District of Columbia AFCARS Assessment Report

FINDINGS

This section provides the major findings resulting from the review of the District's AFCARS data collection. Tab A provides detailed information on the findings for the general AFCARS requirements, each of the foster care and adoption data elements, and the case file review. The AFCARS data used for the review were from the report period April 1, 2004 through September 30, 2004 (2004B).

As part of the post-site visit analysis, the District's documents, the data, the case file review findings, team member notes, and corrections to the program code submitted by the District are assessed to make the final determination of findings. As a result, the original rating factors were modified from those given at the end of the on-site review. The findings matrix in Tab A reports the previous rating with a "strike-through" mark on it, and the new rating. The AFCARS Improvement Plan in Tab B contains the final rating factor.

General Requirements

The District is in full compliance with both the foster care and adoption population requirements and the technical requirements.

Data Elements - Technical Changes

There are six foster care elements and seven adoption elements that require system modifications.

• Foster care element #10, was child diagnosed with a disability

It was identified that the data reported for this element is underreported and also is misrepresenting the characteristics of children in the District's foster care system. Corrections were made to the program code regarding how this information is extracted from the system. The screen correctly contained this question with each of the responses, however the program code did not use this field to extract this information. Instead, the program derived the response by assessing if there were any diagnosed conditions selected in foster care elements number eleven through fifteen. ACF will review the District's data submissions for improvement in the quality of the data.

One of the issues identified during the entry of the test case while on-site was that there is no alert to the worker if the response to this question is either "no" or "not yet determined" and a disability condition applies in elements #11-15. Issues related to this were identified during the case file review. There were several error cases that were reported as "no" instead of "yes." Therefore, a system alert and additional training need to be implemented in order to improve the accuracy of the data for this element and elements related to diagnosed disabilities.

• Foster care elements #11-15 and Adoption elements #11-15, diagnosed disabilities

In addition to the issues identified for foster care element #10, there are issues related to how diagnosed conditions are mapped to the AFCARS values. Many of them are mapped to the wrong category and even more conditions are being mapped then should be included for AFCARS. The District should map chronic, debilitating and not acute conditions to AFCARS values.

• Adoption element #7, Child's Race

During the post-site visit review of documentation and notes, an error in this element was found. This field is initialized to zeros and if none of the races are selected, this element is defaulted to "unable to determine." The use of "unable to determine" should only be used if the child was abandoned or if the child's parent, or if age appropriate, the child, refuses to provide the race information. Race and ethnicity information are to be self-reported by the client. Workers must be trained to determine an individual's race/ethnicity by asking clients to identify all appropriate races.

• Adoption element #18, Mother Married at Time of Birth

The value "unknown" is mapped to "unable to determine." This may be incorrect if the District's definition of "unknown" is not identical to the definition of "unable to determine" in AFCARS. The District needs to provide ACF with its definition of "unknown."

Also, this question currently is on the adoption screens. While it is an AFCARS adoption file question, it is information that is gathered at the beginning of a case, not the end. The District must add the question to a foster care case management screen or the client general information screen. If this question is left on the adoption screen, it should be populated by the response from the case management screen.

The case file review findings indicated that 100% of the records analyzed did not match what was reported in AFCARS. In every record the response for AFCARS was "unable to determine." It seems unlikely that all the children adopted in this report period had been abandoned children. In three records, the reviewer was clearly able to determine the mother's marital status.

Data Quality

The quality of the data needs to be improved. There were 64 elements (44 foster care and 20 adoption) that require additional training and supervisory oversight. Additionally, in some instances the quality of the data needs to be further assessed due to the corrections made by the staff to the program code.

There were instances where missing data had been defaulted to a valid AFCARS value. Now that these defaults have been removed, underlying data entry issues will be unmasked. The District needs to incorporate ongoing data quality assurance to ensure that the data are correct and consistent.

One issue related to missing data was in the area of foster parent information. The District contracts for placement services with private child-placing agencies. However, data on the demographics of the foster families are not entered in a timely manner into the system. This is required information that the District must provide and it is important to assess the make-up of families that volunteer to be foster parents.

There are also issues that are probably related to data conversion. For the removal and placement information, most of the errors identified could be attributed to a lack of data entry when the District's information system became operational. Data entry was not identified as an urgent issue and should be addressed on cases that are now closed when and if they re-open. The District should encourage workers to clean up the removal and placement information on open cases in which there was a prior foster care history that occurred before use of the new information system.

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