Another Planned Permanent Living Arrangement (APPLA) 624-05-15-115-30

(Revised 7/23/18 ML #3535)

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Another Planned Permanent living Arrangement (APPLA) is a permanency alternative permitted under ASFA that allows a young person age 16 or greater to have a "permanent home" that is not the child's home of origin, adoption, guardianship, or kinship care.

 

When to Select this Goal:

APPLA should be selected as a permanency goal only for a child:

  1. Age 16 or greater
  2. After reunification, adoption, legal guardianship, and relative placement have been ruled out.

ASFA explicitly prohibits long-term foster care as a permanency option. APPLA either will involve a permanent adult caregiver of the child or adult parental figures playing permanent and important roles in the child's life.

 

APPLA is intended to be planned and permanent. Planned means the arrangement is intended, designed, considered, premeditated, or deliberate. Permanent means enduring, lasting, or stable. In other words, the agency must provide reasons why the living arrangement is expected to endure. The term living arrangement includes not only the physical placement of the child, but also the quality of care, supervision and nurturing the child will receive.

 

How to Implement this Goal:

If the custodian concludes, after considering reunification, adoption, legal guardianship, or permanent placement with a fit and willing relative, that the most appropriate permanency goal for the child age 16 or greater another planned permanent living arrangement (APPLA), the custodian must document to the court the compelling reason for the alternate plan.

 

The case plan should focus on building relationships between the child and those adults who will be his or her network of support upon discharge from foster care. APPLA can certainly include family foster care, but it will usually be foster care with a particular family or individual. Most importantly, the plan should focus on the caregiver's familial relationship with the child continuing after the youth is discharged from foster care.

 

Examples of a compelling reason for establishing a goal of APPLA:

  1. The case of a child age 16 or greater who specifically requests the custodial agency to allow them to “age out of care”;
  2. The case of a parent and child who have a significant bond but the parent is unable to care for the child because of an emotional or physical disability and the child's foster parents have committed to raising him/her to the age of majority and to facilitate visitation with the disabled parent; or
  3. The Tribe has identified APPLA for the child.

In cases in which a compelling reason has been shown that it would not be in the child's best interests to return home, to have parental rights terminated, to be placed for adoption, to be placed with a fit and willing relative, or to be placed with a legal guardian, whether and, if applicable, when the child, aged 16 or older, will be placed in another planned permanent living arrangement. The court shall:

  1. Verify the child is age 16 or greater;
  2. Ask the child whether the child has a desired permanency outcome of APPLA,
  3. Make a judicial determination explaining why APPLA is the best permanency plan for the child, and
  4. Identify the compelling reasons it continues not to be in the best interest of the child to return home, be placed for adoption, be placed with a legal guardian, or be placed with a fit and willing relative.