California Welfare and Institutions Code

§ 16519

WIC § 16519 Effective Jan 1, 2008Div. 9 · Part 4 · Ch. 5

Statute text

The Legislature finds and declares the following:

(a)Safety, permanency, and well-being are crucial for the more than 82,000 California children in foster care, and are paramount to achieving both federal and state child welfare system improvement goals. Foster children need safe homes with permanent connections to family or other caring adults. The current licensing and approval system, which screens families to care for foster children, fails to support these outcomes.

(b)Children in foster care live in a variety of out-of-home care settings: licensed foster family homes, approved relative and nonrelative extended family member homes, foster family agencies, and group homes. All of these placement types, considered facilities under current law, are required to meet the respective health and safety standards in order to be licensed or approved. This has produced administrative inefficiencies and confusion among stakeholders, and has contributed to difficulty in recruiting suitable foster family homes for children in out-of-home care. Increasing the number of available suitable homes will improve the likelihood that the best home will be initially identified to meet a child’s particular needs.

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Legislative history

Added by Stats. 2007, Ch. 464, Sec. 2. Effective January 1, 2008.