Family Assessment & Planning Team
Established by the Children's Services Act, the Family Assessment and Planning Team is designed to help troubled youths and their families.
The Children's Services Act, which established the Family Assessment and Planning Team (FAPT), was designed to help troubled youths and their families. State and local agencies, parents and private service providers work together to plan and provide services.
In each community, local teams decide how to accomplish this. A 1993 Virginia law provided for the pooling of eight specific funding streams used to purchase services for high-risk youth.
These funds are returned to the localities with a required state/local match and are managed by local interagency teams, such as Community Policy and Management Team (CPMT) and FAPT.
The purpose of the act is to provide high-quality, child-centered, family-focused, cost-effective, community-based services to high-risk youth and their families.
The CPMT is appointed by local governing bodies to manage local cooperative efforts to serve the needs of troubled and at-risk youth and their families and to maximize the use of state and community resources. Members of the CPMT appoint members to the FAPT. FAPT is comprised of the supervisory level staff from the same agencies as the CPMT as well as a parent member from the community and often a private provider.
These teams work with the families to develop the Individual Family Services Plan (IFSP). If the services needed are beyond what is available in the participating agencies and there are no other family or community resources available, the team may choose to purchase them with local CSA pool funds. In general, the children who would have been served by one of the funding streams placed in the pool are targeted for services through CSA.
The children who would have been served by the education funds and/or the foster care funds placed in the pool are considered "mandated" for service. This is because there is "sum sufficient" language attached to them in the Federal law and/or the Code of Virginia. These special education and foster care children are the only populations that state and local governments are required to appropriate sufficient funds to serve.
If funds are available, localities may choose to serve other children with emotional or behavioral problems, especially those with multi-agency involvement. Parents may be required to contribute financially toward the cost of any CSA-funded services. There is no legal requirement that local government provide the matching dollars to serve the non-mandated and other eligible populations.
The FAPT meets twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays to assess the strengths and needs of at-risk youths and families who are referred to the team.
The team identifies and determines the complement of services required to meet the child’s unique needs. Services such as psychological assessments, therapy, medical treatment, intensive in-home treatment, therapeutic and residential care are some of the wide array of services that can be recommended.
Once a service is recommended by the FAPT, the case is reviewed for monetary funding by a management team. These funds can only be used for placement in an approved or licensed facility.