The current regulation regarding use of the VEMAT to assess children’s needs and enhanced maintenance levels paid to caregivers has important strengths and some limitations. Since public comment is designed primarily to identify potential limitations, we address that area first.

There is a potential problem inherent in limiting the enhanced payment to caregivers for children placed on an emergency basis to 30 days. Often, children placed on an ‘emergency’ basis are new to the system and may come directly from their own homes from court and into foster care. Very little may be known about these children. For many, a thirty day assessment period will not be sufficient to adequately assess their needs. We would suggest a longer assessment period during which an enhanced maintenance stipend may be available to caregivers while a child’s needs may be more accurately determined.

Our understanding is that in general regulations that affect both foster care and adoption and public and private child-placing agencies should be congruent. The regulation does a reasonably good job here. It allows both public and private child-placing agencies to use the VEMAT to determine accurate levels of enhanced maintenance to caregivers for children whose needs are exceptional. The VEMAT can be used for children placed in treatment foster care whether the child-placing agencies are public or private. The regulation also allows for the VEMAT to be administered and enhanced maintenance payments to be made to non-TFC caregivers if specified supports are in place. The regulation allows this in both public and private sectors so long as the agencies involved are child-placing agencies. Such parity seems consistent with the general principle of regulatory congruence between public and private programs. It would be wise in any revision of the regulation to continue this parity but to emphasize that the child’s legal guardian – usually the local department of social services – be the entity in charge of administering the VEMAT, even if the child is referred to another child-placing agency.

Public-private parity, then, is for the most part well-articulated in the proposed regulations. However, the same congruence may not be reflected there with regard to foster care and adoption. Again, our understanding is that there should be relative regulatory parity between the two as far as is practical. We believe, then, that the VEMAT should also be used in helping to determine maintenance levels paid through adoption subsidy for adoption cases that already have been finalized. This adjustment would create more level ground between these two segments of the child welfare system.