Los Angeles County Self-Assessment Report

Los Angeles County Self-Assessment Report
the areas of family functioning in which the family needs to address and improve (based
on the 15,001 FSNAs that were completed by social workers during the calendar year of
2007): Parenting skills (36.6%), substance abuse (27.1%), mental health/coping skills
(22.7%), household relationships (17.4%), social support system (17.1%), resource
management/basic needs (9.4%), physical health (3.3%), culture/community identity
(1.7%), and other identified caregiver need (5.3%). Thirty-five percent of the FSNAs
resulted in no priority needs being reported. It should be noted that there has been a
significant increase in the utilization of the FSNA tool, with a current utilization rate of
78% for the calendar year of 2007, which means that the majority of the families are
having their needs assessed in a systematic manner.
The SDM Child Strengths and Needs Assessment (CSNA) requires social workers to
evaluate each child across nine different domains of functioning. Social workers
completed CSNAs for 29,434 children between January 1 and December 31, 2007. Of
those, 10,214 (34.7%) children were between 0 and 4 years old, 10,827 (36.8%) were
between 5 and 11, and 8,393 (28.5%) children were between the ages of 12 and 17
years of age. Only .5% of children in the 0-4 age group exhibited delinquent behavior,
while 2.7% of children in the 5-11 age group and 17.7% of children in the 12-17 age
group displayed needs in this area. Educational needs also increase with the age of the
child, with 1.4% of 0-4 year olds, 15.5% of 5-11 year olds, and 32.5% of 12-17 year olds
showing concern in this area. The areas that required the most attention for
intervention for 0-4 year olds were the quality of family relationships (9.8%), child
development issues (7.1%), medical/physical issues (6.5%), as well as
emotional/behavioral (4.9%) and peer/adult social relationships issues (4.1%). For 5-11
year olds, the areas that needed to be addressed were issues related to education
(15.5%), family relationships (13.5%), emotional/behavioral challenges (11.8%), and
quality of peer/adult social relationships (7.0%). And, finally, for 12-17 year olds, results
show that the greatest areas of need are related to education (32.5%), family
relationships (26.3%), emotional/behavioral challenges (22.1%), delinquent behavior
(17.7%), peer/adult social relationships (13%), and substance abuse (6.8%).
In addition to SDM, family team meetings that are offered by Team Decision Making,
Wraparound, Family Preservation, Family Group Decision Making, Emancipation
Conferences, and Permanency Review meetings all offer the opportunity to thoroughly
assess, with participation by the family and child, the particular services that will be
needed. These processes provide the capability to design a more effective, realistic
individualized case plan along with the family instead of merely prescribing a generic
type of case plan.
Resource Development:
DCFS and its stakeholders agree that efforts are made to strengthen the service array
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