Advocates say DCF needs continuity to follow through with reforms

The state’s child welfare agency is underfunded, its case workers are over-extended and the children in the system are at risk of falling through the cracks, according to a report commissioned by The Boston Foundation.

The report released last week outlined best practices for child welfare agencies, calling on the Department of Children and Families to incorporate real-time inputting of data, invest more in middle management and work with other agencies to provide services to parents of children involved in DCF.

The silver lining at the DCF may be that high-profile failures of the system, like the death of four-year-old Jeremiah Oliver last year while under Department of Children and Families supervision, draw attention to the agency and provide an opportunity for substantive change, child welfare specialists say.

In a conference at The Boston Foundation last week, a group of specialists shared ideas about how best to approach reforms at DCF as officials appointed during Gov. Deval Patrick’s administration prepare to transfer the agency to new leadership.

“I think what we can do is come up with overarching principles and develop plans to move those principles forward,” said Gail Dillinger, the Child Advocate for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

DCF assigns social workers to families with children deemed to be at risk of abuse. When assigned to work with a child, DCF social workers will either provide services to help the child or remove the child from his or her home and place the child in foster care. While there has been much attention focused on the plight of children in the wake of the Oliver case, Andy Pond, President of the Justice Resource Institute, said policymakers should look at the broader societal problems that push children into the DCF caseload — addiction, poverty, gambling, joblessness, domestic violence.

“All these things put kids in a place where they are at risk,” he said. “The place where it all lands is in the lap of DCF.”

In the wake of the Jeremiah Oliver case, the Legislature approved a $25 million funding increase for DCF, bringing the agency’s budget to $779 million. The agency hired 200 new social workers, but lost some to attrition, bringing its net personnel gain to 142.

But with increased rates of joblessness, substance abuse and other issues that affect families, the number of children under the care of DCF has increased. In the last year alone, the number of DCF caseworkers with caseloads of more than 20 children has increased from 187 workers to 1,054. The agency has set a goal of dropping its maximum case load for each social worker to 15.

At the same time, advocates say, cuts to funding for DCF over the years have forced the agency to lay off much of its middle management — the very people who are responsible for training and supervising the front-line social workers.

“Reform for the Legislature means first and foremost getting the agency more money,” said state Sen. Paul Barrett.

But he acknowledged funding alone cannot stop child abuse.

“If you fund the agency well, children are going to die. If you fund the agency poorly — and we fund these agencies poorly — more children will die.”

DCF has made changes aimed at using data to track children in the system and their case workers. Earlier this year, DCF distributed iPad personal computing devices to its case workers, allowing them to input data on their cases in real time, although the agency does not yet require the workers to do so.

With the Nov. 4 election looming, it will fall on Republican Charlie Baker or Democrat Martha Coakley to follow through on the reforms currently being implemented at the department. The advocates at The Boston Foundation conference stressed the importance of following through on the current set of reforms.

“We are in mid-reform,” Pond said. “We began reform nine months ago. To be perfectly blunt, this is a bad time to change leadership.”