Homebuilders

The Family First Prevention Services Act, the most consequential rewrite of federal child welfare policy in decades, was signed into law in 2018 and took effect at the end of 2019, making 2020 the first full year of effect.

Lost in the shuffle of the obvious and only news story going, the federal Prevention Services Clearinghouse has approved Homebuilders, a family preservation model with a large track record of success, for new federal funding under the Family First Prevention Services Act. 

Consider two approaches to working with troubled children and families. Approach #1 is embodied in a paragraph from a column in The Chronicle in which the author cites what she sees as barriers to working with children in foster care: “When foster parents said they could not, and our overworked paraprofessionals were unavailable, I had to take my clients to the doctor, dentist, therapist and for family visits.

I appreciate the opportunity to debate child welfare finance with Sean Hughes in the Chronicle. But I am disappointed that in his introduction to the latest installment, Daniel Heimpel chose to repeat what I view as The Big Lie of American child welfare – the idea that child protection and family preservation are at odds.