Although abundant evidence exists indicating the prevalence of trauma exposure among youth in residential care, few models exist for creating trauma-informed milieu treatment. This article outlines the problem and describes the implementation of Trauma Systems Therapy (TST) in three residential centers. TST is unique in emphasizing youth emotions and behaviors as well as the role a distressed or threatening social environment may play in keeping a traumatized youth in a dysregulated state. This dual emphasis makes TST specifically appropriate to implementation in congregate care, focusing assessment and intervention strategies on both clinical treatment and the functioning of the therapeutic milieu itself. Data are reported on incidents of the use of physical restraint; numbers of disrupted foster care placements following discharge from residential treatment; and scores on psychometric measures of children’s functioning and emotion regulation capacity. Knowledge gained through TST implementation in these three residential centers has important implications for developing a model of trauma-informed congregate care.

Reunification of foster children with their birth parents is a critical focus of child welfare services, and the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 has intensified the effort to reunify families. A large child welfare agency in a midwestern state developed an evidence-based treatment reunification model, that is based on the practices and principles that have been found to most predictive of a safe, timely and successful return home. This model is intensive, home-based, and incorporates an innovative support group for birth parents. A comparative evaluation of this model after 1 year finds that its reunification rates are double that of comparable cases receiving the agency's conventional reunification services.Children in foster care are at risk of losing their connection to their biological family, and this risk increases over time (Proch and Howard 1986). The most critical predictor of whether and when a child will return home from foster care is his continued connections to his birth family. The longer a foster child remains in out of home care, the more the connections weaken, and the less likely the child will return home (Berry 2002). Therefore, parent visitation-the scheduled, face-to-face contact between parents and their children in foster care-is considered the primary effective intervention for maintaining and enhancing the development of parentchild relationships, so necessary for successful family reunification (Haight et al. 2003).

High performance computing applications often must handle on the order of peta bytes of data during their operation. Such large data sets inherently require distributed storage. Emerging distributed storage solutions in this realm, such as our L-Store framework, virtualize the distributed nature of the storage by offering the notion of a single file system to applications. These virtualization schemes must manage substantial amount of metadata to handle the data sets across the distributed storage. Apart from the primary concern of virtualization, a number of secondary but crosscutting concerns related to transaction and persistence control, database connection pooling, authentication and authorization, and logging must be addressed in these metadata management schemes. This paper describes our investigations into discovering these secondary and crosscutting concerns in metadata management for large-scale distributed data storage. We describe how we have applied AspectJ to address these crosscutting concerns in metadata management for the L-store distributed storage framework.

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