Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare
Subsidized Guardianship
The Subsidized Guardianship Program is part of a comprehensive
Guardianship Permanency Initiative to improve permanency outcomes
for children in out-of-home care by promoting the use of permanent
legal guardianship as a permanency option.
While guardianship has long existed as a permanency outcome
for children, the lack of ongoing payments to guardians to care
for children once permanency has been achieved has limited the
effectiveness of guardianship as a permanency outcome and results
in foster care cases remaining open longer than necessary to
continue payments to the caretakers.
The Subsidized Guardianship program will be operated under a
federal Title IV-E waiver to provide ongoing payments to persons
becoming legal guardians of children in foster care, similar to
the
adoption
assistance program for children who are adopted.
The target population for the Subsidized Guardianship
program is children placed with relatives licensed as foster
parents. The
Subsidized Guardianship Program will make guardianship more
feasible as a permanency outcome and improve the permanency
options available for children placed with relatives.
The Guardianship Permanency Initiative is based on the
following principles:
-
Improving permanency outcomes for
children and families through more effective permanency
planning that is family-focused.
-
Promoting the use of relatives as
foster care placement resources.
-
Ensuring the safety and well being
of children through permanent placements with caring adults
whom will raise the children to adulthood.
-
Providing services to families in
ways that address the needs of children but minimizes the
public child welfare involvement in the lives of families.
-
Operating the subsidized
guardianship program in a manner similar to the adoption
assistance program.
Initial implementation of the Subsidized Guardianship program
began in the fall of 2005 in
Milwaukee County by the Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare.
Approximately 650 children in Milwaukee will be part of the
target population for the program over the 5-year period.
As a condition of the federal waiver, an independent program
evaluation including random assignment of cases must be conducted.
Target population cases will be assigned to experimental
and control groups for evaluation purposes, with only the
experimental group being eligible for subsidized guardianship
payments.
Contact
the Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare
Last Revised:
February 24, 2010
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