Dispatches From the Field: Re-imagining Our Child Welfare System

“There are times when I’ve talked to parents who say to me, ‘I have a car, but I don’t have money to put gas in my car. If you would give me a gas card instead of a bus pass, that would help me.’ But we don’t typically do that, we don’t give cash. There are limits to how the foster care or child welfare systems have traditionally been able to support families with public dollars. I’ve had parents say to me, ‘You took my child and you placed them with a foster parent, and then you started paying that foster parent $800 a month. If you gave me the $800 a month, I’d be able to take care of my child because I could get to work, and I would be able to pay for childcare.’ It’s those kinds of things that we’ve been hearing from parents, indicating something is not right with our system.” – Commissioner Christine Beyer

Interview with Christine Norbut Beyer

What made you want to become Commissioner of the Department of Children and Families and how did your prior work prepare you for this role?

I’ve always lived in New Jersey and almost my entire career has been in New Jersey. In 2003, I began to work for what was then called DYFS (Division of Youth and Family Services) — now our Division of Children Protection and Permanency. I was there for about eight and a half years, starting as a regional assistant director and moving up to assistant commissioner of DCF. I left in at the end of 2011 to work at Casey Family Programs, a national foundation focused on improving child welfare outcomes, for six years.

DYFS’s work was originally housed in the Department of Human Services, and then became its own cabinet department — the Department of Children and Families — in 2006 under Governor Corzine. I was in the Department at that time and was part of its reformation right from the beginning. I also worked for every commissioner before I became commissioner and I had watched all of them subsequently build on what their predecessors had done to move the work along. I felt there was already a good roadmap, and I had a real understanding of the direction of the work here. Also, my time at Casey Family Programs, which functioned like a child welfare think tank, allowed me to learn from some of the best in the field. Taking what I learned there and what I learned from other jurisdictions, and then applying that here in New Jersey is what has shaped our strategic plan and the work we’re doing. To be honest, I felt very fortunate to even be asked to sit in this seat. It really was a dream come true.

One strategic priority in your department relates to re-envisioning the foster care system. Can you speak about the kinds of approaches you are using, as well as your goals?

One of the main goals in the Department relates to kinship care [the care of children by relatives or close family friends]. We have done a really great job of reducing the number of children in foster care. When I joined the Department, about 40% of children entering out-of-home care were placed with kin. This could be relatives — it could be fictive kin, a teacher, a coach, or somebody with whom the child was connected — to really help reduce the trauma of being removed or separated from their parents. When we looked at the national numbers, we saw that 40% was actually pretty high, so we had individuals here in New Jersey saying, “We’re one of the best in the country, we’re doing great. Why are you thinking there’s a problem?” And I explained, “Well, 40% really isn’t very good. It’s only 4 in 10 children. And yes, doing well compared to others in the country is great, but no one’s doing well in this.”

Having knowledge about Adverse Childhood Experiences made me aware that children in many families already were dealing with trauma. Separating them from a parent would add to that trauma, so I felt that mitigating that was our responsibility. And we knew from the research that children placed with relatives get reunified quicker or, if they can’t go home, they achieve permanency faster either through adoption or kinship legal guardianship, and they’re better able to maintain sibling connections and bonds.

Expanding kinship care became a priority. With the work we’ve done in the past three years, the number of children being placed with relatives has dramatically increased — now up to 70% of children are placed with relatives within the first 30 days of coming into foster care. As part of our re-envisioning foster care, we are working with traditional foster parents to have a focus on reunification. This means moving to the idea where they’re not just fostering the child, but they’re connected to the biological parents, and they’re also helping the biological parents get themselves to a place where the children can go back home with them. So we’re trying to really move away from foster care as a logical step to adoption and into a situation where if you’re fostering it’s because you want to help the child and their family, not because you want the child to become part of your family. That’s a significant shift that we continue to work on every day.

Can you speak about the Powerful Families, Powerful Communities initiative and how it intersects with your work to reduce state interventions?

Powerful Families, Powerful Communities NJ is about making obsolete the need for foster care. The idea behind it is for parents and community to determine and design interventions that would support them. The goal is to ensure that parents get what they need so their children can stay home safely with families, and families don’t ever become the subject of a call to the child abuse hotline. We have an advisory board of public and private partners, and philanthropists, which has been meeting for over a year to help advance this Powerful Families idea and movement.

We’ve identified three communities in New Jersey to begin our work: Cumberland County, Camden, and Newark. We have teams of parents, some who have experience with our system and some who don’t, designing prototype interventions. We are considering things we haven’t tried before, and some things that are completely unique to the field of child welfare, and even go beyond child welfare.

The next stage of Powerful Families will be to start implementing these interventions and tracking them to understand the impact. Certainly, it will help New Jersey families in our system, and we also believe we could be a model for other states and other systems. It could potentially lead to federal finance reform because I fully expect that some of the interventions parents say they need may be things that cannot be paid for from state funds or federal funds. [Federal finance reform refers to giving child welfare jurisdictions the ability to invest federal funds in different ways to address the unique needs of their communities.]

