Minnesota placed 11,239 foster children in out-of-home care in 2010, a 4 percent decline since 2009 and a 39 percent decline since 2000, according to the state's annual child welfare report to the legislature. The decline underscores Minnesota's continued success in using family assessments to strengthen families in which abuse or neglect has taken place and to keep children out of the system and safely with their parents.

But the report shows that the state continues to fall short of federal goals when it comes to achieving permanency for the children that it does place in the foster care system.

The number of family assessments in Minnesota has tripled (from 3191 in 2001 to 11,723 in 2010) while the number of formal child welfare investigations has declined (from 14,607 in 2001 to 5309 in 2010). The alternative of family assessments was used mostly for parents accused of neglect or physical abuse. Traditional investigations remained far more common when allegations involved sexual abuse. As in past years, roughly half of formal investigations determined that child victims needed protective services, while only one in five family assessments determined that children needed formal protection.

When Minnesota does place children into foster care, it remains much more likely than other states to seek to reunify those children with their parents. It also remains one of the fastest states at reunifying children. The state discharged children back to their parents on average in 3.9 months in 2010, when the federal goal was 5.4 months or less.

Some advocates believe the state moves too quickly and aggressively to reunite children with parents who abused or neglected them, in part because the state has a high rate (24.4 percent in 2010) of children who re-enter the foster care system within 12 months of being discharged from the system to their parents.

Minnesota is relatively fast at adoptions, completing nearly half in 2010 within two years of children's placements in foster care. (The federal goal is 36.6 percent.) But it struggles to achieve permanency for its toughest cases. Of children who had been in foster care at least two years at the start of 2010, only 19.9 percent were placed in permanent homes by the end of the year. The federal child welfare goal was 29.1 percent.

More than 900 children aged out of foster care, meaning they turned 18 without permanent homes, in 2010, according to the state report. Most were still legally bound to their birth parents, but hadn't been reunited with them for a variety of reasons. There were 98 children who aged out of the system on their own, because their parents no longer had rights to them and the state failed to find them adoptive parents or guardians.