(AP) — For every 100 foster children in Mississippi’s custody, the state has only 52 foster homes. To recruit more families to care for these children, the state is joining the Trump Administration’s A Home for Every Child Initiative, Gov. Tate Reeves announced Tuesday.

Mississippi is the fifth state to join a pilot of the initiative behind Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma and Tennessee. Each state will be required to share updated data with the federal government about its child-to-home ratio, which will be shared on an online dashboard.

To incentivize states to opt in, the federal government is allowing these states to forgo tedious paperwork associated with Children and Family Services Reviews. These federal performance reviews of state child welfare programs look at metrics such as the percentage of cases in which states deployed appropriate risk and safety assessments or concerted efforts to prevent family separations.

Under those reviews, states develop Program Improvement Plans to address problem areas. But states who join the push will no longer be required to conduct these. The last PIP from Mississippi available on the federal website is from 2019.

The initiative is not tied to additional federal funding, but a federal representative said the reduction of red tape will allow the state to target funds for necessary casework.

“On average, states were sending us 300-page reports of mostly duplicated and recycled content across years that the federal agency did nothing with, frankly,” said Alex Adams, assistant secretary for the Administration for Children and Families under the U.S. Department of Human Services. “A lot of what this is doing is liberating the time and energy of the best caseworkers that they have to better deploy that time to actually benefiting kids as opposed to checking boxes and all those things that just sap time and energy.”

Reeves said the state’s child welfare agency, the Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services, has already begun using data to determine where and what kind of foster homes are most needed across the state. Many children who come into state custody require therapeutic care requiring a higher level of licensing.

“Instead of broad recruitment efforts that don’t always meet specific needs, we are moving towards targeted recruitment, identifying the right families for the right types of placements,” Reeves said. “At the same time, we are working to cut unnecessary red tape that discourages qualified families from stepping up and stepping forward. Good people who want to help children should not be overwhelmed by bureaucracy.”

In the absence of licensed foster homes, some children who come into state custody end up in short-term rentals, hotels, Airbnbs or even in government offices, Adams added.

“This is a beautiful building, but I don’t know that government buildings are conducive to stable, loving, nurturing environments that every child deserves,” Adams said during the press conference at the Walter Sillers Building in downtown Jackson.

Andrea Sanders, director of CPS, said the agency is working on a modern, digital application process for prospective foster parents. She also said a new campaign to recruit foster families will launch soon.

“That’s part of the work that we’re doing to make sure that this becomes a transparent process where the agency is fulfilling its role to help support and provide information to foster parents,” Sanders said.

A federal announcement of the A Home for Every Child Initiative says it also aims to reduce the number of children entering the system by prioritizing other interventions.

“By investing in prevention, we can reduce unnecessary entrees into foster care while still protecting children who truly need intervention,” Reeves said.

The Tuesday announcement did not provide specific details about how Mississippi plans to increase prevention through the initiative.

The Family First Prevention Services Act, enacted in 2018 during Trump’s first term, was designed to pump unprecedented levels of funding into states to support the stability of biological families – such as mental health and substance abuse treatment and in-home parenting programs – to prevent the need for foster families.

It took years for Mississippi to submit a state plan to the federal government to start receiving these funds. The plan was approved last August, but the state has yet to fully launch the program.

A Home for Every Child is a product of HHS’s Administration of Children and Families. Laurie Todd-Smith, a deputy assistant secretary for that agency and former Gov. Phil Bryant’s senior policy advisor, recently visited Mississippi ahead of the announcement to assemble suitcases for foster children as part of a partnership with evangelical Christian parachurch organization, Focus on the Family.

The problem they sought to solve: Children carrying their belongings from home to home in trash bags. “Nationally, it’s 57 homes to every hundred children. In Mississippi, it’s 52 homes for every hundred children. So our goal is to get to a one-to-one ratio. A home for every child,” Todd-Smith said at the Jan. 14 suitcase event, WLBT reported.

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This story was originally published by Mississippi Today and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.

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