Executive Director Judith Sandalow testified at the Performance Oversight Hearing of the Child and Family Services Agency, during which she urged CFSA to address numerous serious, complex and deeply rooted problems in the District's foster care system, including:
- Preventing child abuse and neglect by developing and enacting a comprehensive plan that includes proven programs, requires the participation of a range of key stakeholders and is led at the Mayoral level;
- Concerns that significant numbers of children who are removed from their homes are being returned quickly, possibly indicating unnecessary removals, causing trauma and diversion of resources that could be spent elsewhere;
- Improving kinship care to ensure that more foster children are living with extended family;
- Improving the focus on a child's well-being while in foster care, including ensuring school stability, better foster parent recruitment and retention and a special focus on placements for teens;
- Removing adoption and guardianship subsidy barriers by passing the subsidy extension and expansion provisions of the Adoption Reform Act of 2009;
- Improving community involvement and interagency collaboration, leading to better policies and stronger community support for those policies; and
- Maximizing federal revenue to prevent cuts to essential and locally-funded programs.
Read the full testimony here.
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