There are just under 38,000 children 15 years of age and under in the Highland Shores catchment area.
Why It's Important
Highland Shores Children’s Aid needs to know the child population it is serving. It provides the context for some of the other statistics we report and also allows us to compare our service results with other CASs with similar sized populations.
Each year, about 5.7% of children come to the attention of our agency for a concern about their well-being or safety.
Why It's Important
This number represents how often our Society completes an assessment regarding a child or youth potentially in need of protection. This can reflect community need or agency practice.
Each year approximately 1,358 families are assessed by Highland Shores for a concern about their children.
Why It's Important
This is a key statistic that speaks to the volume of our work.
About 637 families (or 2.7% of the Highland Shores child population) are provided with ongoing services after assessment each year.
Why It's Important
This is important as it shows the number of families who move beyond investigation by Highland Shores to being provided services from the Society. It allows us to compare this number to the total number of families being assessed. We can also start to ask questions about how many families we are providing with ongoing services vs other CASs and why those numbers may be higher or lower and if any action is required on our part as a result.
After receiving ongoing services from Highland Shores, 11% of the families return to our agency within 12 months.
Why It's Important
This is important in order for us to assess whether the families we are working with are getting the proper tools and services they need to continue to be successful into the future so that ultimately they do not need to return to Highland Shores for assistance.
Families who return to our agency after receiving services return for an urgent need in only 2.8% of cases and for a more chronic need in 8.6% of cases.
Why It's Important
This information helps our agency to better understand the causes behind a family returning to Highland Shores for service. It also allows us to understand if the reasons families are returning are a result of an urgent need or due to a more chronic need. These figures show that it is not urgent protection cases such as physical or sexual abuse that are the primary reasons families return to Highland Shores for service but rather ongoing chronic needs generated most often by mental health issues, substance abuse or challenges arising from poverty.
Our agency places approximately 206 children each year in care outside of their home. This number represents 6% of all the children we assess in a year and less than 1% of the child population served by Highland Shores.
Why It's Important
This addresses the misconception that the purpose of a Children’s Aid Society is to bring children into its care. The reality of the situation is that 97% of all families we work with keep their children in their home.
Within 36 months, 91% of children in our care have been discharged from care.
Why It's Important
Our goal at Highland Shores is to provide those children in our care with an opportunity to benefit from permanent family connections. This information helps us understand how long children remain in our care before moving on to a permanent family situation. We can also look at our historical results and results from other CASs to see if there are differences and if so, ask questions as to why that is happening.
The average number of days that children spend in our care is 235.
Why It's Important
This is a measure that helps us understand how quickly children leave our care. It can help us locate areas for improvement and can also be compared to other agencies to find out what they are doing to achieve results which may be better for children in care.
About sixty percent of the children in our care stay in the same placement for the duration of their care. Twenty-four percent of children move once, seven percent move twice and nine percent move three or more times.
Why It's Important
This is a key measure for understanding placement stability for children in our care. Experiencing stable, family-based care is our goal for children who must come into the care of Highland Shores due to concerns about their safety or well-being. Reducing the number of moves a child makes between placements is our goal. This information can be studied in order to better understand why children move between placements and how those moves might be reduced in the future. Understanding the relative proportion of children who move three or more times is important because these are likely among the most vulnerable children in our care.