Understanding Adverse Placement in Foster Care
An adverse placement is a foster care situation that can harm a child's well-being and stability. It occurs when a placement doesn't meet a child's specific needs, leading to frequent moves, disrupted relationships, and a lack of consistent care. These placements often result from a poor match between a child's challenges and a foster parent's skills, inadequate support services, or a failure to consider the child's best interests.
Measuring Adverse Placement: The Foster Insights Score
Foster Insights at the University of Chicago developed a set of criteria to measure the quality of a placement, called the Adverse Placement Score. This score is based on several factors:
- Kin-first placement: Was the child offered a placement with a relative first?
- Sibling placement: Was the child placed with their siblings?
- Proximity to siblings: If not placed with siblings, were they placed near them?
- Distance from home community: How far was the child placed from their home?
The Impact of Distance on Placement
Moving a child far from their home community can make it difficult to maintain crucial family connections and participate in reunification efforts. This physical separation can also isolate a child from their school, friends, and local support networks. As a result, this distance creates a significant barrier to the services and relationships that are vital for a child's healing and achieving a successful long-term placement.
At RRFF, we are seeking to track the Adverse Placement Scores of our clients, with the goal of reducing this score in the future. We are currently focusing on the displacement of youth from their home county as a key metric.
The heatmap above is a screenshot of an interactive dashboard which shows the percentage of youth placed outside of their home county, a signal of an adverse placement. NC has a unique situation wherein we have 100 counties and out-of-county placements are common (see that some counties have over 90% out-of-county placements). That was the inspiration for a more detailed map below.
This is a screenshot of an interactive dashboard which shows the geographic distribution of placements from a youth’s home county. For example, in the county of Mecklenburg, we see that among the 87 Mecklenburg youth that needed placement, the average distance is 31.7 miles with only 35.6% of youth needing to be placed out-of-county. Despite better than average in-county placement rate, we see several placements that are a large distance away and potentially adverse.