ln 1998, the Florida state legislature mandated the privatization of child welfare services. The decision to contract child welfare services to non-profit organizations was done as an effort to attain lower costs, effectiveness, and quality in service delivery. The 1998 initiative came to be known as "Community-Based Care" and was based on the idea that local communities would have incentives to be more accountable for children than the state. The federal government requires that safety be the paramount goal for all children in the child welfare system. The purpose of this study was to assess if Community-Based Care was indeed effective in this principal objective with the use of the researcher's own developed definition of "safety" and three safety performance measures relative to her definition taken from the Florida Department of Children and Families online performance dashboard application. This research focused on the Community-Based Care initiative in district 7 (Orange, Osceola, Seminole, and Brevard counties) and drew attention to the question, are district 7 's children safer now since the privatization of child welfare services? From a public management perspective, this study showed that privatized child welfare services are both capable and incapable of keeping children safe due to various factors. The findings from this study are important as they can give national, regional, and local public managers a significant and unique view on privatized child welfare services along with associated benefits and shortcomings in ensuring children's safety.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ucf.edu/oai:stars.library.ucf.edu:honorstheses1990-2015-1765 |
| Date | 01 January 2008 |
| Creators | Bazunu, Antoinette |
| Publisher | STARS |
| Source Sets | University of Central Florida |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | HIM 1990-2015 |
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