Marathon County Community Response: Voluntary Services for Families Screened out of Child Protective Services

Child protective services (CPS) systems are charged with ensuring the safety, permanency, and well-being of children. In some jurisdictions, agencies have recently begun expanding to also provide child maltreatment prevention services to families that they had not traditionally served. These programs are called different things in different areas; California has a program called "Path I," which includes systematically reaching out to families who are screened out (Reed & Karpilow, 2009), while Minnesota has a program called Parent Support Outreach Program that serves the same population (Loman, Shannon, Sapokaite, & Siegel, 2009). The aim of these programs is to intervene early and prevent further involvement with CPS. There is currently limited information about the effectiveness of such programs. The current study seeks to provide some insight into the question of whether such programs can successfully reduce CPS re-referrals by comparing families who participate in a program called Community Response Program (CRP) to families who were eligible but wait-listed in Marathon County, Wisconsin. CRP is a voluntary home-based program provided to families who are reported to, but screened out of, CPS.CRP offers outreach services to families that have been referred to CPS; however, the allegations in the reports did not meet the statutory requirements of a formal intervention. Screened-out cases are not investigated for child abuse since there is no legal jurisdiction, but they are potentially referred to CRP for preventative services. The program is not offered to families who are screened in for investigation. Families that are screened out of CPS are selected for the program if they have specific risk factors that contribute to abuse and neglect and if there are children in the home under the age of five. This age criterion was required by the grant administrator. Once the referral is made to CRP, a family is contacted by a social worker and invited to participate in voluntary services.A program wait-list was established if the CRP social worker was unable to open a new referral due to program capacity issues. If a family remained on the waiting list for more than three months they were not offered services. The social worker would move on and attempt to engage families that had been more recently referred to CRP. The rationale behind the three-month time frame was that the more recent referrals were likely referred to CPS due to some type of crisis. Therefore, it would be best to engage with families screened out of CPS as quickly as possible in an attempt to alleviate problems related to a specific crisis. Families were not made aware of their status of being on the waiting list, and therefore received "services as usual" within the county. Because families were not made aware that they were on the waiting list, being in such a situation would be similar to being screened out in the absence of the program; therefore, there should be no additional risk associated with being on the waiting list compared to having no such program available.The sample size for this study is 351 families, which is the number of CRP referrals that were received from September 2008 until May 2014. The data was collected by tracking new abuse and neglect reports that were made on CRP families after case closure, as well as through social worker reports in the Wisconsin Statewide Automated Child Welfare Information System.Background InformationLiterature ReviewPreventing maltreatment is essential to ensure the health and wellbeing of children. Maltreatment has long-term negative effects for children, with prior research finding associations with a variety of sequelae including health problems, depression, substance use, and use of violence (Hussey, Chang, & Kotch, 2006). The risk for negative outcomes is increased for children who are exposed to repeated maltreat-ment events (Ethier, L emelin, & Lacherite, 2004; Ireland, Smith, & Thornberr y, 2002; Manly, Kim, Rogosch, & Cicchetti, 2001). …