The Department for Children and Families handles child abuse and neglect cases differently in different parts of the state, and there are differences between the law, DCF policy, and reality, legislative attorneys told the Committee on Child Protection Thursday.
The child protection service system in Vermont is not cohesive, and communication and cooperation sometimes lacks between entities that help families, even as they try to do their jobs, attorney Luke Martland said. The system is complex and gaps exist between statute and reality, Martland said in a presentation to lawmakers.
The legislative committee is investigating the state’s child protection system with an eye toward reform. So far it has conducted 14 hearings which included 60 hours of testimony from 176 witnesses, and received 800 pages of written testimony and materials. Lawmakers are near the point of recommending changes but still want to hear from more witnesses and gather more data, they said Thursday.
In an a five-hour hearing in the Statehouse Thursday, the eight lawmakers heard from legislative attorneys who boiled down testimony and their own research into key themes. They also posted a wealth of information on the committee’s website.
Martland pointed out instances where law, DCF policy, and reality differ. Often the law is broad, DCF policy is more narrow, and practices vary across the state, such as the frequency with which DCF refers cases to police or the handling of sex abuse cases, Martland said.
For example, by law DCF must report and request assistance from law enforcement in investigations of cases of serious physical abuse and several other types of circumstances. DCF Policy 68 defines serious physical abuse specifically; but in reality, the percentage of cases referred to law enforcement varied from 3 percent to 66 percent in different districts, Martland said.
In an example of how practices differ across the state, Martland explained how district offices can “override” a decision by DCF’s central call center not to accept a report of alleged abuse.
The percentage of overrides varies by district, data showed. For example, Rutland, Springfield and Brattleboro overrode less than 1 percent of central intake unit’s decisions, whereas Middlebury overrode 7.4 percent, Martland said.
The number of reports of alleged abuse or neglect rose in 2013 to 17,458 from 15,756 the year before, he said. About 30 percent of reports were accepted each year. There are also now more children in DCF custody than a year ago and more cases accepted, said Deputy Commissioner Cindy Walcott, who attended the hearing.
“All of our caseloads are in an upward climb,” Walcott said.
The lawyers also presented data on what happens to cases accepted by DCF. Social workers assign cases to one of three tracks: investigation, assessment, or Juvenile Proceedings Act (JPA) track.
More than half of cases, between 44 percent and 57 percent depending on the district, were designated as investigations in 2013. Between 20 percent and 34 percent of cases were assigned to the assessment track, which allows social workers to offer services to a family but does not result in a determination of whether abuse occurred.
The remainder of cases, between 15 percent and 30 percent, are referred to the JPA track, one not created by state law but established by DCF to handle reports that don’t qualify for assessments or investigations, such as prenatal exposure to drugs, educational neglect, or if a parent had another child removed from his or her custody, according to Martland.
In addition, lawmakers discussed DCF staffing. Martland said Walcott told him DCF’s Family Services Division has never had enough social workers in her 37 years with the agency, but is doing better after Governor Shumlin authorized the hiring of 18 new workers this spring.
The Family Services Division, which handles abuse and neglect reports, now has 160 social workers and 30 supervisors, according to data presented to the committee.
The number of social workers has grown since 2005, the oldest data presented Thursday, when there were 126 social workers and 26 supervisors.
At the same time, DCF’s Family Services Division also relies on about 30 temporary employees, who are trained, meaning DCF actually needs about 220 workers total.
The Family Service Division within DCF had a 15 percent turnover rate in fiscal year 2013, the most recent data presented, and a 22 percent turnover rate the year before.
The average caseload is 17.5 cases per social worker, though loads vary between districts. Also, one family is considered one case even though some families have more than one child. In the Hartford DCF office, workers have an average of 23.8 cases each. In Morrisville, the average caseload is 10.5, according to DCF.
Lawmakers remarked that DCF, like the department of corrections, is the “back end” of the system, and ideally family situations should not rise to the level of DCF intervention.
“This is a bigger problem than DCF,” said Sen. Jane Kitchel, D-Caledonia.
Kitchel, a former secretary of the Agency of Human Services, which oversees DCF, said the Legislature should examine how AHS allocates its money and whether it is being spent wisely.
Lawmakers also talked about what an ideal child protection system would look like, remarking that if a new system was created from scratch, it would not look like the one that exists today.
