Shame on U.S.: How Does Wyoming Rate?

by Tom Rose

As introduced in the first part of this series, the Shame on U.S. report, published in January 2015 has made some radical recommendations to address the national crisis of child welfare. If the Congressional committee to which it was presented follows the recommendations of this report, Wyoming may soon see a drastic decrease of federal funds related to child welfare.

The Children's Advocacy Institute of the San Diego School of Law provides state-specific pages indicating where each state stands in regard to the monitored child welfare indices. The following information comes from CAI's Wyoming page.

The federal government's dereliction allows states to fall short on meeting minimum child welfare standards. Below is information specific to Wyoming:

CFSR Results Summary: In its Child and Family Services Review (CFSR) process, HHS determines whether each state is in substantial conformity with 7 specific outcomes (pertaining to the areas of safety, permanency and family and child well-being) and 7 systemic factors (relating to the quality of services delivered to children and families and the outcomes they experience). In the first two rounds of the CFSR, HHS has concluded that Wyoming was:

Round 1 (2002)

NOT in substantial conformity with 7 of the 7 Outcomes
NOT in substantial conformity with 3 of the 7 Systemic Factors

Round 2 (2009)

NOT in substantial conformity with 6 of the 7 Outcomes
NOT in substantial conformity with 2 of the 7 Systemic Factors

Although federal law mandates that any state found not to be operating in substantial conformity during an initial or subequent review must begin a full review within two years after approval of the state's program improvement plan, HHS has announced that Wyoming will not undergo Round 3 of the CFSR until FY 2016 (see CFSR Technical Bulletin #7 (March 2014)).

As you can see, Wyoming is not the poster child for conformity with these standards. The Shame on U.S. report makes it clear that the continuation of funding despite persistent non-compliance is wasteful and counterproductive.

In theory, the CFSR process as mentioned above was supposed to go into states, do evaluations, draft a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) and then allow states to work on compliance/conformity for two years. The second evaluation was conducted with the anticipation that states would have substantially addressed their issues and achieved "…substantial conformity…" with both the outcomes and systemic factors. If non-compliance and non-conformity was still found, funding for the violating states was supposed to be cut off.

State performance was assessed according to seven "child and family outcomes" and seven systemic factors. If a state was evaluated with an overall strength rating of at least 90% it was considered to be substantially conforming. The Executive Summary of the Final Report of Wyoming's Child and Family Services Review from May 2009 details Wyoming's failures.

First the good news: "Wyoming achieved substantial conformity with one of the seven CFSR outcomes, Well-Being Outcome 2: Children received services to meet their educational needs."

Here is the list of key concerns for which Wyoming did NOT meet the standards:

• The State did not meet the national standard for the data indicator pertaining to the absence of maltreatment in foster care.

• The State did not meet the national data standard for Permanency Composite 1 (Timeliness and permanency of reunification) or for Permanency Composite 4 (Placement stability).

• The State was NOT in substantial conformity with six of the seven outcomes:
  • Well-Being Outcome 3 (Children receive services to meet their physical
    and mental health needs)
  • Safety Outcome 1 (Children are, first and foremost, protected from
    abuse and neglect)
  • Safety Outcome 2 (Children are safely maintained in their homes when
    possible and appropriate)
  • Permanency Outcome 2 (The continuity of family relationships and
    connections is preserved).
  • Well-Being Outcome 1 (Families have enhanced capacity to provide
    children's needs)
  • Permanency Outcome 1 (Children have permanency stability in their
    living situations)

This 2009 Wyoming report is 139 pages and the findings were grim. One of the most frustrating aspects of this report is that every page has at least one paragraph articulating that Wyoming has not met a particular standard. The responses from Wyoming DFS on each and every issue is that they are working on this issue, that they have formed committees and groups and oversight committees and yet, here we are in 2015 and Wyoming has not managed to achieve compliance and conformity on basic child welfare issues.

The Children's Advocacy Institute and First Star are recommending that "Federal Child Welfare Cash Should Be Tied to Full Compliance, Groups Say".

"Although the imposition of financial penalties or sanctions is a tool HHS has within its discretion that, arguably, could in fact ensure state conformity with federal requirements, thus far HHS has only imposed penalties on states that cannot even meet the terms of their own customized PIP." We will explore these funds and how they work more thoroughly in the next part of this series.

To put Wyoming's standing on these issues in proper context I reviewed each state-specific page available through the Children's Advocacy Institute. What I expected to find was that Wyoming was lagging far behind several other states. I justify this expectation because on juvenile justice issues Wyoming has not historically measured well according to national standards. Apparently, the vast majority of states failed most of these well-being and safety standards. Before you breathe a sigh of relief remember that this means that we as a nation are failing to achieve the safety and well-being of children who are entrusted to our care.