While the Oklahoma Institute for Child Advocacy (OICA) primarily works with state policies, there are often federal issues which we try to engage our advocates in calling for better opportunities.

One of these policies is support for the bipartisan “Protecting America’s Children by Strengthening Families Act,” which would invest critical new resources in Title IV-B and provide needed policy improvements. We have joined the Oklahoma Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics in calling for congressional support for the enhanced efforts described below.

This week, the U.S. House of Representatives, by an overwhelming 405-10 vote approved the bipartisan Protecting America’s Children by Strengthening Families Act (H.R. 9076), with all five of Oklahoma’s members of Congress voting “Yea.” The measure now moves across the Capitol to the United States Senate, and our U.S. senators need to hear your support.

There are two parts to Title IV-B in federal law. The first, Title IV-B Part 1, Child Welfare Services (CWS) of the Social Security Act, was first established as part of the 1935 Social Security law. Title IV-B part 2, Promoting Safe and Stable Families, started in 1993 as part of a federal budget agreement. It began as Family Preservation and Family Support but was amended to the current name and charged with delivering family preservation programs that sought to prevent foster care placement through intensive focused and limited efforts to help families at a crisis stage.

Over the past year, bipartisan leadership in Congress has brought critical attention to the need to reauthorize Title IV-B and better support strong families. The Protecting America’s Children by Strengthening Families Act responds to priority areas outlined in consensus recommendations for reauthorizing Title IV-B of the Social Security Act.

Family support is the main emphasis of the bill. By boosting federal backing for keeping children with their families in family-based foster care placements as much as possible, the legislation would create a clear commitment in federal law that poverty is not neglect.

This underscores the role of family preservation services for families experiencing a crisis related to a lack of resources and focuses on the vital role of strong families in supporting thriving children. The Protecting America’s Children by Strengthening Families Act would further bolster support for kinship caregivers.

The bill would also authorize discretionary funding for competitive grants for each of the next four years to support programs that sustain meaningful relationships between covered foster children and their incarcerated parents. Further, the legislation would enact policy improvements that complement mental health efforts and support trauma-responsive child welfare systems that promote healing.

This bill would expand by $10 million annually the Court Improvement Program, which is the only direct child welfare-related federal funding that state and tribal courts receive to manage children’s cases in court across the nation each year. The bill would put another $10 million annually for Regional Partnership Grants which address the intersection of parental substance use and child welfare involvement. The bill goes further by allocating more funding for tribal sovereign nations, reduces barriers to tribal participation in IV-B, and supports oversight of implementation of the Indian Child Welfare Act.

We at OICA support the Protecting America’s Children by Strengthening Families Act as an important step toward a modernized child welfare system that better supports children and families. Please reach out to Oklahoma’s two U.S. Senators – Sen. James Lankford and Sen. Markwayne Mullin – to ask them to support for this legislation.

-The Oklahoma Institute for Child Advocacy was established in 1983 by a group of citizens seeking to create a strong advocacy network that would provide a voice for the needs of children and youth in Oklahoma, particularly those in the state’s care and those growing up amid poverty, violence, abuse and neglect, disparities, or other situations that put their lives and future at risk. Our mission statement: “Creating awareness, taking action and changing policy to improve the health, safety, and well-being of Oklahoma’s children.