Rate of Children Entering Out-of-Home Care by Race/ethnicity, 2010-2022

These data are related to DCYF’s Office of Innovation, Alignment, and Accountability (OIAA) prevention dashboards, published to support the agency’s efforts to prevent child maltreatment. Those dashboards can be found here: dcyf.wa.gov/practice/oiaa/reports/prevention-dashboard Much of the data requested by the Strengthen Families Locally communities to inform their planning, and thus contained in these initial dashboards and datasets, are what we know about children entering out-of-home care (OOH care) – age distribution, counts, rates, trends over time, and race/ethnicity.

In 2022, about 3,370 children entered out of home care statewide, a record low for Washington State. The prevention dashboards and datasets also include descriptive data on children in Child Protection Services (CPS) intakes – rates of intakes “screened-in” for a CPS response, as well as the types of referents referring to CPS. In 2022, DCYF received CPS intakes involving over 89,000 children statewide, and 46,000 total children in intakes screened in for a CPS response.