Fiscal Year 2004 Proposed Budget

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DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN SERVICES
CHILD AND FAMILY SERVICES DIVISIONAL MANAGEMENT

PROGRAM MISSION: To provide leadership and maximize resources thereby enabling divisional staff to provide high quality integrated services that ensure the safety and well being of children, youth, and their families.

This includes identifying needed prevention and intervention services to promote family self-sufficiency, ensuring the availability of essential services through community collaboration, using multi-disciplinary expertise to deliver services, and providing community leadership for the coordination, planning and evaluation of community-wide services in a culturally sensitive environment. The well being of the individual child, however, takes priority over the needs of the whole family when the two are in conflict.

The Child and Family Services Division Chief is the code-required "Director of Social Services," and the administrative staff of this division provides liaison and compliance assurance for all Department of Human Services programs funded with state and federal funds through the Virginia Department of Social Services. This division also provides staff support to the Arlington Partnership for Children, Youth and Families. The Partnership is an advisory board appointed by the County Board and School Board. The Partnership has 24 members, of whom 16 are from the community, and eight from school and County staff involved with youth.

The Division has reorganized administrative support, fiscal management, and traditional child welfare services (Child Protective Services/Screening and Assessment, Family Preservation, Child Placement) within approved FTEs. The objectives of the reorganization are to ensure a more seamless client support environment, maximization of staff resources, and reduction of administrative fragmentation and inefficiencies. More organizational changes are expected after a strategic assessment of early childhood education, child care, parent education, and mental health and substance abuse treatment services is conducted. The Arlington Partnership on Children, Youth and Families (Partnership) is involved in this strategic assessment, which also includes an assessment of similar programming for Parks, Recreation and Community Resources, and the Arlington Public Schools.

The Partnership embraces three broad goals. The goals are in the areas of 1) school readiness and success; 2) activities and opportunities for youth; and 3) health and mental health services for children and their families. The Partnership adopted the Assets Approach as an overall framework for approaching these goals. The Assets Approach focuses on using relationships and other strengths of the community to build the developmental foundation or "assets" that all children and youth need to become healthy, productive, and caring adults. The Partnership conducted extensive community outreach in developing recommendations and in promoting the Assets Approach throughout Arlington. Two major initiatives for the Partnership this fiscal year include a prevention awareness campaign about the assets and risky behaviors teens reported in the surveys conducted in June 2001 and creation and distribution of a community report card.

The Divisional Management Budget Summary includes expenditures that directly support divisional programs that are budgeted centrally in administration and not allocated to the program level. The administrative staff consists of a Division Chief, an Assistant Division Chief, an Administrative Officer, a Management and Budget Analyst, two full-time and one part-time Administrative Assistants, an Office Supervisor, one full-time and one part-time Administrative Specialist, one Social Work Supervisor, three Management Specialists (2.5 of whom support the Partnership), and one part-time Accounting Assistant. The Divisional administration budget includes program costs that directly support the service activities of the Division.

SIGNIFICANT BUDGET HIGHLIGHTS:

• Personnel costs increase due to normal step increases, the shift for budget purposes of 1.5 FTEs from Child Placement, and filling a vacancy with a long term County employee (pay above entry).

• Non-personnel decreases due to elimination of FY 2003 one-time LPACAP funding for a strategic assessment ($100,000).

• Nonprofits increase due to the inclusion of the contract amount for the Healthy Families Program in FY 2004, previously budgeted in Family Preservation in FY 2003.

• Purchase of Service costs decrease due to the Marion Lee West fund, which is instead budgeted in a Special Welfare account.

• State Share revenue increases primarily due to the transfer of funding for the Healthy Families program ($92,697) from Family Preservation, and the inclusion of administrative services pass through revenue, not previously budgeted ($268,078).

• LPACAP revenue decreases due to inclusion in FY 2003 of one-time funding for a strategic assessment of certain services ($100,000). In the initial year of the cost allocation plan, the Department was allowed to submit invoices retroactively up to two years. This revenue was posted in FY 2002 to Child and Family Services rather than to the Director's Office/Planning and Administration Division.

PERFORMANCE MEASURES:

• FY 2002 Actual for approved net tax support expended includes $4,163,524 LPACAP revenue. Excluding LPACAP revenue, expenditure is 99%.

• New automated systems and processes enabling staff to maximize revenue are in place.

• Clinical staffs are required to achieve basic information technology skills as a way to successfully manage automated client and financial information systems.

The Partnership for Children, Youth, and Families Objective: To enhance assets and reduce risk behavior by facilitating collaboration between citizens and staff with the County and School Boards.

Workload Measures

• Baseline data is given for FY 2001. The two standardized surveys, the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) developed by the Centers for Disease Control and The Profiles of Student Life: Attitude and Behaviors Survey designed by The Search Institute are administered every two years to students in grades 6, 8, 10 and 12. Therefore results are reported every other year. No data is reported for FY 2002 and FY 2004.

• Model communities using Assets report significant reduction of risky teen behaviors over a ten year period.

• The measures chosen are directly related to Divisional programming.

• Outcomes are contingent upon varying factors in the community.

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