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Vol.
19, No. 1
December 2013
Data Snapshot: CPS Assessments in North Carolina
When they think of child welfare assessments, people usually think of assessments conducted by child protective services (CPS) when someone suspects a child has been neglected or abused.
That's not surprising. As a system we do a lot of CPS assessments. In the U.S. in 2011 there were about 2 million of them, involving about 3 million children (USDHHS, 2012).
As the figure shows, CPS assessments in North Carolina have been trending upwards over the last ten years, rising from 61,622 in 2001-02 to 68,966 in 2011-12 (Duncan et al., 2013). This is a 12% increase, even though the number of children in NC actually declined 7% during this period (US Census 2000 and 2010, cited in Duncan et al., 2013).