Child Welfare Reports

Maximizing “Fostering Connections” to Benefit Pennsylvania’s Youth examines the societal and fiscal benefits Pennsylvania can achieve by fully implementing the federal Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act of 2008. The report, released in February 2012, concludes that implementing Fostering Connections can help more youth achieve permanency through adoption or legal guardianship and can help those who stay in foster care until age 21 make a successful transition to adulthood, while decreasing costs to the commonwealth.

Pennsylvania has taken a comprehensive, family-focused approach in recent years to reduce the number of children in foster care and provide more services to keep children in their homes. The State of Child Welfare report for 2011 provides evidence this strategy is working.

Child safety is mission central for the child welfare system. In recent years Pennsylvania state government officials and their county partners who are responsible for the child welfare system have built on their commitment to child safety with a visionary and aggressive goal: to safely reduce the number of children in foster care and ensure that every child benefits from a safe, stable and permanent family. 

How well are Pennsylvania and county governments doing to assure safe, stable and permanent families for all children? This inaugural review of the performance of our child welfare systems provides a data overview to help examine the facts and gauge our efforts to meet the needs of our most vulnerable children. 

All children deserve the safety and security of being raised in loving and permanent families, free from abuse and neglect. Yet a great disparity exists in Pennsylvania’s foster care system: African American children are six times more likely to be in foster care than white children and Latino children are three times more likely to be in foster care. 

Youth in foster care need safe, stable and permanent families. Children don’t just need their families when they are young. Family plays a critical role throughout childhood but that support continues into adulthood. For most children, their parents teach them right from wrong, help them in school, support them as they learn how to make friends and manage relationships. In most families, when a child turns 18, he or she goes off to college, trade school, work or the military. But amidst holiday breaks and summer vacations, most youth have a home to return to and parents to support and guide them for a lifetime – parents who will be there to cheer them on at their college graduation, co-sign a loan to help them buy a car or a house, walk them down the aisle, and celebrate the birth of grandchildren. 

Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children (PPC) released a new report Nov. 13 on the challenges and solutions to promoting a safe and permanent home for all children in the foster care system. The report shows a large number of children still in foster care after 17 months despite a legal requirement that they be released for adoption. Approximately 5,500 children (of 20,000 children in care annually) living in foster care in Pennsylvania have been in placement for more than 17 months but have not been freed for adoption. Only a little more than 10 percent of these children will be released for adoption within the next six months. 

The Porch Light Project will work to spearhead public policy reforms that ensure all children grow up in families where their needs for safety, permanency and well-being are met and to build the political will - including strong and visible leadership, appropriate financing, and sound public policies - to make this vision of a "forever family for every child" a reality.