The mission of National Family Preservation Network (NFPN) is to serve as the primary national voice for the preservation of families through Intensive Family Preservation Services and reunification services. Our belief is that children deserve to remain safely with their families when possible and that all efforts must be made to reunite children with their families when it is safe to do so.

NFPN provides the vision, leadership, training, tools, and resources to assist policy makers and practitioners to build on a family’s strengths and to preserve family bonds so children can be protected and nurtured at home. As such, we are vitally interested in government policies, research, and funding of family preservation and reunification services. We are grateful for this opportunity to express our views regarding the Safe and Stable Families Program and the research on the effectiveness of family preservation programs.

Intensive Family Preservation Services (IFPS) have been widely used, replicated, and studied for over two decades. There is general agreement that these services

• have an excellent safety record in keeping families together,
• provide a wide array of services with emphasis on building skills,
• improve family functioning,
• free up child welfare caseworkers to work with families whose children are in out-of-home placements, and
• report high levels of satisfaction from program participants.

There is less agreement on the effectiveness of IFPS in preventing placements with most researchers agreeing that findings are equivocal. However, it is not surprising that findings would be equivocal based on the commonality of problems with the research. All of these problems are reflected in the current Evaluation of Family Preservation and Reunification programs: Interim Report conducted in the states of Kentucky, New Jersey, and Tennessee and include:

• Fidelity to the model—programs failed to adhere to the model in at least three critical areas: first contact within 24 hours, "front loading" of services in the first week, and contacts with families on weekends.
• Targeting families—placement of a child should be imminent but most families did not meet this definition.
• Random assignment—caseworkers were reluctant to assign families to a control group if families would receive no services so did not always comply with random assignment requirements.
• Sample size—less than two-thirds of the intended number of families were studied.
• Treatment services for control group—some families in the control group received other intensive services; at one site these services were provided by staff trained by IFPS providers.

New research conducted by Dr. Ray Kirk at the University of North Carolina, taking into account all of the problems mentioned above, compared over 1,200 children whose families received IFPS with 110,000 children whose families did not receive these services. IFPS outperformed traditional child welfare services in every case by reducing the number of placements or delaying placements. When multiple risk factors were present, IFPS was increasingly effective at preventing placement when compared to the rest of the child welfare system.

IFPS providers have welcomed evaluation of their programs while occasionally pointing out that the rest of the child welfare system is mostly not evaluated. NFPN takes the position that expanding IFPS would aid the entire child welfare system currently overwhelmed with increasing caseloads, a high turnover rate in caseworkers, disparity in the number of foster and adoptive children compared to the number of foster and adoptive homes available, and an increasing number of child deaths in the system. Used correctly, intensive family preservation services

• provide for close monitoring of high risk families while teaching skills to family members in order to help them make needed changes,
• prevent unnecessary placement to free up scarce foster and adoptive homes for children who do require temporary or permanent placement,
• reduce caseloads and thus provide incentives to lower the turnover rate in caseworkers,
• allow caseworkers more time to work on permanent plans for children who cannot return home, and
• save $3.00 on placement services for every dollar spent providing IFPS.

Saturation of IFPS in a region or state has consistently demonstrated improved management of child protective caseloads, reduction of child deaths in the system, and cost savings as has been demonstrated at various times in Alabama, Michigan, North Carolina, New York City, and Missouri.

President Bush’s proposal to increase funding for the Safe and Stable Families Program is well timed. The child welfare system needs a strong infusion of resources to prevent its collapse. NFPN urges Congress to increase funds for the Safe and Stable Families Program and to put the bulk of these funds into intensive family preservation and reunification services as this will have the most immediate and greatest beneficial impact on the child welfare system.