ACNJ Issue Brief

Protecting Abused and Neglected Children

The state’s child welfare system has been the subject of intense scrutiny for almost three years, the result of a series of high-profile cases in which the state child protection agency, the Division of Youth and Family Services, failed to protect children. A federal lawsuit was brought against the state in 1999 and settled in 2004 with a reform plan that promised sweeping changes in child welfare services.

The reform plan, entitled A New Beginning of Child Welfare Reform in New Jersey, contained 46 pages of mandates that are enforceable by a federal court. The plan calls for spending $320 million on hiring staff, recruiting foster families, increasing services to children and families and hundreds of other initiatives aimed at creating a statewide system that protects children and strengthens families.

In July, the state marked its first full year of reform. Some successes have been achieved. The state has opened its first central child abuse hotline and reduced caseloads by 30 percent. It has also reduced the number of youth in juvenile detention waiting for behavioral health treatment and expanded some services.

But there have also been failures. The state did not launch a training academy to educate hundreds of new workers until one year after reforms were instituted. Supervision of caseworkers is still uneven. Caseloads remain too high for workers to spend adequate time with troubled families. And, while the number of relatives caring for foster children has increased, the state has made no progress in increasing the number of unrelated foster homes, needed to provide caseworkers with appropriate homes for children who have no viable family. The state has also been criticized for its response to reports of abuse and neglect, with many experts saying guidelines are confusing for determining whether a report warrants a child protection investigation.

Clearly, the state has a long way to go before New Jersey’s vulnerable children are protected and families strengthened to prevent abuse and neglect.

What should New Jersey do to reform the child welfare system?

State officials need to get back to the basics and focus on making sure that New Jersey children are safe and in permanent homes. To accomplish this, we need to prioritize the following: hiring quality staff and providing them with adequate training and experienced supervision, creating more relevant and effective services for children and parents, and making the system truly accountable to the public.

Training and Supervision of Staff

When the reform plan was first introduced, all recognized that strong supervision was essential. Many frontline caseworkers had less than five years experience. Lack of adequate supervision leads to bad decisions, which put children at risk. Tremendous efforts have been invested into hiring new staff, but turnover remains high and many new caseworkers labor without the benefit of strong supervision.

Action needed: Stronger supervisor training must be implemented. The new governor must also insure that DYFS has the ability to hire experienced managers from outside the civil service system and that DYFS management must be able to more easily remove workers who fail to do their job or who are unable or unwilling to adapt to new practices.

Screening Child Abuse Reports

The process for deciding whether a report of abuse or neglect warrants a state investigation has been revised four times since the central hotline opened in July 2004. Reports from the field indicate that there is still considerable inconsistency in the way this crucial decision is made. Some reports that should receive state attention are screened out, while others get the attention they deserve. This puts some children at risk.

The state has also instituted “child welfare assessments” for reports that screeners determine do not rise to the level of abuse or neglect. Again, questions have been raised whether screeners can determine, based on a phone call, whether a child is at risk. Under the old system, reports were investigated first and a determination was made after the investigation.

Action Needed: Clarify the definitions of abuse and neglect. Train screeners. Track the outcomes of child welfare assessments to determine whether the classification is being used appropriately and whether families are getting needed services to prevent abuse and neglect as a result of these assessments.

Services for Families. For far too long, parents and children in need of state services have been unable to get help. The need always outpaced availability. And, many of the available services are ineffective in addressing the problems these parents and children face.

The Child Welfare Reform Plan promised to fix that problem with a two-prong approach: expanding “hard” services available to families under DYFS supervision and creating “community collaboratives” that would provide neighborhood support and services to troubled families where abuse or neglect has not yet taken place. The plan identifies five core service areas: substance abuse, mental health, domestic violence, housing and physical health.

One year after reforms were launched, the results are mixed. The state has succeeded in expanding some services, but the need still far surpasses the available help.

Action Needed: Leadership is needed to ensure that the various state departments and divisions operating programs for families and children coordinate and cooperate in determining program eligibility, ensuring that programs actually meet identified needs and that services are accessible on a timely basis. The state needs to move aggressively to provide more help with already-identified services gaps: housing, emergency assistance and substance abuse. The state should also gather and publicize concrete data about the delivered services and whether they have actually helped children and families.

Adoption Case Practice. As part of the reform effort, the court-appointed panel ordered the state to dismantle the former Adoption Resource Centers by December 2004 and move toward a “one worker, one family” model in which a case stays with the same worker, even if a child’s long-term plan changes to adoption. Previously, cases were transferred to the Adoption Resource Centers once the decision was made to place the child for adoption. The ARCs had specially-trained caseworkers who dealt only with adoption cases.

While there was considerable dissent over dismantling the ARCs, child advocates, including the Adoption Services Advisory Committee (ASAC), largely agreed that no changes should be made until the new system was functioning. However, the court-appointed panel set December 2004 as the deadline for closing the ARCs, resulting in widespread chaos in adoption cases and possibly a slow-down of permanency planning for children.

The breakdown in adoption services is affecting not only the 3,000 children who were under the supervision of the ARC offices, but children in placement who will need an adoption plan now and in the future. Currently, more than 2,000 children for whom parental rights have been terminated, some more than two years ago, await adoption finalization.

Caseworkers and supervisors in the new local offices are unfamiliar with adoption practice and training in this area is only just starting. The support systems needed to maintain adoption practice, such as the litigation process, the development of adoptive homes or specialized recruitment for children who need adoptive families, are not fully in place.

Action Needed: Train workers to plan for both family reunification and adoption. Known as “concurrent planning,” this approach helps ensure that children will more quickly be placed in a permanent home, either with their own family or an adoptive one. Create a central adoption unit until expertise is developed in DYFS area and local offices. Conduct periodic assessments of the progress toward integrating adoption services into everyday case practice.

Public Accountability. When the reform plan was introduced, the state promised increased accountability, especially for DYFS, which had, for years, hid problems behind the cloak of confidentiality. Rather than more accountability, however, there is less. It is more difficult to get data and other information that could help measure the progress of reforms, as well as quickly identify trouble areas that might require immediate attention. Not only has data not been developed, there is still no clear plan for communicating that information – and what it means for children – to the public.

Action Needed: Develop a set of data that can be used to measure both the reform’s progress and outcomes for children and legislatively require the Department of Human Services to widely disseminate and publicly report that information.

Join ACNJ’s Make Kids Count campaign at www.makekidscountnj.org and help build a better future for all New Jersey children. For more information, call (973) 643-3876 or email nparello@acnj.org.

The Association for Children of New Jersey seeks to inform and educate voters

and candidates. ACNJ does not endorse specific candidates.