This Is How the Child Welfare System Becomes Less Traumatizing

Wendy Henderson, the former administrator for the division of safety and permanence at the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families, was working late one night, pouring over data related to the early Covid pandemic, when a graph stopped her in her tracks. It showed that, during the eviction moratorium put in place by the Centers for Disease Control between September 2020 until August 2021, the number of Wisconsin children removed from their families due to housing issues fell by 33 percent. “It was unbelievable, just this dramatic drop,” Henderson told me.

The data analysts on her team were excited—this was the closest to a causal relationship as they could get. “In our field, we don’t really do experimental studies because it’s a bit on the unethical side. We’re always trying to [show impact] with correlations,” said Dustin Koury, former strategic initiatives supervisor at the Department of Children and Families. But the correlation was so strong that the data team was confident they could say the drop was “because we stopped evicting people,” Koury said.

The department decided to create a pilot project, which it dubbed Wisconsin Family Keys, aimed at solving a persistent problem: Nationally, in about 10 percent of the cases in which child welfare agencies remove children from their families, the families’ inadequate housing is at least part of the reason why. In 2021, at least 1,467 children were taken from their families solely because of their housing situation. Those numbers don’t include the many families who can’t get their children back because a caseworker or judge deems their housing unfit. The Wisconsin Department of Children and Families allocated $1 million, a “shoestring” budget, Henderson said, to the effort; equally as significant as funding was that it gave counties permission to try out new approaches. State leadership didn’t tell the three counties—La Crosse, Marathon, and Wood—what to do or how. Instead, it gave them money and told them to do “whatever they need to do to keep kids safely housed with their parents,” Koury said.

Each county took its own approach. Marathon County gave families temporary rent payments to help keep them housed so children weren’t taken or could more quickly be reunited; it also required parents to put aside part of their paycheck to eventually pay for housing. Wood County partnered with nonprofit organizations to provide housing navigators to help families with a range of housing-related needs, from clearing evictions from their records to signing up for housing programs “to make sure they get housing more quickly,” Koury said. In addition to sometimes covering a month’s rent or a security deposit, La Crosse County invested in securing housing units that it could place families in, partnering with landlords and housing navigators.

Christina Cahak was one of the beneficiaries of La Crosse’s pilot. Her struggles to secure stable housing eventually meant her infant son, Decklan, was taken away from her. “I was just a mom who got overwhelmed,” she explained in a video later produced by the county. But a child welfare case worker still decided her son needed to be removed and put in foster care because of her housing problems. Even after he was gone, she kept struggling to get decent housing so she could get him back; a past drug conviction meant landlords repeatedly turned her away. She flipped through an album of his baby photos every night before falling asleep, trying to imagine how he was doing. Those photos were her “lifeline,” she said.

Then she was connected with Wisconsin Family Keys. The pilot helped Cahak put together a security deposit and one month’s rent to finally get her own place. That enabled Decklan and Cahak to live together again. “This is what Family Keys did for me, was give him back,” she said. “They gave me the opportunity to prove that I am just like every other mom out there.” Today she savors the “normal things” that parents who haven’t lost custody of a child take for granted: doing dishes, going grocery shopping, baking cookies, simply waking up in the same house as her children.

“There’s so many things that, once you’ve lost time with your kids that you can’t get back, that you see differently,” she said. “Everything in life is different when you get to hold your family back together.”

“I don’t think kids should be in foster care because their families are struggling with housing,” Koury said. Wisconsin Family Keys proves there’s another way to do things, one that is “a lot less expensive and a lot less traumatic.”

The solution that Wisconsin came up with—offering families small amounts of financial help to prevent the trauma and cost of taking their children away—may not sound groundbreaking, but it marks a huge break with the way the child welfare system typically operates. The existing system is focused on “perceived family deficits: what do we have to fix in parents to keep children safe,” said Krista Thomas, senior policy fellow at child welfare think tank Chapin Hall. “And not focused on: What are the root causes of the issues to begin with?” Federal funding won’t reimburse direct financial help for parents, and case workers, who are overworked and overstressed, often can’t or won’t put in the extra effort to track it down.

“We have a policing oriented system,” said Josh Gupta-Kagan, a Columbia Law School professor specializing in child neglect and abuse law, which treats parents the same whether the root cause of child’s vulnerability is a parent who actively harms their child or a parent who can’t afford basic necessities. Neglect, which encompasses everything from actively denying children things like food and education to getting the lights turned off because a parent can’t afford the utility bill, makes up 62 percent of all child removals; by contrast, physical abuse makes up 13 percent, while sexual abuse is responsible for 4 percent.

“Housing concerns are one of the greatest predictors of child welfare system involvement,” Thomas said. There is solid evidence showing that housing insecurity—eviction, foreclosure, and homelessness—are “associated with frequent and more negative child welfare outcomes, from referrals to substantiations to separations,” she said. Each additional eviction a family experiences, for example, increases child welfare reports by 2 percent.

At the same time, the research also demonstrates that “addressing these housing issues can improve child welfare outcomes,” she said. A program in Connecticut that offered families housing vouchers and case management significantly reduced child removals and increased family reunifications. A HUD study conducted in multiple sites also found that families who received housing vouchers saw significant reductions in the number of children being removed.

