TECHNICAL REPORT: Permanency Court Processes and Outcomes for Children in Out of Home Care

ERMANENCY OUTCOMES for children in out-of-home care in Washington State are strongly affected if not driven by the actions of the dependency courts and the child welfare system. The Administration of the Courts (AOC) and the DSHS Children’s Administration (CA) are cooperating on a joint project to investigate barriers to permanency in both systems, sharing administrative data and meeting regularly to review performance and discuss practice improvements. This Technical Report provides a comprehensive set of findings obtained through 2013 on the relationships between AOC and CA processes and permanency outcomes. Both CA and AOC have established a variety of metrics that track performance. CA is expected to meet Federal and State guidelines designed to improve the outcomes for children who are removed from their families of origin and placed in out-of-home care. These include metrics that track the incidence and recurrence of maltreatment prior to placement, timeliness of permanency, proportion of children reunified, proportion re-abused and/or needing to re-enter care following reunification, and critical events and case processes known to impact the safety, permanency, and well-being of children such as moves to different care homes during placement, placement with relatives versus non-relatives, siblings placed together, and regular visits with their social worker, biological parents, and siblings (if not placed together). AOC dependency courts are expected to meet statutory guidelines for case processing objectives related to the achievement of permanency for dependent children in Washington State. These court processing guidelines include holding the first fact-finding hearing within 75 days after the opening of a dependency case, holding the first review hearing within six months, the first permanency planning hearing within twelve months, filing a petition for termination of parental rights within 15 months, and finalization of adoption within six months of that termination. The Washington State Center for Court Research (WSCCR), as part of the Court Improvement Project, has been tracking compliance with these case processing guidelines for the past several years (cf. Orme, Skreen, O’Donnell, McCurley, Wang, and George, (2013)). In general, the rates of compliance have been improving, but the relationship between court processes and permanency outcomes such as length of dependency have not been systematically examined. To address this need, the WSCCR in partnership with CA and the Research and Data Analysis Division of DSHS (RDA) are conducting a multi-year study of the possible associations between permanency outcomes and various CA and court processes. This report focuses on the relationships between court processes and permanency outcomes and factors related to process guideline compliance, and also covers the influence of CA events and processes such as social worker visitation and placement with relatives. Special attention is given throughout to the presence and magnitude of racial disparities. P