This report provides an overview of the methodology and a detailed description of an evaluation of the costs and outcomes of the Family Recovery Program implemented in Baltimore, Maryland.
This document provides an evaluation of the Baltimore City Family Recovery Program (FRP), which serves families involved with child welfare due to substance abuse. The evaluation of the FRP compared child welfare and treatment outcomes, and cost savings for parents that received FRP services between August 2005 and December 2006, to comparable families that did not receive those services. Five main results are reported: on average, children in families served by the FRP spent 252 days in non-kinship foster care compared to 346 days for children in non-FRP families; FRP families were more than 1.5 times more likely to be reunited than non-FRP families, i.e., 70 percent of FRP families achieved reunification compared to 45 percent of non-FRP families; of the families that reached permanency, 64 percent of FRP parents completed treatment compared to 36 percent of non-FRP parents; on average, FRP parents spent 138 days in treatment, whereas non-FRP parents spent 82 days in treatment; and because FRP families used less foster care and were more likely to achieve reunification, FRP cases were less costly to the child welfare system than other Child in Need of Assistance (CINA) cases. The total net cost of savings per year of Baltimore City FRP operations was nearly $1,004,456, or approximately $5,022 per family served by FRP.