If counties and states want to change the way they approach the problem and help families with housing, rather than just take away their kids, there are remedies already available to enable them to do so. Some can be done quickly and relatively easily; others will require a greater investment of time and even a national change in approach.

There’s a largely untapped federal resource that already exists: The Department of Housing and Urban Development gives out housing vouchers specifically for youth who are aging out of foster care and families who are risk of having a child removed due to housing issues or where housing is delaying reunification. These Family Unification Program Vouchers are available to any jurisdiction and function exactly like as Section 8 rental vouchers for low-income renters. Families keep the vouchers and their apartments even after their child welfare cases are closed. The vouchers have “been on the books since the ’70s,” said Ruth White, executive director at the National Center for Housing & Child Welfare.

They have proven effective: in a randomized-control trial, FUP vouchers were found to increase how often children who had been removed were reunified with their families. While the study didn’t find a statistically significant impact on reducing removals overall, in places with high rates of removal there was a reduction.

But local housing authorities have to apply for these vouchers, and just 33,110 of them have currently been requested. Most are used for youth who are aging out of foster care, not families. “There are a lot of places where the vouchers are already there and not being used,” White said. Many agencies don’t apply for them at all. One solution would be for FUP vouchers to be allocated in a noncompetitive, ongoing way, with HUD simply giving them to any jurisdiction that needs them, as is now the case for the youth vouchers, rather than requiring counties and housing agencies to apply and compete against each other.

But just as with Section 8, FUP vouchers aren’t easy to use even when families receive them. They’re on their own to find low enough rent that their vouchers will cover it, and a tight housing market will make that a difficult task, particularly when a family is already dealing with the stress of a child welfare case. Housing costs for renters and owners rose faster than inflation last year, while homelessness reached the highest level ever recorded. In addition, many landlords refuse to take vouchers.

Some states have enacted rules dictating that a family’s poverty can’t be a reason to remove a child. About half exempt parents’ financial inability to provide things like shelter from the definition of child maltreatment, while at least three say homelessness can’t constitute neglect on its own.

Other states could add such protections. The state legislature in New Mexico, where on average about 22 percent of child removals are related to inadequate housing, has been considering adding such language to its statutes. Last year, a state task force developed draft legislation to amend the law, although the bill didn’t pass the legislature. But Bette Fleishman, executive director of Pegasus Legal Services for Children in Albuquerque, predicted the bill would be resubmitted next year. “We’ll just keeping pushing it,” she said. Montana’s legislature passed a bipartisan bill to prohibit child removals solely due to disorderly living conditions or economic status in 2023 only to have the governor veto it.

Statue changes are not a silver bullet; having a law on the books doesn’t immediately or always change caseworkers’ or judges’ behaviors on the ground. “Even where it’s prohibited by state law, it still happens,” White said. But there is some evidence that such legislation can help. Both Texas and Washington State tightened the rules under which children can be removed from their families in recent years—Wisconsin specifically blocked removals solely due to poverty or inadequate housing—and saw decreases in removals, Thomas said.

Perhaps the most promising measure for reorienting the child welfare system away from removals and toward prevention is the Family First Prevention Services Act, a bipartisan bill passed by Congress in 2018 to fund efforts to prevent children from being removed from their homes. As with an entitlement program like food stamps, the funding is unlimited; the federal government will continue to pay out as long as states make requests. Family First addresses long-held concern among federal lawmakers about how heavily the child welfare system relied on putting children in foster care, especially in institutional settings; the ravages of the opioid epidemic pushed them to take up legislation trying to change that approach in 2016. The bill was eventually passed when it was tacked onto a government funding measure and signed by President Trump.

The money it draws on comes from Title IVE of the Social Security Act, the largest source of funding for child welfare agencies, which has traditionally funded foster care after children have been removed. The Family First Act directs states to use it to keep families together. It was “really transformational and groundbreaking,” Thomas said, to put this money toward prevention “for the first time ever.” It’s spurred a greater focus across the country on preventing removals.

But Family First Act funding comes with so many strings attached it’s nearly impossible to use. First there’s the eligibility, which is limited to families whose children are at imminent risk of being put into foster care, although states have been given leeway in defining those terms. Then there’s the fact that the interventions that this funding can pay for have to be evidence-based, which is a stringent requirement. In addition, at least half of the programs states pick must be “well supported,” the highest level of rigor, which typically requires multiple randomized-control trials in different locations. If states pick lower rated interventions, they have to do their own rigorous evaluation and pay for half the cost of that evaluation.

There is a clearinghouse of approved uses, but it’s mostly been filled with traditional child welfare interventions like home visiting programs, substance abuse treatment, and mental health services. Very few approved interventions include what those in the child welfare space call “concrete supports” like assistance with rent or a security deposit. Despite its focus on prevention, Gupta-Kagan says, the law was focused on “evidence-based, clinical supports and less of those concrete financial supports, which I think is really problematic.” The result is that very little Family First money has trickled out to states even seven years after it was enacted.

