Take control of CAS system, Ontario urged

Posted on May 4, 2015 in Child & Family Policy Context

TheStar.com – News/anada – Provincial child advocate says “stunning” differences among 46 children’s aid societies, revealed by Star analysis, are result of government’s hands-off approach.
May 04 2015.   By: Sandro Contenta News, Laurie Monsebraaten Social justice reporter, Jim Rankin Feature reporter, Staff Reporters

The provincial government must grab control of a child protection system that is “at best fragmented and at worst confused” when caring for Ontario’s most vulnerable children, the province’s child advocate says.

“This is about the well-being of children,” says Irwin Elman. “And if we’re not going to take that seriously and be concerned about how we are doing that job, I don’t know what as a province we are going to consider seriously.”

Elman, Ontario’s provincial advocate for children and youth, was responding to an unprecedented analysis of data on the performance of children’s aid societies published a week ago. Conducted by the Toronto Star, the analysis found stark differences in how Ontario’s privately run, non-profit agencies treat children taken from parents due to abuse or neglect.

Whether children are placed with relatives or in group homes, how often they change foster or group homes, how likely they are to rejoin their families, and even whether they receive regular medical and dental checkups are all influenced by where they happen to live and which of the province’s 46 children’s aid societies takes them into care.

The “stunning” differences are the result of the government’s “hands-off approach” to child protection, Elman argues. Yet the Ministry of Children and Youth Services is responsible for regulating societies, and thousands of children in care become wards of the government.

“No child who is in the care of our government should receive different services based on where they live. That’s a huge problem,” Elman says, “and it needs to be dealt with immediately.”

The Star’s analysis comes from budget reports sent to the ministry — detailing how each society spends its portion of $1.5 billion a year in government funding — and from ministry case audits of children in care for two or more years.

Elman accuses the ministry and the Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies, the agencies’ lobby group, of “passing the buck.” They each blame the other, he says, for a system that has no idea why the differences among regions exist, or which practices lead to the best results for children, youth and families.

The government is installing a centralized computer system to standardize the inconsistent data societies collect, but it won’t be fully ready until 2019. And comparing each agency to promised performance benchmarks is many years away, Elman says.

Factors that can affect how children are treated include a lack of social and health services in remote areas, ministry-imposed budget cuts, availability of foster homes and demographic differences, such as poverty levels in a society’s district.

The differences are at times philosophical. Several societies place a significant number of their children in group homes, often seen as less desirable and nurturing places. But Valoris for Children and Adults of Prescott-Russell, east of Ottawa, has less than 2 per cent of them there — the lowest in Ontario. It believes children are better off with families and provides extra services to foster parents to make sure there are enough of them willing to do the job.

The ministry responded to the Star’s 31-page analysis with a one-paragraph statement defending the system as giving children “every opportunity to reach their full potential regardless of where they live or come into care.”

The OACAS instead credited the Star with raising important questions about wide-ranging differences, including the number of times children are returned to their parents only to bounce back into care, raising questions about whether some are being returned to unsafe environments.

Societies contacted by the Star were studying their rankings carefully — from Orangeville-based Dufferin Child and Family Services, which has the fewest children in the care of kin, to the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto, which scored below the provincial average in several key areas of care.

David Rivard, the Toronto society’s chief executive officer, cites the challenges of serving the city’s culturally diverse population. He says, for example, that it is difficult to place children with kin when many newcomers don’t have relatives in the country.

Bruce Grey Child & Family Services, based in Owen Sound, scored lowest in annual medical checkups for Crown wards, and in using mandatory questionnaires that a child or youth’s history when deciding on his or her plan of care.

Phyllis Lovell, Bruce Grey’s executive director, notes it’s the first time she saw the society ranked with others.

“That’s not information provided to us by our sector” or the children and youth ministry, she says. “It should be.”

Lovell describes Ontario’s hospital sector as “light years ahead” of societies in using data to inform the public and improve quality of service. If the ministry considers that important, it should provide funding to make sure small societies like Bruce Grey have the expertise on staff to crunch the data, she adds.

In the meantime, the society has put in place a “quality improvement plan” that makes sure staff understand the standards of care expected.

< http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2015/05/04/take-control-of-cas-system-ontario-urged.html >

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