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  “Why does the funding source make any difference?”

  Susan Mangold

  Professor of Law

By ILENE FLEISCHMANN

Published: February 6, 2012

Making tax dollars devoted to child welfare work most effectively for children is the focus of a promising two-year study led by a UB Law School faculty member.

The study, funded with a $270,269 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, capitalizes on a rich trove of data from Ohio child welfare agencies. It is being led by Susan Vivian Mangold, professor and co-director of the Program for Excellence in Family Law at UB Law School. Her co-investigators are Catherine Cerulli, a 1992 UB Law graduate who is an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Rochester Medical School, and Gregory Kapcar, legislative director of the Public Children’s Services Association of Ohio (PCSAO). The data has been collected by PCSAO for more than a decade and includes both funding and child outcome data.

The grant is one of 15 announced recently by the foundation’s Public Health Law Research Program, whose mission is to promote the effective use of law to improve public health.

Mangold’s project addresses the question: Does the source and/or type of funding, not just the amount of funding, affect health outcomes for children in foster care? The study will examine 10 years’ worth of data from the 88 counties in Ohio, 45 of which have a dedicated local tax levy that provides flexible local child welfare funding. Eighteen other counties have unusual flexibility in how they spend federal funding for children in foster care as part of an experiment by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

The quality outcomes under study include number of days spent in foster care, days a child waits before he or she is adopted and cases of recurrent maltreatment. HHS uses these factors to measure the quality of child welfare programs and, says Mangold, all of them are “directly related to mental health challenges for kids in foster care.”

She says that data analysis already has shown that in counties with local tax levies dedicated to child welfare, children in the foster-care system experience better quality outcomes. The effect is magnified in counties that also received HHS allocations under the federal Title IV-E waiver program, which gives counties greater flexibility in spending that funding than HHS normally grants. So, Mangold says, in counties with both local and HHS flexible funding, children waited less than a year, on average, for adoption; in counties with just one form of flexible funding, they waited three years; and in counties without flexible funding, they waited more than six years.

“Whatever we measured with [flexible funding] as a variable, we found these stunning outcomes,” Mangold says. “The question now is, what can we learn from these correlations?

Why does the funding source make any difference?”

To tease out the reason that flexible funding streams lead to better outcomes for children in foster care, investigators will survey the child welfare directors of all Ohio counties, then conduct in-depth interviews with 30 randomly selected directors.

The goal of the study, Mangold says, is not to persuade other counties or states to pass new taxes dedicated to child welfare, but rather that all levels of government use the results to revise the requirements they impose on how child welfare funding is used—ensuring that it most effectively benefits young people.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant, she says, not only covers the cost of the research, but includes consultation on its methodology and how to disseminate its results in the community of child welfare scholars and advocates.