Benefits and Costs of Intensive Foster Care Services: The Casey Family Programs Compared to State Services

Abstract

"The foster care system attempts to prepare children and youth who have suffered child maltreatment for successful adult lives. This study documents the economic advantages of a privately funded foster care program that provided longer term, more intensive, and more expensive services compared to public programs. The study found significant differences in major adult educational, health, and social outcomes between children placed in the private program and those placed in public programs operated by Oregon and Washington. For the outcomes for which we could find financial data, the estimated present value of the enhanced foster care services exceeded their extra costs. Generalizing to the roughly 100,000 adolescents age 12-17 entering foster care each year, if all of them were to receive the private model of services, the savings for a single cohort of these children could be about $6.3 billion in 2007 dollars. "("JEL "D61, H75) Copyright (c) 2009 Western Economic Association International.

Child Welfare Finance and Foster Care Outcomes

“…It may be that state spending, in contrast to federal spending, is more likely to be for services offered to and required of the family of a child removed and placed in foster care. This would be consistent with the findings of Zerbe et al (2009), who found that intensive foster care that offered more services to the family tended to cost more per child/per day ($32 more per child/per day) and corresponded to longer lengths of stay in care (an average of 2.7 months longer). A greater focus on services for the family after a child has been removed and placed into care corresponds to longer stays in foster care.…”

“…In a comparative cost analysis of an intensive foster care program versus state foster care, Zerbe et al (2009) found state foster care in one state to cost $50, on average, for each day a child is in foster care (or $18,400 annually). Intensive foster care programs (or treatment foster care) typically include smaller worker caseloads and greater foster parent training requirements.…”

Cost effectiveness of a school readiness intervention for foster children

“…Few studies have conducted economic evaluations of interventions aimed at improving the health and well-being of young children with emotional and behavioral problems in foster care (Bywater et al, 2011; Lee, Aos, & Miller, 2008; Zerbe et al, 2009), and none have examined the cost effectiveness of the KITS intervention. This analysis should be considered in light of other possible options for improving school readiness for young children in foster care.…”

A Cost-Savings Analysis of a Statewide Parenting Education Program in Child Welfare

“…An inflation rate is not typically applied to benefits because the discount rate would be adjusted by the same inflation rate, and thus, would result in a net cancellation (Plotnick & Deppman, 1999). As Burgess and Zerbe (2011) point out, there is little agreement on what discount rate to apply when estimating net present values; however, a commonly used discount rate of 3.5% was used in the present study and is recommended in similar studies (Karoly et al, 2001;Moore, Boardman, Vining, Weimer, & Greenberg, 2004;Zerbe et al, 2009). As is typically done, sensitivity analyses were performed around this discount rate.…”