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Current Projects: D.C. Child Welfare System and Family Court Reform
The Council for Court Excellence (CCE) has since fall 1999 facilitated the joint effort among the District of Columbia’s judicial and executive branches to improve the performance of the District’s child welfare system in measurable ways. The scope of this long process and its outcomes are described below:

The Need
In 1999, when this CCE project began, the District of Columbia had not begun to implement the 1997 federal Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA). ASFA requires compliance in order for the District to continue receiving federal funding for essential social services for needy children and families. The ASFA-prescribed 14-month deadline for making permanency decisions for children in foster care had been taking 42 months in DC prior to 2000.

To meet ASFA deadlines and avoid losing federal funding, every part of the DC process needed to be both accelerated and improved in quality. That would be possible only if the new system was both designed and implemented collaboratively by all public players in the system, and if sufficient public resources were devoted to all segments of the new system.

The Collaboration
The Receiver then in charge of the District’s Child and Family Services Agency (CFSA) approached CCE in early 1999 to help that agency engage the Superior Court Family Division and the DC Corporation Counsel in a joint reform effort aimed at successful ASFA implementation. The multi-agency collaboration, now called the DC Child Welfare Leadership Team, began in fall 1999 and continues today. Primary members are the heads of the DC Superior Court Family Court, the DC Child and Family Services Agency, and the DC Attorney General Family Services Division (formerly called the Corporation Counsel). Leaders of the Mayor’s office, the DC Department of Mental Health, and several other DC executive branch agencies which serve the children and families involved have participated at appropriate times throughout the seven years. Both CCE and the Center for the Study of Social Policy, the federal-court-appointed monitor of the District’s child welfare system, have participated as private-sector members of the Team from the beginning.

CCE chairs Team meetings, prepares agendas in consultation with Team members, and prepares minutes. The Team met monthly for its first five years and has met quarterly thereafter. The Team sets its priorities and meeting schedule at the start of each year. Agency heads have had nearly perfect attendance throughout the lengthy project, a key to the success of the collaboration and the system’s reform.

The Challenges

• System Performance. At the start of this project in October 1999, the DC child welfare system was not performing well. The Child and Family Services Agency had been led by a federal-court-appointed receiver for several years as a result of litigation challenging agency performance (receivership ended in June 2001). In the Superior Court, the several thousand post-disposition child neglect cases were dispersed among all the court’s 59 judges, most of whom had full-time assignments outside the Family Division (this ended in fall 2002). The Corporation Counsel had insufficient staff to cover cases in 59 courtrooms, leaving CFSA unrepresented in most post-disposition hearings (this ended in 2002). None of the three agencies had centralized case-management, scheduling, or quality control over their caseload.
• Relationships. Collaboration, particularly across the lines of agencies which “don’t work for each other,” was not a developed skill in DC when this project began. Relationships among the public members of the Child Welfare Leadership Team were strained for the first two years of this project. During those two years, despite their genuine commitment to their jointly-crafted ASFA implementation plan, each agency continued to make some independent internal decisions about case-management procedures which adversely affected the other Team agencies’ ability to discharge their own responsibilities. There was also tension during the second year of the collaboration over the proposed DC Family Court Act, which the Superior Court opposed but other Team members supported. By the third year, 2002, Team relations had improved, and the habit of collaboration had taken hold and has continued to date.
• Turnover. Leadership turnover in public agencies is unavoidable, but it hinders the progress of long-term projects, and system reform is always a long-term project. New leaders must develop their own sense of trust in their partners and in the process, and that takes time. During the first nine years of this project, each of the three principal public agencies has had at least four different leaders. For one three-year segment of the project, leadership of all three principal public agencies remained unchanged, and during that period the most measurable progress on reform occurred. It has been beneficial to have CCE and the Center for the Study of Social Policy involved in the collaboration, because those private partners’ Team representatives have remained unchanged for the entire nine years and have been able to provide institutional memory about the reform process.
• Data. None of the three principal public agencies had reliable data about their caseloads for the first five years of the collaboration. As an interim measure, all Team members agreed at the very start of the collaboration in 1999 on what data they needed to track jointly to measure the success of their reform plan, and for the first four years of the project CCE provided data entry and data analysis services to the Team. After that time, all three public agencies have had good data systems, and the Team now relies on data produced by the agencies involved. All relevant data is shared, probed, analyzed, and discussed among Team members.
• New Legislation. In the midst of the ASFA implementation effort, the DC Family Court Act passed in late 2001, with implementation occurring in 2002-2003. The law mandated major changes in judicial manpower and case assignments in the DC Superior Court Family Court. Those changes in turn required complementary shifts in case assignments in both CFSA and the Attorney General’s office. The Child Welfare Leadership Team planned all such changes together, synchronized their implementation, and resolved implementation challenges collegially. The Team followed the same model successfully in 2004-2005 to implement the case-management changes required by a new DC statute, the Child in Need of Protection Amendment Act of 2004.
• Resources. At the start of this project in October 1999, none of the three principal public agencies had sufficient financial or human resources to handle well their child neglect caseloads. In the early years of the collaboration, CCE devoted some of its own foundation grants to funding Team initiatives, including a mediation pilot project and interagency training. For the past several years, all three agencies have had adequate funding, and it shows in system performance. The Family Court has received substantial federal funding increases as a result of the Family Court Act. CFSA has received substantial federal funding increases as a result of improved claims for federal reimbursement. CFSA and the Attorney General’s office have both received substantial local funding increases as a result of federal court mandates and political support from the Mayor, DC Council, and the community, including CCE and the Center for the Study of Social Policy.

The Outcomes

• The DC child welfare system is vastly improved since the reform effort began in 1999. For several years, it has been in nearly full compliance with ASFA and the several DC laws under which it operates. Notwithstanding this, some serious performance challenges remain, especially achieving prompt implementation of foster children’s permanency goals.
• Much of the progress can be traced to the collaboration among the DC Child Welfare Leadership Team: system leaders coordinate policies and procedures with other system partners, have performance data, share it with each other, monitor it regularly to identify trends, and make mid-course corrections when warranted. None of these factors was in place in fall 1999.
• CCE has published three progress reports to the DC community, in 2002, 2004, and 2006, on the reform of the District’s child welfare system. The reports focus on the performance of the system as a whole, something none of the three principal agencies can do in their individual capacities.
• All Team member agencies have built on the collaboration habit first practiced successfully within the Child Welfare Leadership Team. Each now routinely engages multiple external stakeholders in every initiative.

Past Projects

• Since 1988, the Council has published three editions of its comprehensive Practice Manual for Child Abuse and Neglect Cases in the District of Columbia, a reference used by judges and court-appointed lawyers. The 2008 third edition is now available for purchase via our Online Store.
• In 2005, CCE issued a report on the DC system for providing legal counsel to children and indigent adults in Family Court, offering several recommendations to improve that system.
• Since 1983, CCE has presented 35 trainings for judges, lawyers, social workers, teachers, and other professionals on a variety of topics, including child development, child welfare, juvenile justice, the Adoption and Safe Families Act, the Family Court judicial selection process, and child custody.

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