The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) at long last released annual data from the Adoption and Foster Care Reporting and Analysis program, or AFCARS. While the standard PDF version of the report is available, this year also included the launch of a new dashboard for AFCARS.
The upside: The dashboard makes public a lot more data elements than have been out there in the past. While researchers with special access have been able to mine AFCARS for more over the years, the public report was somewhat limited.
Some downsides this year: This is the first year that states have had to report on an updated AFCARS track first put in motion in fiscal 2020, which entails both new processes and new things to report on. And some states are struggling to report on the new system, chief among them Washington and Wyoming, which are not included in this year’s report at all.
ACF urged “caution and reason” in comparing this year’s report — which actually covers fiscal year 2023 — to previous years of AFCARS. “If a result seems unusual or uncharacteristic it may be due to a state’s continuing efforts to ensure that their infrastructure, data system, policies, and training support accurate AFCARS 2020 submissions.”
At this point, the dashboard only includes 2023 numbers for most elements, so the new visualization tool does not offer an ability to identify trends or changes.
An explanation of the caution shared with Youth Services Insider said ACF expects the numbers “change substantially in some instances, and particularly with respect to counts of children with a permanency plan of adoption and counts of legally free children.” Further, it notes, the new AFCARS system changed the reporting population “in some nuanced ways,” citing some examples of groups that in most states are pretty small: kids home on trial visits but still in foster care, or youth who entered juvenile justice facilities while in foster care.
With all of that said, here are some notes on the 2023 AFCARS numbers.
Foster care is down … we’re just not sure by exactly how much.
A press release teasing the new dashboard trumpeted a steep drop of nearly 7% in foster care between 2022 and 2023. That is misleading, though, because Washington and Wyoming are not in the 2023 set.
The Imprint obtained a youth-in-care total for both states in March of 2023, which is not quite apples-to-apples. Plugging those figures in, you get a 5% decrease. If you back out Wyoming and Washington from the 2022 data and just compare the states in both sets: same result, down 5%. So barring an unforeseen, massive spike in both those states, the national total is down for a sixth straight year. There were, however, 16 states that saw an increase between 2022 and 2023. When you look back five years, there are really only two states with major upticks in foster youth: Illinois, up 15% since 2018, and Maine, up 38%.
Entries, and exits, down again
The decline in foster care has been a story of less overall use eclipsing an overall slowdown in exits from the system. Backing out Washington and Wyoming from 2022, there was a 4% drop in entries in the rest of the states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. Using the same approach with exits, we see a 6% drop in exits from 2022.
As always, this is not a perfectly tidy narrative: about a quarter of states saw an increase in entries in 2023, including five that went up by 10% or more. Louisiana, recently sued over its foster care conditions, jumped 20%. New Mexico shot up an incredible 41%. But a look back to 2018 is confirmatory of the nationwide trend toward fewer entries: between then and 2023, Louisiana is the only state in the nation that has seen entries increase.
Reunification at all-time low
The percentage of children exiting foster care to reunification dropped below 50% for the first time in 2017. It has steadily ticked down from there, and now stands at 44%. If you add up the number of kids leaving for adoption, guardianship or to live with a relative outside of foster care, that group is now equal to those being reunified.
The 2023 data on youth in foster care does not bode well for the trend to reverse. Of the youth in care on September 30, only 42% had a current permanency plan of reunification.
Termination and adoption falling out of favor?
ACF tweaked the specific details about adoption this year, so perhaps that alongside growing pains with the new system has sent this data out of whack. But as is, it really appears that the number of kids whose parents have both lost their rights is way down, as are the number of children for whom adoption is a stated goal.
Here’s the difference in how adoption, and relatedly terminations, are presented.
Previous:
-Number waiting to be adopted on the last day of the fiscal year.
-Number waiting to be adopted for whom parental rights (for all living parents) were
terminated as of the last day of the fiscal year.
For 2023:
-Number with an adoption goal on the last day of the fiscal year.
-Number “legally free” on the last day of the fiscal year.
We are not sure there is anything fundamentally different about the first data point. In the second one, the new approach appears to better identify the entire universe of children whose parents’ rights were terminated, regardless of if there was a goal of adoption set for them.
The new report finds that the number of children with a goal of adoption dropped from 101,401 in 2022 to 77,809 in 2023, a 23% decrease in just a year. The number of children who are “legally free” dropped 29% to 28,459.
Some portion of that is explained by the absence of Washington and Wyoming, which are not in this 2023 data at all. And, one observer pointed out to us, Texas does not appear in this dashboard’s collection on “legally free” children. But it seems logical to project that if the previous two items Youth Services Insider mentioned continue — a decrease in the rate of reunification and less planning for adoption — we might be about to see an uptick in the number of exits to guardianship and other kinship-based placements.
Less “Aging out”
In 2023, 8% of youth exiting the system did so to what is called emancipation on the report and is more familiarly described as “aging out.” But with the overall decline in foster youth, it is worth noting that the amount of youth headed into adulthood without permanency is now 15,590, where just a decade ago it was reliably north of 20,000 youth and in some years approached 30,000.
“Time in Care” metric vanishes
AFCARS has always noted both the median and mean time that youth exiting foster care spent in the system. Both metrics steadily dropped throughout the 2000s until around 2017, when it began to go in the other direction. The number of youth who exited after three years or longer went up two percentage points, from 18% to 20%, so safe bet that at least the mean time in care rose in 2023.
This report does not lay out the mean or median, but includes the number of youth who exit in defined bands of time (ie, under 8 days, 8-30 days, 2-3 years, etc). Additionally, the dashboard breaks all those time ranges down by race and ethnicity.