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Executive Summary

From June 7 - 10, 2004 staff of the Children's Bureau, Administration for Children and Families (ACF) Region IX, and the Office of Information Services (OIS) conducted an assessment review of California's Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS). The AFCARS data used for the review was from the report period April 1, 2003 through September 30, 2003 (2003B).

Two major areas are evaluated as part of an AFCARS assessment review (AAR): the AFCARS general requirements and data elements. The general requirements include the population that is to be reported to AFCARS and the technical requirements for constructing a data file. The data elements are assessed on the basis of whether the State is meeting the AFCARS definitions for the information required, if the correct data are being entered and extracted, and the quality of the data submitted. Each of the 103 foster care and adoption data elements is rated on the basis of its compliance with the requirements in the AFCARS regulation, policy guidance, and technical bulletins. Information that is collected from each of the components of the review is combined to rate each data element. A scale of one (does not meet AFCARS standards) to four (fully meets AFCARS standards) is used to assign a factor to each element. The general information requirements are also assessed and rated separately using the same sc ale. A summary of the significant findings is included in the report, and detailed findings can be found in the “Detailed Findings” matrices for the foster care and adoption data elements, and the general requirements (Tab A). The minimum tasks that are required to correct the State's reporting of the AFCARS data are included in the AFCARS Improvement Plan (Tab B). The rating factors received by the State are:

Outlined below is an overview of the results of the AFCARS Assessment Review based on the on-site and post-site visit analyses.

General Requirements

The standards for the adoption population require that the State submit all adoptions that it has involvement with either due to the child being in its foster care system and/or one in which there is an adoption agreement. The State has adoption agreements with, and provides subsidies to families that adopted a special needs child through a private agency. The State is not including these adoptions in AFCARS, and must begin doing so immediately.

In regard to the foster care population, the State/counties must ensure that case workers enter situations in which a child is placed back into his/her own home while the agency still has responsibility for care, placement, or supervision. Case workers must not enter these situations as a discharge from foster care; they should enter it as a placement change. If there is a specified period of time that the court has ordered the child home, the State is to continue reporting this child in AFCARS and the placement setting should be “trial home visit.” When a child is returned home for a non-specified period of time, if the timeframe extends beyond six-months, for AFCARS purposes the child would then be discharged from care.

In regard to the technical requirements, the State's program code does not extract the AFCARS foster care file based on a transaction date associated with either the date of the current removal from home or a discharge from foster care; instead, the extraction is based on whether the child is in an out-of-home placement setting. This results in fluctuations in the number of children being reported in AFCARS each report period by improperly excluding children returned home but for whom the agency continues to have responsibility for supervising. The State must immediately begin using the transaction dates to extract the data files.

Data Elements

As noted in the above chart, there are two elements that the State is not collecting and reporting. One is the foster care element (#62) pertaining to whether child support is a source of income for the child and the other is the adoption element (#34) pertaining to who placed the child for adoption. In regard to the child support element, the State's information system, CWS/CMS, does not record child support as an asset for the child. The State must develop a method to collect and report whether child support payments are paid on behalf of the child during each AFCARS report period.

The issue with the adoption element on who placed a child for adoption (#34) is related to the adoption population noted above. The State is not including non-State agency adoptions. Currently, the program code sets all responses to “public agency.” This needs to be corrected and CWS/CMS will need to be modified to allow the entry of these children in the adoption file.

System corrections are mainly grouped into two categories, corrections/modifications to the screens and/or changes to the program code that extracts the data from the system. Some screen changes involve adding a field that will more accurately collect the AFCARS data or adding another response. An example of adding a field is the one related to the collection of whether or not a child “has been diagnosed with disabilities.” This is not a question on the CWS/CMS screen; instead the information is derived based on whether diagnosed disability information was entered. If a disability is checked, the response to the question is “yes.” Otherwise, the response is coded as “no,” thereby creating a false “no” in the reported data. This method makes it hard to ascertain if the worker failed to enter the data or, alternatively, if the child had been seen by a physician and did not have any disabilities.

Another issue with the screen design is there are some fields that “pre-fill” with a valid response instead of requiring the worker to answer the question. An example is the question about whether a child has been previously adopted. The screen pre-fills with the response “unable to determine.” The screens must be modified to not allow pre-filling of information on certain fields.

One type of error in the extraction code is the use of “defaults.” A default means that if there are missing data, the program code extracts a valid AFCARS value. This masks underlying data entry issues and provides an inaccurate reflection of the State's foster care and adoption population. In other instances, the State staff will need to add to or modify the existing program code to correctly extract the data.

The State/counties also need to address the timely entry of data and oversight of the accuracy of the data. Additional training, supervisory oversight, and use of internal reports are necessary to ensure that the data submitted to ACF and used for national reports accurately reflect the practices in California.

The State needs to assess the ongoing quality of the data. Several items were given the rating of “3” because of underreporting of information and will necessitate additional training for caseworkers and monitoring by supervisors to ensure accurate data entry. The State may want to consider reviewing the data in the file at the time of a periodic review to ensure it is accurate and up-to-date. (See AFCARS Federal regulation at 45 CFR 1355 Appendix A, I. I. E.)

Changes made to the system with regard to data entry will inevitably result in improved data accuracy and quality. The State's semi-annual data submission may, as a result, fail to meet the missing data standard. In order to ensure that the data are complete, the agency must require workers to enter the data, and assess its validity prior to submitting it to ACF. To do so, the State may utilize the management reports created by the agency, as well as the Data Quality Utility and the Frequency Utility issued by ACF.

Within 30 calendar days after the receipt of this report and the attached AFCARS Improvement Plan, the State staff are to submit the Improvement Plan to the ACF Regional Office with estimated due dates for completing the tasks in the Improvement Plan. Test cases will be provided to the State once all of the required modifications are completed. Dates for the submission of the extracted test data file will be arranged with the ACF Regional Office and OIS. Once ACF and the State agree that the quality of the data is acceptable, the AFCARS Improvement Plan will be considered finished, and a letter will be sent to the State from the Children's Bureau confirming this fact. The letter will include a summary of the actions taken by the State and the completed AFCARS Improvement Plan.

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