LITTLE ROCK — The Arkansas Department of Human Services is beginning new efforts to reduce the number of children in the state’s foster-care system by intervening early with families at risk of having children removed from their homes.

The agency will use a waiver that gives it flexibility in how it spends federal funds targeted to adoption and foster care to implement its new strategy.

That flexibility will allow social workers to better tailor their approaches to families’ specific needs and to create a “differentiated response” system that creates new options short of starting full investigations into welfare concerns, the state’s waiver proposal said.

“The trend nationally is to try to safely reduce the number of children coming into the foster-care system,” said Cecile Blucker, director of the Human Services Department’s Children and Family Services Division. “You can’t just fix the child without fixing the family.”

Arkansas was one of 10 states to receive the waiver for use of Title IV-E federal adoption and foster-care funds in the fall, Blucker said, and it is the only state that plans to make changes statewide. Other states have focused their flexibility plans on specific age groups or geographic regions, she said.

The state will use its waiver to hire a supervisor for monitoring in-home cases, to train social workers in new ways of approaching child-welfare concerns and to build community resources that can help limit the need for foster care, such as angermanagement classes for parents or after-school care for children who may otherwise go home unsupervised.

The state’s child-welfare system investigated 33,849 reports of child maltreatment in the past fiscal year, which ended June 30. It managed 21,461 cases in that time period, including 13,502 protective and supportive services cases and 7,959 foster-care cases.

The new push follows a successful multiyear plan to turn around the state’s foster-care and protective-custody system.

In October, the federal Administration on Children, Youth and Families informed the agency that it had completed its first successful federal review in more than a decade after it increased staffing levels, worked to reduce the number of times a child was transferred between foster homes and streamlined its adoption process so that children could be placed in permanent homes more quickly.

“Arkansas is in a unique position to seize this innovative opportunity to build upon the foundation laid over the past three years to transform the child welfare system,” the state’s waiver proposal said. “The State believes that access to the waiver will provide yet another way to implement and scale up effective screenings, assessments, and interventions focused on enhancing the well-being of children and families.”

Using the “differentiated response” strategy, social workers may quickly remedy a concern related to a child’s well-being rather than completing a full, formal investigation. For example, if a school reports that a child frequently does not attend class, a social worker may work with parents to find a free bus route or provide an alarm clock to get the child up.

Similarly, using a strategy called “structured decision making,” social workers who respond to child-welfare complaints and proceed to investigate them will now have a broader range of options for intervening, Blucker said. If issues in some homes do not pose an immediate or severe threat to children’s health or safety, the social worker may choose to help remedy the problem and follow up with support and monitoring, she said.

For example, a parent caught with drugs at home may be required to enroll in an outpatient drug-rehabilitation program, Blucker said. Similarly, if a home’s condition triggers a welfare call, a social worker might train parents how to properly clean and follow up later to ensure that their habits have changed.

“You’re supporting the family, and you’re also letting them know what kind of resources are there,” Blucker said.

If social workers discover inadequate resources in a community to support a family’s needs, they may work with agencies in the area to fill the gaps, she said. For example, they may encourage a child-mentoring program to increase availability after school to provide supervision for families who can’t afford child care.

“We’re switching it and saying there’s a much better way of dealing with that situation that will produce better results for the family and for the child,” Blucker said.

This will help fill gaps for other families, reducing the need for state intervention, she said. And working with parents in their homes reduces their defensiveness and enables them to partner with state employees to fix concerns, she said.

Safety will remain a top priority, Blucker added, noting that there will still be situations where removing children from their home is the only option.

But, in some cases, the consistency and security of home is a benefit workers can’t ignore, she said.

“The trauma that a child endures when you remove them from their home is tremendous,” Blucker said.

Arkansas, Pages 7 on 01/03/2013