California Blue Ribbon Commission on Children in Foster Care

Charge of the Commission

"Nothing is perhaps more critical for youth than having an adult to count on--always. Clearly we have our work cut out for us to promote the individual and systemic changes that need to happen in our foster care and court systems to help make this possible."

Supreme Court Justice Carlos R. Moreno,
Chair, Blue Ribbon Commission on Children in Foster Care

The charge of the Blue Ribbon Commission is to provide recommendations to the California Judicial Council on ways in which the courts and their partners can improve safety, permanency, well-being, and fairness outcomes for children and families.

The commission focused its deliberations around three key areas for reform:

• The role of the courts in achieving improved outcomes for children and families. The courts make life-changing decisions about children and families. Doing a better job depends on manageable caseloads for judges and attorneys, better access to training, and a system to measure progress. The commission also recognizes the critical value of youth and parent participation in foster-care hearings where life-changing decisions are made.
• Court collaboration with partner agencies. Dependency courts do not operate in a vacuum. Multiple agencies often join the courts in working with the same families: child welfare, mental health, education, substance abuse, domestic violence, or probation. Parents sometimes receive different or contradictory directions from multiple caseworkers. The data systems, jargon, and regulations of these various bureaucracies can make communication difficult.
• Funding and resource options for child welfare services and the courts. The commission knows that to honor the pledge to provide safety, permanency, well-being, and fairness for children in foster care, the system must have adequate funding; and that funding must be allocated in ways that allow counties to use it where it is most needed. Most federal funding for child welfare, for example, flows only after a child has been removed from the home, which leads to a system that is biased towards foster-care placement. The Blue Ribbon Commission looked at what it would mean to have the ability to use funds more flexibly, thereby promoting preventive and early intervention services that could better support struggling families and avoid removal of children from their homes in appropriate cases.

In addition to substantive recommendations, the commission also was charged with developing a framework for local courts and agencies to work together at the county level. The Blue Ribbon Commission is a statewide panel, but commissioners know that change for families and children will take place at the local level. The commission's life has been extended to June 2009 in order to allow commissioners to support the counties as they develop a local collaborative process to enact change locally. This is where the recommendations of the commission will make their way into policy and practice—and where children and families will see the difference.