Child Welfare

The Palm Beach County Child Welfare system is operated by the Florida Department of Children and Families This sector includes sub sectors such as: Community Based Care (outsourced of foster care and foster parent Programming with Child Net), adoptions, child legal services, child welfare (separation of child from families, reunification of child in foster care with birth families, permanent placements for a child unable to return to the birth family), refugee services program, child care services and licensing programs.

Levers of Change: Actors

FL Department of Children and Families

Early Childhood Court

Department of Juvenile Justice

Juvenile Court

Child Net Speak Up for Kids

Guardian Ad Litem Program

Legal Aid of Palm Beach County

Levers of Innovation: Actions

Quick Wins (QW) or Major Project (MP)

Train all staff in ACEs and intergenerational transmission of ACEs (QW).

Provide community education with a focus on parents/caregivers (QW)

Selected

Encourage kinship foster parents, training, financial assistance, and support groups Provide assessments such as AAPI (QW)

Collaborate on building the capacity of the PBC workforce for dependency case managers and child protective investigators (MP)

Consider the presence of intergenerational trauma during kinship placement, especially in sexual abuse cases (QW).

Call to Action:

A primary call to action is to comprehensively train and build the capacity of case workers and foster parents to understand ACEs, trauma, and the effects on the developing brain.

Ultimately building case workers and foster parent’s skill in being not only buffers but therapeutic agents The Child Welfare system encounters children with 100% certainty of having at least one, but likely multiple ACEs. The ACEs and trauma training needs to be competency based and build not only awareness but skill in trauma-informed approaches to mitigate the effects of trauma and ACEs This is the biggest missed opportunity for children in our system The trauma-informed lens and skills associated with being a therapeutic agent will likely result in changes for removal and placement decisions and the selection and outcome “success” of foster parents.

In a study by the Department of Health and Human Services where case record abstraction was conducted on the child welfare case records of an urban, ethnically-diverse sample of youths, neglect, including emotional, supervisory, environmental and physical, are often overlooked and not recognized, yet what we know about the developing brain of the child, this can have some of the worst long term consequences In the study, neglect was present in 710% of the sample as compared to the 410% classified as neglected by CPS records 65