[A]s numbers of children in state custody across Vermont continue to rise, one area is experiencing particularly high rates.
The Department for Children and Families district office in St. Albans has more children in custody than any other office in Vermont, including the district office in the much more populous Chittenden County to the south.
A count on June 9 found there were 252 children in custody under the responsibility of the St. Albans office. The Burlington office had the second-highest number at the time, 179 children — 73 fewer than the northwestern district.
DCF Commissioner Ken Schatz presented the caseload report breaking down the numbers of families and children being served across Vermont’s 12 district offices during a meeting of the Joint Legislative Child Protection Committee last month.
Caseloads across the state in the child protection system have been rising for several years. In June, 1,392 children were in DCF custody statewide.
Schatz said the department has been tracking the trend in the St. Albans area as it developed in recent years. Some people say it’s “a little city with big-city problems and little-city resources,” Schatz said.
Alix Gibson, the family services division district director in the St. Albans office, has worked in that office for 16 years.
Over the last several years, she said, she has seen the numbers of cases grow every month.
“It’s frightening,” Gibson said. “It just keeps going up.”
According to data from a point-in-time count in 2010 and one in 2015, the St. Albans DCF office has seen a dramatic increase across the board in the number of cases in the child protection system.
At a single point in time in 2010, there were 453 investigations into reports of child abuse or neglect; in 2015 at a similar point, there were 650.
In 2010, the count found 79 families whose children were in the custody of DCF, or 140 children total. In the 2015 point-in-time count, there were 151 families, or 255 children.
Gibson perceives many factors that could be feeding the trend. One basic one could simply be population growth, she said. However, she and others noted that substance abuse, particularly opiate addiction, has been a major factor in child protection cases.
“We are an area that’s rural. It’s been considered rural,” Gibson said. “But the problems are more urban-like at this point.”
Gibson estimated that approximately three-quarters of cases have some sort of substance abuse, including alcohol, as a factor. About half of cases involve a family member struggling with opiate addiction, she said.
Currently some families the district office works with go to Newport every day for addiction treatment, Gibson said. The state plans to open a new addiction treatment hub in St. Albans, and Gibson is hopeful that might help reduce the number of child protection cases.
“The easier that we can make it for people to get the treatment they need, the better,” Gibson said.
Another factor that some social workers in the office noted to Gibson was that the children DCF served in cases several years ago are now parents in current DCF cases.
“A couple of the social workers felt that because of those generational issues that haven’t been addressed, that does lead to the increase in custody as well,” Gibson said.
Social workers across Vermont are carrying a high number of cases each with the influx of children into the system. In June, Vermont social workers carried an average of 17.9 cases, some involving multiple children. That worked out to an average of 24.3 children per social worker. The federally recommended level is 15 cases per worker.
Meanwhile, the increase in cases happens as social worker safety has been in the spotlight after the shooting of a social worker in Barre last year.
The impact of high caseloads on social workers in the St. Albans district office is “tremendous,” Gibson said. They often feel like they have so much on their plates that they do not have time to really get to know their clients.
“They’re scared for their safety, and they all acknowledge if they had more time to develop relationships with clients they might not feel so scared for their safety all the time,” Gibson said.
DCF got a bump in funding to hire social workers across the state, three of which will be in the St. Albans district office. Between those positions and vacancies, the office is in the process of hiring nine new social workers, according to Gibson.
Officials at Northwestern Counseling and Support Services, an agency that, among other things, provides services to families, said they are struggling to meet the needs of families with the available resources.
The agency helps provide supports and counseling in an effort to keep children at home with their families.
According to Todd Bauman and Danielle Lindley, director and program manager of the counseling agency’s children, youth and families division, the high numbers of child protection cases often lead to pouring significant amounts of time and resources into single cases that are at a crisis point instead of spreading those resources out and helping several families avoid crises.
“It forces us to not be able to get ahead of the curve and not help families who are on the cusp of coming into (state) custody,” Lindley said.
“We’re just not able then to get to the families that need a little bit of help to avoid custody tomorrow,” Bauman said.
When Franklin County State’s Attorney Jim Hughes first decided he would take the lead in the prosecutor’s office on the juvenile docket, child protection cases came up in court one day a week. Now, with the increased numbers, there are hearings on those cases most days.
“I don’t know how to fix it. If I did I probably would be in a more expensive chair,” Hughes said.
He perceives opiate addiction as a major driver behind the growing number of cases of child abuse and neglect in northwestern Vermont.
Hughes hopes that local access to opiate treatment can help reduce the numbers. His office also got increased funding from the state to hire an additional deputy state’s attorney. Someone will be starting in that position soon and will be dedicated to the juvenile docket, he said.
It’s unclear how these issues will affect children in the long run, Hughes said.
“They’re just growing through this stage of history where we have problems and it’s affecting them, (we) just don’t know how,” Hughes said.
