Lisa Carmel, Chairperson of Parents Taking Action (PTA) related that the Family to Family initiative which includes Team Decision Making (TDM) Meetings, Icebreakers, and Parents Taking Action is a major step toward meeting these objectives.

Third, the Orange County community’s ability to redesign the child welfare system and achieve the federal and state mandated outcomes it will require a strong collaboration of all the county agencies and community partners including shared expectations, shared responsibilities, shared data, shared resources, shared?

Parents Taking Action(PTA)

Orange County in conjunction with Parents Anonymous has formed a Task Force designed to develop parent leadership in Orange County. This task force has been meeting regularly to develop strategies to support and mentor those who are working to reunify with their children. From this task force the Parent’s Taking Action (PTA) was formed. This group consists of parents that have successfully reunified with their children and have a desire to help others that currently involved in the Child Welfare System. Lisa Carmel has been chosen as the chairperson for this group and they have recently developed their own bylaws and governance structure.

Recruitment Training and Support Update

In January 2005, Orange County will began full implementation of the Family to Family PRIDE model of training foster parents. The PRIDE model is designed to teach knowledge and skills in the following five essential competency categories for foster and adoptive parents:

Protecting and nurturing children;
Meeting children's developmental needs, and addressing developmental delays;
Supporting relationships between children and their families;
Connecting children to safe, nurturing relationships intended to last a lifetime; and
Working as a member of a professional team.

PRIDE is a series of nine classes that are provided for prospective resource families. One of the major components of PRIDE involves the participation of veteran foster parents as equal partners in the training process. Careful attention is also paid to targeted skill building to help Foster Parents to better engage birth parents and increasing the voice of youth by incorporating them into pre-service. This model also focuses on bringing and keeping right types of resource families

New efforts of recruiting, training and supporting our resource families continue to be developed in Orange County.
A grant was recently secured with the focus of developing an effective campaign to recruit resource families.

Team Decision Making Update

Team Decision Making Meetings (TDM’s) are currently being held on all initial placement decisions that occur during normal working hours. These cases do not include weekend and after hours cases in which law enforcement removes a child without agency assistance.

These cases account for approximately 50% of children removed. Approximately half of the children brought into custody by law enforcement are returned home within 72 hours.

Orange County has implemented a “second shift” for Emergency Response workers that will employ regular staff until 10:00 p.m. This will expand Emergency Response Services, increase prevention services and allow more children coming into care to have a Team Decision Making Meeting. In addition, a rapid police response workgroup has convened to strategize how the agency can respond to the law enforcement requests for assistance quicker. A special hotline for law enforcement agencies has been activated so they can request a social worker join them in the field to assist with a child abuse assessment.

More TDM Facts:

Currently there are 6 ½ TDM facilitators
TDM’s have occurred in 10 languages including English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Sign, Korean, Mandarin, Chinese, Japanese, and Farsi
Approximately 50% of placement change TDM’s have either maintained the current placement or resulted in the child being placed in a less restrictive environment.
Since TDM’s began in March of 2004, over 2000 TDM’s have been held.
The largest volume of TDM Meetings are for placement moves

Self Evaluation Team Update

The Self-Evaluation Team has been meeting monthly since 2003 to gather data to support and analyze trends. A technical subgroup has also been formed to work on some of the more detailed data issues. Much work has been done by this strategy team in the area of geo-mapping to gather information for particular geographical areas to target our efforts to improve outcomes in the areas where the largest number of children are at risk of coming into the system. This strategy team has been moving away from descriptive to inferential data to get good sound correctional outcomes

In addition the Self-Evaluation Team continues to research the area of Fairness and Equity.

The SET Team has also developed a series of Bulletins and Data Sheets to distribute to staff and community partners. (These Bulletins and Data Sheets can be found in the Statistics Section of this website)

Planning Council

The goal of the Planning Council is to evaluate the current Child Welfare system, note strengths and concerns, establish goals for a redesign and look at resources to accomplish these goals.

The Planning Council is currently addressing the implementation a System Improvement Plan (SIP) to address the following Family to Family outcomes:

Reducing the number of placements of children
Family Reunification within 12 months

n addition, The Planning Council assists in the planning of the Community Forums that occur 3-4 times annually. These forums highlight relevant topics regarding Child Welfare and the community with the goals of increasing awareness, encouraging action and building partnerships with community members.