In Wyoming, there are more than 1,200 children in state custody who are currently placed somewhere outside their own homes, either with a foster family, detention facility or behavioral institution. It's a big number.

A popular misconception is that these are all children who were removed by DFS. But in Wyoming, children can only be removed from a family for safety reasons by a police officer or a physician. They can only be put in jail by law enforcement. By and large, these professionals, along with assistance from DFS workers, all seem to be making fairly reasonable decisions.

So what accounts for Wyoming's continued high rate of child removal and foster care?

Among Wyoming's child advocates, we talk a lot about two major barriers to reducing our numbers of children in out-of-home care. They include 1) the rural nature of the state and 2) lack of specialization.

These are real barriers. Most counties in Wyoming have fewer than 50,000 people, and resources for struggling families are scarce. The distance to the closest expert on trauma, parenting or delinquency intervention is often significant.

This is a big reason why courts and court-appointed multi-disciplinary teams (the ones that recommend services or placements) rely so heavily on private institutions for stabilizing and treating acute emotional and behavioral problems. If you're looking for a clinician who can conduct an appropriate assessment and create a case plan that works for the court system, group homes and residential treatment facilities do good work.

For child protection cases that don't involve significant clinical needs, the resource Wyoming relies on the most to ensure short- or long-term child safety are foster parents. If you want to be better safe than sorry, and you want children with trained parents, it certainly makes sense.

Finally, the people we rely on the most to intervene with delinquents and ensure community safety from troubled youth are sheriffs, police and prosecutors. It's been observed that Wyoming relies too much on detention for these youth. That's true, but as police and prosecutors often observe, there's not much available in most communities between warrants and detention. Law enforcement officers do not have a lot of alternatives.

I know I left out the courts, but let's cut to the chase: there are no clear enemies in the day-to-day struggle to reduce the numbers of children in out-of-home care or to help keep struggling families intact.

There are no clear enemies, but of course our youth are not winning when we rely too much on secure interventions, particularly those far from home. Something has to change.

There are a number of other facets to this overall discussion, but when you add it all up, a lot of us think we simply need better local planning for services and interventions. And we need a financing system that supports intervention and assistance before children and families get caught up in the juvenile court system.

This is the logic of the community juvenile service board approach in the state's ongoing juvenile justice reform effort. Several communities are already planning to help direct state funding for locally created alternatives to detention. These will be things like community service programs, home detention, electronic monitoring, day and evening check-in programs for youth on probation, day education and treatment programs and others.

These programs will dovetail with new detention and intake centers that are also being supported by state resources in a few key counties, according to locally driven plans.

Other child welfare reform efforts need to take the same approach. While it's easy to think the state should just dictate the conditions and framework for communities to manage their own children, it's not that simple. We need clear roles, clear goals, and we need to hold each other accountable.

So what do the goals need to be? While I think, "identified community by community" is a good answer, we already know from a number of those community-centered initiatives what basic services we need. The state ought to respond by helping direct more of its available resources to the kinds of things listed below.

For juvenile delinquents, we need alternatives to detention. While it's certainly appropriate that we leave long-term placements in family foster care or institutions up to the district courts, wouldn't it be great if law enforcement had access to electronic monitoring, home detention programs, day and evening check-in programs and perhaps even probation at a circuit or municipal court level? For child protection cases, we need better risk assessments and more people who can effectively work with families to mitigate risk and improve their chances of safely managing their own children. For children in need of behavioral or mental health services, we need clinical assessments at a pre-MDT level. We need more mental health professionals who can work effectively with the court system and provide support for temporary foster care and therapeutic foster care interventions.

It's somewhat reassuring to think that a number of dedicated and hard-working people are already making great progress in this direction for their communities and their children. But unless we make state support of community-centered planning a constant way of doing business, our progress can fade pretty quickly.

Tony Lewis is the director of the Wyoming Department of Family Services and is a former director of the Wyoming State Bar.