Family treatment courts serve children, parents, and families involved in the child welfare system in cases when parental substance use is a contributing factor to child abuse or neglect. These specialized court programs provide intensive judicial monitoring and offer families access to multidisciplinary interventions designed to meet their needs. Since its establishment in 2007, the San Francisco Family Treatment Court (FTC) has sought to emphasize family-centered programming, elevating the needs of parents and children to promote safe family reunification.
Due to budget constraints, the focus of the FTC was initially limited to parental supports, with services such as substance use treatment and counseling. An OJJDP grant awarded in fiscal year 2009 allowed the FTC to double its capacity, adding a second case manager and serving 40 clients, said Jennifer Pasinosky, the court’s coordinator. The FTC expanded its focus in fiscal year 2014 after securing a grant from the Doris Duke Foundation and The Duke Endowment. The prevention and family recovery grant, which was administered by OJJDP partner Children and Family Futures, funded three new positions—a children’s services coordinator, public health nurse, and child welfare liaison. This enabled the FTC to address the needs of both parents and children, supporting parental recovery from substance use, reducing the time children were separated from parents, and ensuring families received appropriate assessments and services.
A second OJJDP grant awarded in fiscal year 2018 enabled the FTC to offer early childhood mental health assessments and child-parent therapy for families with children up to age 5. A child psychologist from the Infant-Parent Program at the University of California San Francisco joined the FTC team to center children’s mental health needs within the program. Another psychologist was embedded in one of the FTC’s residential treatment partners to strengthen child-parent bonding and provide care coordination for families in need of long-term support. With this collaboration, the FTC could offer dyadic therapy to improve parent-child relationships, decreasing the rate of child removal while increasing the likelihood of family reunification, when compared to child welfare cases that are not referred to the FTC. “A lot of our success has to do with our therapeutic approach,” Ms. Pasinosky said.
“[The Infant-Parent Program] has made early childhood mental health a central focus of our program and helps ensure that parents and young children get the support they need as early as possible.”
—Judge Kathleen Kelly, presiding judge for the Family Treatment Court
The FTC’s close partnership with the Infant-Parent Program has increased its staff’s understanding of early childhood mental health, inspiring it to offer dyadic therapy to parents in residential treatment. That change has led to a greater share of parents in residential treatment remaining with their children, avoiding the trauma of family separation. More broadly, the improvements funded through the enhancement grant “helped create a cohesive continuum of care [across San Francisco] so that all the [city’s child-serving] systems are talking to each other,” Ms. Pasinosky said. At the same time, providers have gained a better understanding of the importance of avoiding parent-child separation, she said.
The 2018 OJJDP funding was intended to expand the early childhood mental health services offered by the FTC and position it to sustain those improvements over the long term. So far, the FTC is on track to realizing that goal, Ms. Pasinosky said. Because of the importance of addressing young children’s needs, the San Francisco Superior Court reallocated local funds to retain the clinical positions originally supported by the OJJDP grant.
Resources:
An Office of Justice Programs fact sheet includes additional details about family treatment courts and other drug courts. Read about family treatment courts rated by OJJDP’s Model Programs Guide. The guide also includes a literature review on family treatment courts.
Learn more about practices for family treatment courts in Family Treatment Court Best Practice Standards, a publication developed by OJJDP partners Children and Family Futures and All Rise. A Children and Family Futures' Practice Academy course provides a comprehensive introduction to family treatment courts for interested jurisdictions.