Idaho child welfare director seeks $14 million supplemental, emphasizes prevention and foster recruitment to curb expensive congregate care

Director Adams, director of the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare, told a legislative committee he is seeking a $14,000,000 supplemental and will ask for additional spending in the department’s upcoming budget to expand prevention services and recruit and retain foster families.

Adams said the department is treating child welfare as a strategic priority and that recent oversight work by the Office of Performance Evaluations helped crystallize where to act. “They gave us a Rosetta Stone of options for us to consider,” Adams said, and the department has focused on raising the number of foster families and increasing prevention services to keep children safely at home.

The department described statewide child-welfare activity and drivers of rising costs. Idaho has roughly 463,000 children; the department receives about 24,000 hotline calls a year and responds to roughly 15,800 investigations. Adams said 89% of assessed children are found to be safe; about 11% — roughly 1,700 cases annually — are deemed unsafe. Of cases that come into custody or require further action, Adams said currently about 300 cases a year are managed as prevention cases while roughly 1,400 result in placements.

Placement type drives the budget, Adams told the committee. He said the state spends about $16 per day (roughly $5,800 annually) for traditional foster or kinship placements, about $385 a day on average for congregate care based on 2024 data, and that some congregate care rates have risen to as much as $1,400 a day. By contrast, he said prevention services cost about $1.80 a day (about $657 a year). “It’s one of the rare instances where the budget and the outcomes are perfectly aligned,” Adams said, arguing prevention produces better outcomes at lower cost.

Adams walked the committee through steps the department has taken and plans to expand. Actions already taken include streamlining licensure rules, establishing reciprocity for families licensed in other states, waiving adoption fees, creating a foster-family newsletter and forum, and working with community partners (parks, Fish and Game) to advertise benefits to foster families. The department also supported Governor Brad Little’s expansion of paid family leave to include foster placements.

The department set a “wildly important goal” to double the ratio of foster families within 24 months; Adams reported that the department’s calculated ratio improved from 0.74 to 0.94 (meaning 94 families per 100 foster children, measured January 20 data). The department briefs a district-by-district scorecard and said northern regions have higher ratios than other areas.

Deputy Director Monte Pro said the department wants social-worker caseloads closer to the national standard of 12 to 15 cases, noting large regional variation: some regions have caseloads that can be as low as roughly 8 per worker and as high as about 19 in busier regions. Pro said the department will request staff to reduce caseloads and invest in technology to allow workers more time with families.

Adams and Pro described a “flywheel” effect: investing in prevention reduces foster entries, which frees foster beds that can then be used to move children out of costly congregate care and into family settings, generating budget and outcome improvements. Adams told the committee the department has already reduced congregate placements from about 268 children to about 90 and reduced out-of-state placements to 49, and that the last use of short-term “Airbnb” placements ended in November.

For the coming budget, the department said it will emphasize prevention and temporary targeted supports for recruitment and retention. The supplemental and budget requests described in testimony include one-time recruitment investments, a proposed 5% base pay increase for foster families (with higher supplements — 8–10% — for older children and sibling groups and 2% for infants), a 24/7 warm line to provide clinical support to foster families, and additional licensing staff to speed approvals.

Adams said the department is deliberately asking other divisions to hold to maintenance budgets so child welfare can be prioritized. He characterized the child-welfare program as an “open-ended entitlement” — a program whose costs are driven by the number of children the courts commit to state custody and by placement and length-of-stay decisions.

Committee members asked for clarification on several points. Adams said Senate Bill 1379 (passed last year) required additional justification before placing a child in congregate care, which department leaders said helped reduce congregate placements. Adams and Pro also said the department has tightened transparency rules to provide maximum transparency to vested parties in cases and will fund small, practical home items (smoke detectors, carbon-monoxide detectors) to remove minor barriers to licensure. Adams said the department has implemented temporary rule changes that produced immediate improvements in foster recruitment during summer and fall months.

On federal funding and grant risk, Adams said Title IV-E entitlement funding is mandatory and not at risk from federal executive actions. He identified a limited set of discretionary federal items — IRA-related weatherization and certain LIHEAP funds — as carrying potential risk under proposed federal policy shifts, and said the department is treating federal grants with “extreme discretion” and maintaining exit plans so that state taxpayers would not be left to absorb grant-funded programs if federal support disappears.

The presentation closed with Adams asking the committee to consider the department’s supplemental request and a preview of a fuller budget hearing before the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee (JFAC) in the coming weeks.

Ending: The department’s request centers on prevention, foster-family recruitment and retention, and targeted capacity to reduce congregate and out-of-state placements. Officials asked the legislature for near-term funding to support those priorities and described measurable targets and operational steps the department says will produce both better outcomes for children and lower long-term state costs.