The CASA system

· 11 min read

Origin: a judge with a caseload problem

Judge David Soukup of King County Superior Court in Seattle was assigned dependency cases in 1976 and quickly realized he was deciding children's futures based on minutes of input from caseworkers carrying caseloads of fifty or more. He started the first CASA program the following year. The original premise was modest: a community volunteer would meet the child, read the file, and write the judge a report. The premise was so obviously sensible — and so unusual in 1977 — that the model spread quickly. By the early 1990s, CASA programs existed in every state. The federal Victims of Child Abuse Act of 1990 provided funding through the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, giving the model a federal anchor.

What a CASA actually does

A trained CASA volunteer is appointed by a judge to a specific child or sibling group. They visit the child regularly, talk to everyone in the child's life, attend court hearings, and submit written reports with recommendations to the judge. They are not the child's attorney; in most states, that is a separate appointment, often called a guardian ad litem (GAL). In some states the CASA serves as the GAL, blurring the lines. The CASA's recommendation typically addresses placement, visitation, services for the child, and permanency planning. The CASA's distinctive contribution is time: the average volunteer spends ten to fifteen hours a month on a case, several times what an overworked caseworker can spend.

The training question

CASA volunteers receive thirty to forty hours of pre-service training, with ongoing continuing education. The curriculum covers child development, trauma, court procedure, cultural competence, and report writing. By professional standards this is light. The model's defenders argue that CASAs are not asked to make clinical or legal judgments, only to observe and report, and that observation does not require professional credentials. Critics argue that the recommendations CASAs make — about placement, visitation, permanency — are exactly the kinds of judgments that benefit from professional training. Both points are correct. The model lives in the gap between them.

Who volunteers and what they bring

The demographic skew of the CASA volunteer pool is striking. National CASA's own data show that the volunteer base is overwhelmingly white, female, middle-aged, and middle to upper-middle income. The children served are disproportionately children of color from poor households. This mismatch is not unique to CASA — it characterizes the broader child welfare workforce — but it is sharper in CASA because volunteers self-select rather than being assigned by employment. The result is that the volunteer most likely to be observing a Black or Indigenous family in crisis is least likely to share that family's cultural reference points. National CASA has invested in recruitment of volunteers of color with limited success.

The evidence base

Multiple studies have evaluated CASA outcomes. The most rigorous, including a 2004 federal evaluation, produced mixed findings: children with CASAs received more services and had more court hearings, but were not consistently more likely to achieve permanency faster. Some studies found longer stays in foster care for CASA cases. The interpretation depends on whether one views longer stays as a failure (delayed permanency) or success (more thorough decision-making). National CASA has commissioned its own evaluations finding positive impact, particularly on educational outcomes and connection to siblings. The truth is probably that CASA's effects are real, modest, and concentrated in particular kinds of cases — older children, complex sibling groups, cases where the agency's attention has thinned.

The sibling separation problem

One area where CASAs have demonstrably contributed is sibling contact. Foster placements routinely separate siblings, sometimes by necessity, sometimes by foster-home availability. The CASA, knowing the child and the siblings, is often the person in court raising the question of why a brother has not seen his sister in eleven months. Judges, prompted by a CASA report, order visitation that the agency had not arranged. This is a small but real contribution. Sibling bonds in foster care are protective in ways that have been documented for decades.

CASA and the reunification question

A persistent critique, articulated most clearly by Vivek Sankaran, is that CASA recommendations tend to slow reunification. The volunteer, having spent months observing a child in foster care doing better than they were at home, may find it hard to support returning the child to a parent whose progress is imperfect. The result, repeated across thousands of cases, can be a structural drift toward extended foster care or termination. Defenders counter that this is exactly the role CASA was designed to play — to keep the focus on the child's actual situation rather than the bureaucratic timeline — and that the alternative is rushing children home to families not yet ready. Both arguments are reasonable. The empirical effect of CASA on reunification rates remains contested.

CASA versus the child's attorney

In most states, dependency cases involve a child's attorney, a parent's attorney, an agency attorney, and sometimes a CASA. The roles overlap. The child's attorney represents the child's expressed wishes (or, in younger-child models, the child's best interests). The CASA represents the child's best interests as the CASA understands them. When the two disagree — which happens, especially with teenagers — courts must decide whose voice carries. Frank Vandervort and others have analyzed this tension legally. In practice, the CASA's written report often carries more weight than its formal status suggests, simply because it is the most thorough document in the file.

