Minnesota counties are telling state lawmakers they need more financial support to launch a new law focused on communities that are overrepresented in the child welfare system.
The African American Family Preservation and Child Welfare Disproportionality Act requires stepped-up social work to protect kids and families from foster care separation, and must be enacted statewide by January. But associations representing Minnesota’s urban and rural counties say that unless they receive additional funds to provide the necessary services, the law’s start date should be delayed.
“We believe in the act and believe it is very important and valuable — that’s why we want to do it well, and we don’t want to roll out implementation without being ready,” said Britta Torkelson, a lobbyist for Minnesota Rural Counties.
Torkelson said her association of 45 local governments also needs clear definitions and guidelines about which families are eligible for the enhanced protections outlined by the law. “Our greatest concerns would be not being able to comply with the act, and therefore children and families suffering as a result.”
Passed with bipartisan support in 2024, the act requires social workers to make “active efforts” to avoid separating children from their families who are more likely to be in the child welfare system due to “race, culture, ethnicity, disability status, or low-income socioeconomic status.”
Hennepin and Ramsey counties, the state’s most populous, were each awarded $2.5 million to establish pilot programs in 2025. But next year, when the law’s standards must be applied statewide, no additional funds have been made available.
As a result, county governments faced with a January deadline say they will need to hire new staff to handle the increased workload that active efforts require.
State law does not specify what precisely active efforts involve, but they are broadly characterized as a “rigorous and concerted level of effort” on the part of child welfare agencies when it comes to providing services and supporting reunification efforts. Prior to passage of the family preservation act, only tribal children who are covered by the Indian Child Welfare Act were guaranteed active efforts. All other children and families required only “reasonable efforts” by agency social workers, a lower legal standard.
In a statement sent to legislators April 15, a spokesperson for the Association of Minnesota Counties and Minnesota Association of County Social Service Administrators said local leaders “are increasingly concerned about our ability to equitably and successfully implement the 2024 law.”
They’re also concerned about case reviews required under the law that identify such issues as what led to an out-of-home placement, barriers to family reunification and the types of active efforts social workers used. County governments are asking the Legislature to require the state Department of Children, Youth and Families to conduct these reviews.
“If the Legislature does not provide a viable path to provide ongoing support and a plan to shift case review to the state, we believe there must be an honest legislative conversation about the implementation date of January 1, 2027,” the county statement reads.
Clay County Commissioner Jenny Mongeau has also spoken out. “Given the fact that January is a short eight months away, we will be out of compliance with this,” she told lawmakers at an April 14 legislative hearing. “We’re just hoping that there would be some sort of delay so that we can more accurately address the additional cost burdens that will come.”
Some lawmakers are pushing back against delaying the law’s mandates.
“The word ‘delayed,’ it’s like a punctured wound when we think about how delayed we are in human rights and how hard our county has fought for civil rights,”said Rep. María Isa Pérez-Vega, an early champion of the family preservation act. “I’m not here for a body of Minnesotans to continue to delay on our Black children.”
Rep. Jess Hanson said in a phone interview that she is in favor of giving counties additional resources. But “we won’t be entertaining a delay,” she added, referring to fellow Democrats on the children and families finance and policy committee. “We want to make sure we’re moving forward, not making people wait.”
The family preservation act has had a rocky rollout.
The law instructed Hennepin and Ramsey counties to begin enacting the law before the rest of the state, through gradually phased-in pilot programs. Beginning in 2025, active efforts were provided to 30% of eligible cases, a percentage that had been scheduled to increase over time.
But in December, Judge Matthew Frank ruled that the phased-in approach was unconstitutional, treating “some families as test cases, while excluding others from the services and protections” of the new law.
In recent reports shared with the Legislature, the counties described other early challenges: It was hard to identify who was eligible; tracking was difficult in the state’s Social Service Information System and caseworkers inconsistently documented their active efforts, making monitoring of compliance difficult.
But last month, Hennepin County District Commissioner and Board Chair Irene Fernando told legislators that early results have been promising. As of February, she said, just 3.8% of cases where active efforts had been applied early on resulted in children being removed and taken into foster care — a significantly lower rate than before the pilot program.
Pending legislation proposes other changes.
Senate President Bobby Joe Champion’s bill, introduced in March, would shift the responsibility of case reviews to the state and alter the definition of “disproportionately represented child” by removing the word “culture” from consideration. His bill proposes additional funding for counties, but would require that they document efforts to determine eligibility.
His proposal has since been included in a larger package of Senate bills, and county representatives are working with his office to determine how much money is needed to fully implement the family preservation act.
A bill authored by Rep. Dawn Gillman that would have slowed that progress stalled out in the children and families finance and policy committee. The legislation, heard on April 14, would have granted counties additional funds, while delaying statewide implementation a year.
Gillman said more time is needed to modernize the state’s Social Service Information System, which tracks foster care, adoption cases and other social services.
Rep. Nolan West, the co-chair of the committee, agreed.
“A delay is the responsible thing to do here,” West said at the hearing. “In particular, without IT modernization, we are going to have so many errors, and this is just going to be an unmitigated disaster because the counties simply can’t do the work.”
But some members of the children and families committee in the house objected, prompting a response from Rep. Esther Agbaje, author of the family preservation act.
“To delay this effort is to discredit almost a decade worth of work from our communities to ensure that more families have the opportunity to stay together,” Agbaje said. “Rep. Gillman’s bill does nothing to support reunification or address the racialized constructs that enable the overrepresentation of Black and brown children in the child welfare system.”
