Title IV-E Funding: Funded Foster Care Placements by Child Generation and Ethnicity

Tracy Vericker, Daniel Kuehn, Randolph Capps

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Read the other two briefs in this series

Foster Care Placement Settings and Permanency Planning: Patterns by Child Generation

Child Sexual Abuse: Removals by Child Generation and Ethnicity

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Abstract

Over one fifth of all U.S. children have at least one immigrant parent. Social service systems are encountering increasing numbers of these children, but few hard data exist. Three briefs in the Identifying Immigrant Families Involved with Child Welfare Systems series provide some of the first data on Latin American immigrant children in out-of-home care in Texas. Key findings include:

• Placement type: only 8 percent of Latin American immigrant children in out-of-home care are living with relatives compared with 20-28 percent of U.S.-born children.
• Removal reason: Latin American immigrants are three times more likely to be removed because of sexual abuse than children of U.S.-born parents.
• Title IV-E eligibility: only 5 percent of Latin American immigrants in out-of-home care are eligible for reimbursement compared with over half of U.S.-born children.

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Title IV-E of the Social Security Act is the primary source of dedicated federal child welfare funding to states (Scarcella et al. 2006). This funding stream allows states to apply for and receive federal matching funds for the following child welfare activities: adoption assistance, foster care maintenance payments, short- and long-term training, administrative expenditures, and costs of required data collection systems (HHS 2005). In 2004, IV-E was funded at $5.8 billion (Scarcella et al. 2006). However, Title IV-E does not subsidize all children in the care of the state; rather, eligibility is determined by a number of criteria, including immigrant status and income eligibility. States are required to use their own funding to pay for children who are not Title IV-E eligible.

This brief, focusing on children living in out-of-home care in the custody of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) on March 31, 2006, discusses findings related to the share of children Title IV-E eligible by generation and ethnicity. We find that immigrant children from Latin America were determined to be IV-E eligible less often than other children in the child welfare system, likely owing to their immigrant status based on federal law.

(End of excerpt. The complete report is available in PDF format.)

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