The federal and state funding structure

CASA programs are typically local nonprofits, affiliated with state organizations, affiliated with National CASA / GAL. Funding comes from federal grants under the Victims of Child Abuse Act, state appropriations, court fees in some jurisdictions, and private philanthropy. The federal piece has been stable but small; the program survives largely on private giving. This funding structure produces wide variation in quality. A well-funded urban program may have professional supervisors, thorough training, and active recruitment; a rural program may rely on a single staff member supervising dozens of volunteers. The CASA in your county may be excellent or barely staffed. The label does not guarantee uniformity.

CASA and the legitimacy of dependency courts

One under-discussed function of CASA is that it makes the dependency court look less like a closed bureaucracy. The presence of a community volunteer, accountable to no agency, signals to families that their case is being watched by an outside party. This is mostly a perception effect rather than a structural one — CASAs do not have legal power beyond writing reports — but perceptions matter in a system whose legitimacy is regularly questioned by the families it serves. Whether the effect is net positive depends on whether the CASA in a specific case earns the family's trust or confirms their sense of being surveilled by yet another outsider.

CASA and the workforce crisis

American child welfare has a chronic workforce crisis: high caseworker turnover, low pay, secondary trauma, and difficulty recruiting and retaining qualified staff. CASA was not designed as a workforce response, but it functions partly as one. The volunteer fills gaps that paid staff cannot. This is helpful in the short run and corrosive in the long run, because it allows policymakers to defer fixing the workforce problem on the grounds that volunteers are doing the work. A serious child welfare system would professionalize the work CASAs do rather than depending on civic generosity to substitute for adequate staffing.

Critiques from the abolitionist frame

Dorothy Roberts and others writing from a child welfare abolitionist perspective argue that CASA, however well-intentioned, is part of the apparatus that produces racially disparate state intrusion into families. Adding a layer of well-meaning volunteers to a system that disproportionately surveils Black and Indigenous families does not address the underlying problem and may legitimize it. From this view, the volunteer time spent observing families in crisis would do more good directed toward material support — diapers, rent, transportation — outside the court system altogether. CASA does not engage seriously with this critique, and it would change the program substantially if it did.

What CASA can honestly claim

The honest version of what CASA offers is: one trained volunteer, with thirty hours of preparation and ten hours a month of bandwidth, providing a child with a consistent adult presence and the court with a more thorough description of that child's situation than the system otherwise produces. That is not a small thing. It is also not the rescue narrative that fundraising materials sometimes imply. A CASA cannot fix a broken family, replace a missing parent, or correct the structural failures of the system around them. They can show up, learn the child's name, notice the small things, and write them down. In a system that loses track of children, that is genuinely useful. It is also far less than the system needs.

Citations

1. Edelman, Marian Wright. The State of America's Children. Washington, DC: Children's Defense Fund, annual. 2. Sankaran, Vivek S. "Protecting a Parent's Right to Counsel in Child Welfare Cases." ABA Child Law Practice 28, no. 9 (2009): 129–135. 3. Roberts, Dorothy. Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World. New York: Basic Books, 2022. 4. Vandervort, Frank E. "Honesty in Child Welfare Practice: A Cornerstone of Professional Ethics." Family Court Review 49, no. 4 (2011): 688–702. 5. Lund, Theresa Roe, and Jennifer Renne. Child Safety: A Guide for Judges and Attorneys. Chicago: American Bar Association, 2009. 6. Testa, Mark F. "When Children Cannot Return Home: Adoption and Guardianship." The Future of Children 14, no. 1 (2004): 114–129. 7. Courtney, Mark E. "The Difficult Transition to Adulthood for Foster Youth in the U.S." In Aging Out of the Foster Care System, edited by Antoinette Farmer and Geetha Suresh, 1–14. New York: Springer, 2018. 8. Freundlich, Madelyn, and Sarah Gerstenzang. Serving Children with Special Needs in the Adoption System. New York: Children's Bureau / Collaboration to AdoptUSKids, 2003. 9. Pertman, Adam. Adoption Nation: How the Adoption Revolution Is Transforming Our Families—and America. Boston: Harvard Common Press, 2011. 10. Oliver, Toni. Black Children in Foster Care: A Practitioner's Guide. Atlanta: Roots Adoption Agency, 2012. 11. Allen, Brian, and Mary Vacca. "Frequent Moving Has a Negative Effect on the School Achievement of Foster Children." Children and Youth Services Review 32, no. 6 (2010): 829–832. 12. Schneider, Andrew. Foster Children and the Courts. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003.

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