DCF helps keep kids with parents

Last May, Samantha Collins’ drug use, legal problems and dealings with the state Department of Children and Families forced her to strike a bargain with the agency.

In return for allowing social workers to come into her home three times a week to help her stay off drugs, improve her parenting and learn the practical skills needed to function as an adult, DCF would not remove her children.

The 26-year-old Somers mother of 2- and 7-year-old boys entered Family-Based Recovery, a program created 10 years ago by DCF, the agency better known, perhaps, for separating families than working to keep them together.

Family-Based Recovery, or FBR, is an example of DCF’s dramatic reversal in philosophy and practices, after years of a policy approach based largely on removing children thought to be at risk and placing them in congregate care facilities.

“‘Pull and ask later,’” said Kristina Stevens, a former DCF social worker who is now administrator of the agency’s Clinical and Community Consultation and Support Division, which includes a fastgrowing array of in-home treatment programs.

As recently as 2011, nearly 1,500 children and youths were separated from their families and were living in 54 group homes and other treatment centers in and out of Connecticut. Another 2,300 children and families were served in a dozen intensive inhome treatment programs.

Today, about 5,000 children and families receive mental

health, substance abuse and other clinical care through DCF programs — a 24 percent increase since 2011 — although most of those programs are part-time and not residential.

In 2016, social workers, clinicians and other mental health professionals from a dozen DCF programs — at a cost of about $26 million — provided in-home treatment. Just 500 children now live in congregate care or residential care, Stevens said — a 66 percent reduction since 2011. As of May, just three lived out of state.

The shift to in-home care — part of a national movement — has not been without controversy, as some critics say it can be driven by cost-savings, rather than a need for more extensive and sometimes necessary residential care.

Counselors in one out-ofhome treatment program — IICAPS, or Intensive InHome Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Services, for example — worked with 2,259 families in 2016, helping children with serious mental health challenges. Child First went to the homes of 547 children who live in environments marked by violence, neglect, mental illness or other stress-inducing conditions. Another program provided in-home clinical intervention for 80 adolescents with problem sexual behaviors and their families.

Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, said Connecticut is “miles ahead of most states” in understanding the importance of home-based treatments. He was adamant that even if a parent is a substance abuser, “Separating a child from his mother is more toxic than cocaine” in how it harms the child.

“There was a belief that by virtue of going into [congregate] care, a level of intensive treatment came with it. That wasn’t always the case,” Stevens said. “So when you meet a family benefiting from a family-based recovery experience, they’re actually seeing their treatment providers more than a youth who would have been in a congregate setting.”