Arizona Department of Child Safety—Permanency Practices—Department should improve its provision of information to the juvenile courts and Foster Care Review Board and implement its plans to further improve other permanency practices and outcomes

The Arizona Department of Child Safety (Department) is responsible for helping to ensure that children who have been removed from the home achieve a safe and stable permanent home. Although most Arizona children exiting out-of-home care achieve permanency in a family setting, we found that the Department can improve its permanency efforts. Specifically, the Department has not consistently submitted timely and detailed reports about the status of a child’s case to the juvenile courts, and caseworkers are frequently absent from Foster Care Review Board reviews. We also found that although the Department places more children with kin than the national average, staff have not always documented their kin-search efforts. Further, previous department reviews found that it has needed to improve other permanency practices and outcomes, including ensuring that children achieve permanency in a timely manner; filing petitions in a timely manner to terminate parental rights so that a child can be adopted; recruiting and retaining foster homes, which can become permanent placements; and preserving a child’s connections to his/her family and community.