Because concurrent planning policies are so new, little is known about their practices or outcomes. The purposes of this study were to compare one-year permanency outcomes for very young children from before and after the passage of concurrent planning legislation in one California county. A review was conducted of 110 case records of children under three years old who entered foster care prior to legislation, and 87 cases of children under age three who entered foster care in the same county after legislation. Additionally, information on “poor prognosis indicators,” which have been suggested as a means of identifying families unlikely to reunify, and “bypass indicators,” which per federal legislation allow a county to bypass the provision of reunification services, was gathered for the second sample. These “practice wisdom”-based indicators were examined in a logistic regression along with other characteristics of children and families to test their ability to predict non-reunification.
A decrease in one-year permanency rates was found for the children who entered care subsequent to concurrent planning legislation. Neither poor prognosis indicators nor bypass indicators predicted failure to reunify. Findings suggest that the prognosis indicators found in federal and state legislation may not always accurately predict those families least likely to reunify, and that efforts to develop empirically based prognosis assessment tools are warranted. Implications for the practice of concurrent planning are discussed.