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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wednesday, Dec. 29, 2010
Contacts:
Patrick Gardner, National Center for Youth Law
510-835-8098, x3005, pgardner(at)youthlaw.org
The California Child Welfare Council (CWC) has unanimously approved a framework for ensuring access to mental health services for “out-of-county” foster youth. The plan’s intent is to essentially shift responsibility for authorizing and providing mental health services from the child’s county of jurisdiction to his or her new county of residence.The Dec. 9 vote by the CWC comes a little more than two years after the National Center for Youth Law began efforts to improve access to mental health treatment for California foster youth placed across county lines. Health and Human Services Secretary Kim Belshe, co-chair of the CWC, was instrumental in focusing the Council’s attention on this issue and bringing the matter to a resolution before she completed her tenure as HHS Secretary. “Out-of-county” foster children – approximately 15,000 children or 20 percent of all foster youth in California - are placed outside the county where they lived when they first became dependents of the state. Under current policies, even when these young people move, the responsibility for providing mental health services remains with their county of jurisdiction. Since each county in California has its own system of mental health services, the administrative structure leads to frequent and lengthy delays in providing medically necessary services to out-of-county youth, or to youth not receiving them at all. These delays and failures are harmful to the development and well-being of vulnerable foster youth. NCYL brought this issue before the CWC in 2008 because the Council is uniquely suited to create and oversee solutions to systemic problems such as the out-of-county mental health issue. The CWC was created by the Child Welfare Leadership and Performance Accountability Act of 2006, AB 2216 (Bass), legislation sponsored by NCYL. The 50-member Council began meeting in 2007 to improve communication and collaboration among key players working with children in California. Members of the Council are legislators, judges, child welfare advocates, and leaders of a variety of state departments and service agencies. Those members include Supreme Court Associate Justice Carlos Moreno, HHS Secretary Belshe (whose replacement will take over her seat on the Council), directors of the Departments of Health Care Services, Mental Health, and Social Services, and NCYL Deputy Director Patrick Gardner. Although the CWC is an advisory body and cannot direct the mental health or child welfare agencies to change their procedures, their leadership and support are critical for coordinating efforts and holding parties accountable for their progress. The CWC agreed to create a steering committee and three working groups to begin preliminary work on the new plan. The steering committee is charged with supervising the working groups and setting detailed goals and deadlines. The working groups will: - investigate the cost of transferring responsibility for services;
- determine criteria and assign responsibility for transfers; and
- create a system to monitor and report on access to services in the future.
An initial steering committee meeting is planned for January 2011, at which time the working group members will be appointed and given their initial tasks. The working groups are expected to report back to the CWC in March 2011 on their initial progress, with subsequent reports made at every quarterly CWC meeting.
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