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California Voter |
Juvenile Justice in California
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| Addressing Issues Surrounding Child Abuse and Neglect | ||
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California Voter |
Juvenile Justice in California
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| Addressing Issues Surrounding Child Abuse and Neglect | ||
| The League of Women Voters of California | Fall 1999 |
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In this section... ADDRESSING ISSUES SURROUNDING CHILD ABUSE & NEGLECT  TABLE OF CONTENTS
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The wraparound process is designed to serve the most needy children in foster care, who have multiple issues to be addressed. They may have developmental or learning disabilities, have been sexually abused, act out in any number of inappropriate ways or be suffering from the results of physical and emotional neglect. Many of them show behaviors that could make them a risk to the safety of themselves or others. The seriousness or multiplicity of their problems means that they require the most comprehensive services available. Until recently, these young people have usually been taken care of in group homes with an intensive level of services.
Since 1994, Program UPLIFT (Uniting Partners to Link and Invest in Families of Today), a collaborative between Santa Clara County and Eastfield Ming Quong, has been serving these children in a different way. The program offers community-based, highly individualized "wraparound" services to seriously disturbed children and adolescents who would ordinarily be removed from their homes and communities and placed in intensive residential care settings. Services are wrapped around youngsters living in birth parent, adoptive parent, foster parent, specialized foster care and independent living settings, with the goal of building and maintaining normal lifestyles and avoiding the need for more restrictive and more costly out-of-home placements. The services are tailor-made to address the unique needs and preferences of each child, adolescent and family in the major "life domains" of residence, family, emotional, social, medical, legal, educational, vocational, safety and cultural areas. This service delivery model is based on the recognition that for the most disturbed children and youth, there is a tremendous variation in how symptoms and problems manifest themselves between individuals and with the same young person at different times. As a result, service delivery must be sensitive to these differences and responsive to change over time.
Program UPLIFT lists the principal characteristics of individualized wraparound care in Implementing Wraparound: Individualized Care Strategies for Children, Youth and Families, as follows:
Marjorie Kelly, former Deputy Director of Children and Family Services Division of the California Department of Social Services (CDSS) has frequently said, "If something is not working, you don't move the child, you change the services until it works." She continued, "Wraparound programs, like family conferencing and home visitation, are very respectful of families. The fundamental belief is that only a family can be a family, not government. [Children's Protective Services] will become the facilitator of solutions, the supporter for the families. Wraparound is not a program, it is a process."
Recent legislation, SB 163-Solis (Chapter 795, Statutes of 1997) permits all counties to participate in a five-year pilot program using Program UPLIFT as a model. Program UPLIFT provides training to Children's Protective Workers across the state. The CDSS Office of Child Abuse Prevention has produced training materials and resource articles.
Over 700 people from around the state have received the three-day Wraparound Introductory Training. In November 1997 a workshop on the wraparound process was presented to California's Chief Probation Officers. The Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services, with 40 percent of the child welfare caseload of the state, is working with CDSS to establish a training plan for all its social workers and their community partners (mental health, probation, education, foster family agencies and others). In spring 1998 CDSS began the development of Phase II for Wraparound, which is an intensive, one-on-one consultation with counties on the actual implementation of the wraparound process in specific locations and upon request.
Vermont is the only state known to have extended the program to all those eligible. Two evaluations of that program were presented at The Seventh Annual Research Conference Proceedings, "A System of Care of Children's Mental Health, Expanding the Research Base." One evaluation "support[ed] the evidence for the use of the [wraparound process] to keep complex youth in communities, in less restrictive settings." The other "showed that the wraparound process was fiscally sound, and represents a better use of taxpayer dollars."
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