For example, there are times when I’ve talked to parents who say to me, “I have a car, but I don’t have money to put gas in my car. If you would give me a gas card instead of a bus pass, that would help me.” But we don’t typically do that, we don’t give cash. There are limits to how the foster care or child welfare systems have traditionally been able to support families with public dollars. I’ve had parents say to me, “You took my child and you placed them with a foster parent, and then you started paying that foster parent $800 a month. If you gave me the $800 a month, I’d be able to take care of my child because I could get to work, and I would be able to pay for childcare.” It’s those kinds of things that we’ve been hearing from parents, indicating something is not right with our system. So, I think that it’s not only about re-envisioning foster care, but also re-envisioning child welfare. It’s asking who has a part to play in child welfare. It’s not just the Child Protection Division, it’s public health, it’s our medical community, it’s our schools, it’s law enforcement. Everybody has a role to play in changing the way we support families or how we intervene in their lives.

What are some other strategic priorities for the Department of Children and Families?

We have clear goals around our Children’s System of Care. We have probably the most robust system of care for children needing behavioral mental health services in the country. It’s been in existence for around 20 years, but we came to a place where we knew we could do more to enhance and improve services for children with behavioral health needs and those with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Before I was sitting in this seat, around 2013 or so, all the services for children with intellectual and developmental disabilities were housed in the Department of Human Services, within the Division of Developmental Disabilities. Under the Christie administration, the decision was made to move those children’s services to our Children’s System of Care, and 13,000 children were brought into this new system.  At the time, not a lot of work was done to really tailor services to that population — and its population is unique, where every child has varying needs.

Our Children’s System of Care was really based on 9-month or 12-month interventions, but many children with developmental or intellectual disabilities have lifelong needs. One of our transformational goals is to have a more fully integrated Children’s System of Care that would serve all children needing that type of service. We also want to increase services for children 5 to 8, and cover children under 5 who had not had access to those services. We continue to evaluate how best to provide infant mental health and we keep looking at the landscape to see what we can do to better focus on early intervention with children and families.

Another transformational goal relates to staff. We have a workforce of 6,600 within the department, with over 5,000 of them employed in the Division of Child Protection and Permanency. They see a lot of the ugly side of humanity and as a result there’s a lot of secondary trauma within our workforce. In fact, there was a study showing that Child Protective Service workers have higher rates of post-traumatic stress disorder than Gulf War veterans.

For our staff, there’s just that constant trauma-related stress day after day, year after year, and it really takes its toll — not only on the staff, but then on their families, and then on the families they work with here. A lot of times, it goes unnoticed or unrecognized or, even if it is recognized, there’s not a lot done internally to address the needs of staff. So that was one of the things I knew I wanted to focus on. We recently created an Office of Staff Health and Wellness. Right from its beginning we started talking about staff taking care of themselves and we put together a mindfulness toolkit, among other things that could help support them. It’s very important that we attend to  the wellness of our overall workforce.

You’ve been vocal in your desire to convey to New Jersey families that the Department has become more focused on prevention and providing services to support families. Are there barriers that prevent families from seeking out these services and what do you think the Department can do to lessen those barriers?

I think it’s a combination of things. Right from the start, my goal was to try and present the Department in a way that pushed against what people’s current beliefs were about DCF (Department of Children and Families). The belief was that DCF removed children, DCF put kids in foster care, and did not necessarily offer all the prevention services and the Children’s System of Care work. It’s one of the reasons I did a listening tour, to really try and get an understanding of how we were perceived in the community as well as to listen to parents about what they need so we could improve our services.

I learned that many communities in this state still are attached to negative notions of DCF or DCP&P because of personal experiences, whether it was something that happened to them or to a friend or family member. That’s why we need to do more work in the community to get the word out about our services and our approach. We also know that some of our programming needs to be branded in a different way — including branding it for all New Jersey residents and not just for low-income families. Our social media really was non-existent prior to this administration, but now I believe we really are producing some incredible materials, so some members of the community are now seeing us in a different light

The Department of Children and Families has been very engaged in helping families during the pandemic. Do you have any advice for parents on how best to support their children during this difficult time?

My best advice to parents is to talk to their children. Talk to them no matter what age they are, at an age-appropriate level, about their fears, their anxieties, and their concerns regarding COVID, or anything else that’s happening in the world, including all the social justice and the race equity work happening across the country now. Even at young ages, children are absolutely aware of what’s happening, either through the tension in their house, or from what they’re seeing on TV or hearing in conversations in their home or among older siblings or friends. We have a lot of families in New Jersey who lost loved ones due to COVID, and it’s important to be willing to have a conversation about that with your children. We have materials, developed by our Office of Communications, tips for parents on how to take care of themselves and de-stress, but also tips for talking to children. And with the recent rise in COVID cases there’s a lot more talk; kids are going back to school now and having to mask so I think some of those fears and anxieties may appear or rise again. We want parents to be aware that there are supportive services through DCF. If they don’t feel comfortable talking to their children there are places that they can go and get help with doing just that.