President Joe Biden signed a pair of “minibus” appropriations agreements last month, narrowly avoiding the government shutdown that seems always to be looming these days. The finalized federal spending for 2024 includes mostly level spending (and a few modest cuts) for child welfare, juvenile justice or youth homelessness programs, as well as a few new instructions for the executive branch.
See below to access Youth Services Insider’s handy federal spending chart, which includes the past five years of appropriations for dozens of key federal programs for youth and families. The chart also includes the percentage changes from fiscal year 2023.
Following are a few details in the agreement that jumped out to Youth Services Insider.
Juvenile Justice Spending Recedes
There are two core funding streams connected to state compliance with the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA), which sets core national standards around issues like detention of status offenders, locking up youth in adult settings, and addressing racial disproportionality. One is Title II, often referred to as the formula grants, and the other is Title V, the delinquency prevention program.
These accounts saw a recent peak of $75 million and $65 million respectively in fiscal 2023, still far less than many advocates would like to see going out to states after the JJDPA was reauthorized in 2018. Both took more than a 10% cut in the spending deal. Most of the smaller programs in the juvenile justice portfolio — two focused on supporting girls involved in the system or who have experienced trafficking, for example — took more severe cuts.
The formula grants don’t amount to a ton of money for states — it’s less than $1 million for most — but those dollars are tied directly to states adhering to the four core standards in JJDPA. There are already four states that have opted out of participating in the act — Connecticut, Nebraska, Texas and Wyoming — and there is always concern that receding financial incentive will cause more states to lose interest.
Chronic Absenteeism
Frequent absences from school can bring a child into the orbit of both child welfare and juvenile justice. In the case of younger students, many CPS agencies can investigate school absence for possible educational neglect, and older youth can become entangled with law enforcement for being truant, especially if they are already on probation for something else. And Congress sent a clear message in the spending deal that there is concern about the rising rate of chronic absenteeism, which is defined as missing 15 or more days in a school year.
The chronic absenteeism rate for the 2021-22 school year was 31%. For context on how bad that is, the Department of Education called chronic absenteeism a “hidden educational crisis” in 2016 when the rate was 16%. It has just about doubled since that statement.
The agreement notes that the Department of Education had made known its intention to “conduct additional monitoring of States’ implementation of school improvement requirements in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), including in States that have adopted chronic absenteeism as the statewide school quality and student success indicator.”
In light of the alarming absence numbers, Congress is directing the department to brief relevant committees on “how its additional monitoring will assess applicable States’ effectiveness in using chronic absenteeism as an indicator in identifying schools in need of support and improvement.”
New Rules on Unaccompanied Minors
Youth Services Insider is going to guess that few, if any, pieces in the federal government have ballooned in size like the Unaccompanied Children program at the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). This is the program through which the federal government handles asylum-seeking youth who arrive at the border without any adults; they are transferred from Border Patrol to the custody of ORR, who keeps them in foster homes or residential facilities until a sponsor can be identified inside the United States.
The budget for this program was in the area of $300 million back in 2013, and reached a peak of more than $8 billion in 2022 (that included some supplemental funds added during the year). This year the initial appropriation for Unaccompanied Children dropped 2% from 2023, from $5.5 billion to $5.4 billion, but the deal creates a triggered increase in funds if the number of youth in the program exceeds 16,000. For every 500 children over that level, another $15 million will be available.
The deal also requires that ORR begin to provide a monthly, online report that identifies the number of children who are separated from their families and then subsequently enter the Unaccompanied Children program. This became a hot issue during the Trump administration, during which officials acknowledged that such separations were intended to deter asylum-seekers.
Youth Services Insider heard rumblings all year that the AmeriCorps program, part of the federal Corporation for National and Community Service, could be in for a major cut to its operation. It wouldn’t have been the first time that the program, which provides stipends and college assistance to participants in exchange for work at nonprofits and community projects, had been on the chopping block; advocates for AmeriCorps saved it back in 2003.
AmeriCorps’ was level funded at about $557 million, as were several other programs overseen by the corporation. But supporters of AmeriCorps were critical of the appropriation, saying that it might “result in a reduction of 26,000 AmeriCorps positions and severely hamper the work of organizations across the country that respond to natural disasters, support students in our schools, and serve our veterans and military families.”
Small but Notable Grants
We have not yet had a chance to pore over the long list of congressional earmarks from this spending deal, projects carved out by members usually for things in their home districts or states. But here are a few competitive grants included in the deal that caught our eye:
-$3.5 million for “Family Alternative Sentencing,” which apparently first got funding in fiscal 2022 at the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention and is focused on testing models to “divert justice-involved parents/primary caregivers whom a court has found guilty of a crime from the prison system, promote the unification of families, and prevent children from entering the foster care and/or juvenile justice systems.”
-$900,000 for a rigorous evaluation of teen pregnancy prevention models and strategies (the federal budget used to include quite a bit of money for such programs).
-$1,000,000 for a competitive grant program to improve access to adoption-sensitive care training for hospital staff.
“With all the changes in women’s healthcare, this training has never been more important — especially to educate and protect our patients and their families!” said Rebecca Vahle, executive director of Family to Family Support Network, in a LinkedIn post about the appropriation. “How do you best care for a situation in the hospital that is the equivalent of a wedding and a funeral in the same room? How do you ensure that you are referring patients to local parenting resources, or how do you connect them with only ethical adoption resources upon request? Looking forward to these dollars empowering healthcare professionals across the nation!”
-$2 million for an evaluation of programs to support adoption arrangements at risk of a disruption or dissolution, a well-known blind spot in child welfare practice that was highlighted in a major data investigation by USA Today in 2022.