Wracked by the mounting toll of children who were abused or died while in an experimental program that provides in-home services, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services has decided to start over. But in scrapping its Family First program in Cook County, DCFS has, at best, half succeeded.
It has selected as a replacement Homebuilders, the oldest and most respected of intensive family service programs in the nation. Started in 1974, Homebuilders has been the model for programs in 30 states.
It places highly skilled workers in a home, typically for four to six weeks, up to 20 hours a week. They help families build such skills as keeping up a clean house, finding appropriate child care and resolving the crises that can lead to abuse and neglect. The in-home plan is recommended only when children are not at imminent risk of being harmed.
Homebuilders should have been the program for Illinois from the start. In fact, it almost was, but politics and bureaucratic myopia interceded. Given the state’s checkered history with family preservation, the simple declaration from DCFS that Homebuilders is now the choice isn’t yet reason to cheer. DCFS has to prove it can make this idea work.
As child welfare caseloads exploded in the 1970s and 1980s, states looked for alternatives to foster care. Family preservation was the most promising.
When Illinois first looked into alternatives to foster care, the state tested a small Homebuilders program under a private grant. It rushed the program into existence and met resistance from DCFS employees and from child care agencies that believed they had their own answers for intensive family services. Homebuilders never had a chance. When the grant expired, DCFS killed off the brief experiment.
Then, DCFS created Family First, which was really a hodgepodge of programs created by dozens of private agencies. The different Family First models neglected some of the key elements of the Homebuilders design. Their staffs had far less experience and training, they provided less intensive services, they didn’t target children who were at risk of going into foster care. Not surprisingly, they failed.
So DCFS is returning to Homebuilders.
If DCFS sets this up, calls it “Homebuilders” and repeats the mistakes of the past, it will flush away more money and harm children. It must recognize that Homebuilders demands extensive training so workers are prepared to make critical decisions about the safety of a child and capacities of a parent. It has to ascertain that agencies hired to do this follow the Homebuilders model, not their own whims.
It is encouraging that, this time, DCFS will start small, involving fewer agencies and families than Family First did. If it succeeds in Cook County, it will be expanded to the rest of the state. Perhaps this time family preservation will work, if DCFS learns from its errors.