Some child welfare advocates, including Thomas and Frank Edwards, associate professor of sociology at the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice, want to make the case that the funding should be used to provide parents with direct financial support. Chapin Hall submitted a policy brief to the Family First clearinghouse arguing that financial supports, such as Child Tax Credits or universal child care, should be included. “The evidence is clear,” the brief states, “reduced access to economic and concrete support is associated with increased risk of child maltreatment and child welfare involvement, while increased access to economic and concrete support is associated with decreased risk of child maltreatment and child welfare involvement.”

Edwards is involved in a randomized control trial studying whether giving parents a form of guaranteed income reduces child welfare involvement. The study is directly aimed at getting into the clearinghouse so that states can use Family First money to give cash payments to families at risk of losing their children to foster care. William Schneider, associate professor at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, is running a similar study looking at the impact of unconditional cash payments paired with training for case workers with the same goal.

But it will take years before states can use the money for such interventions, assuming the studies find the interventions successful. Edwards’s study is still analyzing data. Schneider’s only started enrolling participants in January, and then each one will get cash payments for a year. It’ll likely be three to four years before it’s in the clearinghouse And even if it does make it into the clearinghouse, it’ll likely be labeled “promising,” the lowest rating; it would take many more years more to move up to “well supported.”

Wisconsin’s Family Keys program was never meant to be entered into the pantheon of evidence-based practices that could be reimbursed with Family First funding. To conduct a randomized control trial, the state would have had to dictate far more about the structures of the pilots. It also “would have cost more than what we spent on the program” to run such an evaluation, Henderson said.

Among child welfare advocates, there is also a debate about whether families should have to get caught up in the child welfare system, one that has a long history of dismantling families and that has bred a lot of distrust, before they can receive assistance. Just having an open child welfare case comes with stigma, fear, and the logistics of navigating the courts. White uses what she calls the Pottery Barn approach. “If you broke it you bought it, you got to fix it,” she said. In other words, if a child welfare agency opens an inquiry into a family and finds out it needs housing help, she believes it’s then the responsibility of the agency to take that on.

This is a debate that came up when Wisconsin Family Keys was being designed, Koury said. Ideally, he says, communities would have the resources to ensure that families have adequate housing without having to go through the child welfare system. “But that’s not the world we live in,” he said. If there’s a possibility that children will be put in foster care just because their families can’t afford decent housing, “it’s our ethical responsibility to find interventions that are less traumatic and related to the concern we’re seeing.”

The dynamic is different for Family First funding. Families don’t become eligible only by having an open child welfare case; they can also contact other organizations and get referred into these programs. In Washington, DC, for example, families can be routed into its Family First–funded program by contacting the city housing authority. About 24 other states are looking at doing something similar and reaching families before child welfare is called on them, Thomas said.

Family First doesn’t have to be the sole source of funding for more innovative approaches. White insists that, even if Title IVE doesn’t cover money spent helping families with housing, there are other sources states and counties can use. Title IVB has more flexibility in what it can pay for, even if it’s a smaller pot. There’s also money states can draw from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, the Social Services Block Grant, and their own budgets.

If states use that money to follow Wisconsin’s example, they may find the interventions quickly pay for themselves. In its first year, Wisconsin Family Keys saved Marathon County $381,000 in foster care costs by preventing 38 children from being removed from their families and reunifying three others. Even when the $129,000 cost of paying rent was taken into account, the program created a net savings of nearly $250,000. For Henderson, the most important outcome was that “we were avoiding the trauma of children being removed.” Keeping 38 children home might not sound like a lot. “But that’s 38 kids who got to go to their same school, who never had to wake up in a house they were not familiar with. That’s a pretty big deal, actually,” she said. The program also sped up reunifications for families whose children had already been removed. “What we learned was it was very successful.”

The Wisconsin Family Keys pilot is technically over; state funding ended at the end of June. When Koury went back to the three counties to see how it was going, he expected them to ask for more state money. They all told him that the savings were so large that they could sustain the most impactful parts on their own. Even Marathon County, which had initially shot the idea down, recently passed a resolution to find budget flexibility to keep it going. Instead, the counties asked that state money be put towards spreading the pilot to other parts of the state. Other counties are eager to join in. “We got lots and lots of inquiries,” Koury said.

Matt Anderson, CEO of the policy incubator Imagination Factory, is creating a playbook out of Wisconsin’s experience so that other locations can try their hand at the same intervention. He’s already in conversations with Miami Dade County, Florida, as well as Colorado and Michigan. “There’s definitely a lot of interest,” he said. A lot of people in the child welfare system, he said, “want to do the right thing and want to not take kids away from their families, but they don’t have the tools to do it so they don’t.” The plan is to eventually get four jurisdictions to commit to building their own housing-focused programs. It is “a real, targeted, scalable solution,” he said. He believes that “any jurisdiction can do this anywhere around the country.”

“If communities can find some flexible dollars to put towards stabilizing families, they’ll see a return on investment in less expensive interventions down the line,” Koury agreed. He added, “There’s not a lot of things that make people feel hopeful in child welfare. This provides a glimmer of hope that this doesn’t have to be this way.”