Program Profile: Hillsborough County (FL) Family Dependency Treatment Court

This program consists of a specialized court for substance-using caregivers involved with the child welfare system. The program is rated Promising. Program participants showed a statistically significant higher likelihood of family reunification and a lower likelihood that children would reenter care after permanent reunification. However, families that participated in the program achieved permanency at a statistically significant slower rate, compared with families that did not participate.

A Promising rating implies that implementing the program may result in the intended outcome(s).

A Promising rating implies that implementing the program may result in the intended outcome(s).

Program Goals

The Hillsborough County Family Dependency Treatment Court (FDTC) is a specialized court in Florida for substance-using parents and caregivers whose families have become involved with the child welfare system. The goal of the FDTC is to achieve reunification between parents/caregivers and their children, while ensuring the safety and well-being of families. 

The FDTC is an integrated court, meaning a single judge is responsible for overseeing both the dependency-related petitions and the parents’/caregivers’ compliance with court orders for substance use treatment. The judge also follows the child welfare case from the initial temporary custody proceedings to final disposition.

Target Population

To be eligible to participate in the Hillsborough County FDTC, parents/caregivers must 1) have a substance use or dependence problem; 2) be referred to the program by a dependency judge, drug court case manager, or state attorney; 3) have a child or children who were removed from the home after an initial child welfare investigation and placed in kin care or foster care; 4) have no serious and unstable mental illness (such as schizophrenia or other psychotic disorders); 5) have no prior convictions for violent or sexual offense or serious offenses resulting in incarceration; and 6) have a case plan goal of family reunification.

Program Components

Parents/caregivers are assessed by an FDTC case manager prior to referral, to ensure they are eligible to participate. Once they enter the program, parents/caregivers receive a full face-to-face assessment conducted by treatment agency personnel. FDTC participants must successfully complete court-mandated treatment, meaning they must graduate from the treatment program before family reunification can occur. Participants must also satisfy other court requirements such as attending required status hearings with the judge.

Participants receive group counseling and individual counseling on a weekly basis. The group counseling sessions include a trauma-informed psychoeducational counseling component. Participants must also attend weekly Alcoholics Anonymous/Narcotics Anonymous self-help groups, undergo as many as three random drug screens each week, and make biweekly court appearances. Other services, such as psychiatric counseling, vocational counseling, and GED courses, can be provided to participants on an as-needed basis courses.

Key Personnel

The FDTC team includes a judge, court-employed case managers, local substance use treatment providers, representatives from the local child welfare agency, guardian ad litem personnel, defense attorneys, and the state Office of the Attorney General. The team works together to provide holistic treatment to substance-using parents, who have cases in the child welfare system.

Study

Chuang and colleagues (2012) conducted a quasi-experimental, nonequivalent group research design to examine the effectiveness of the Hillsborough County Family Dependency Treatment Court (FDTC) on three child welfare outcomes: reunification (measured as whether children were reunified with their primary parents/caregivers after discharge from out-of-home care); time to permanency (measured as the number of days it took to achieve final case disposition, either reunification or adoption); and reentry into care (measured as whether the child experienced subsequent removal from the home within 12 months after permanency was achieved).

The FDTC program group included 95 caregivers enrolled in the program between March 2007 and March 2009 who received 9 to12 months of intensive outpatient services from a local substance-use treatment agency. The comparison group included 91 cases from a demographically and geographically similar county that did not have an FDTC program (Pinellas County, Florida). To be eligible for the comparison group sample, caregivers in Pinellas County had to meet similar criteria to the Hillsborough FDTC program: 1) involvement with the child welfare system between 2007 and 2009; 2) verified maltreatment resulting in child removal from the home; 3) parental substance use or dependence affecting caregivers’ ability to adequately care for children; 4) no parental incarceration; 5) no serious or unstable mental illness; 6) no immediate termination of parental rights; and 7) family reunification as the case plan goal. Propensity score matching was used to match FDTC participants with comparison cases from Pinellas County.

The FDTC program group was 75 percent female, with an average age of 29.7 years. The race/ethnicity breakdown of the program group was 80 percent white and other race, 14 percent African American, and 6 percent Hispanic. The matched comparison group was 78 percent female, with an average age of 29.6 years. The race/ethnicity breakdown of the comparison group was 84 percent white and other race, 12 percent African American, and 4 percent Hispanic. In both groups, 67 percent of caregivers had a criminal history. There were no significant differences between the FDTC group and matched comparison group on baseline demographic characteristics.

Logistic regression was used to analyze FDTC participation on reunification and reentry into care. Cox regression was used to analyze FDTC participation effects on time to permanency. No subgroup analyses were conducted.

These sources were used in the development of the program profile: