Child welfare deficient
By Gordon Y.K. Pang
Advertiser Capitol Bureau
Gov. Linda Lingle and state Human Services Director Lillian Koller said yesterday they will work with federal officials to avoid possible fines that are being threatened as a result of deficiencies in the state's child welfare system.
A 36-member team from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services yesterday wrapped up a weeklong examination of the state's child welfare system, specifically the programs and agencies dealing with child protection, foster care and adoption.
Team co-leader Linda Mitchell said while the system did some things well, it was deficient in other areas. The key problem, she said, is a lack of resources. "There is no question that the high caseloads and the lack of services impacted your results in this review," she said.
A final, written report will be completed in about a month and is expected to recommend that the state be fined if it does not meet certain goals within a two-year period. But a DHHS official on the Mainland said while all 39 other states reviewed have been told to implement improvements or face fines since the state-by-state review began two years ago, none has actually had to pay.
After the final report comes out, the state will have 90 days to submit a program improvement plan. Once federal officials approve the plan, the two-year clock begins ticking.
The Child Welfare Services Division, which has about 450 employees, is in charge of ensuring the safety and permanency of children in their homes and, when necessary, out-of-home placements.
Programs include child protection, family support, foster care, adoption, independent living and licensing of foster family boarding homes, group homes and child-placing organizations. The division has an annual budget of about $47 million, roughly 54 percent of which comes from federal sources.
Lingle promised yesterday to work on the deficiencies. "We just simply won't settle for things staying the way they are," she told federal officials. The impending report, she said, is neither a criticism nor an audit but "an analysis of an entire system ... that is welcome, long overdue and will be the incentive for us to do better."
Mitchell told welfare officials that the commitment of workers and supervisors at the state Department of Human Services, along with judges, attorneys, foster parents and others, is "the No. 1 strength you have here in Hawai'i."
At the same time, however, she said there were "inadequate resources."
"Everywhere we went this week, over and over we heard about extremely high caseloads from DHS workers, judges and attorneys," she said. "We heard about overloaded foster homes and waiting lists for services."
One team member reported the example of one case worker who had 50 open investigations, then given 15 new assessments to be investigated while carrying 20 ongoing treatment cases, Mitchell said.
Such heavy workloads mean social workers don't have the time to be in the field better monitoring the status of the children, Mitchell said.
State DHS officials told The Advertiser that money is not necessarily the only issue. Koller said her department has had difficulty retaining social workers. DHS Deputy Director Henry Oliva said the department is short several dozen workers, primarily in rural sections of Neighbor Islands.
Hawai'i's child welfare system, like that of other states, was reviewed in 14 areas.
In general, the findings showed that Hawai'i did not meet the national standard when it came to the number of recurrences of maltreatment of children, instances of child abuse and neglect while in foster care, and stability of foster care placements.
Mitchell said an area that needs to be shored up is more timely response to neglect reports. "Some of the delays, we found, occur in transferring reports from the intake unit who's taking the call onto the assessment or investigation unit," she said.
Hawai'i did meet the national standard in the areas of length of time to achieve reunification and length of time to achieve adoption.
The state has good foster parents, and social workers did a good job with other adoption issues such as getting relatives to adopt foster children and being able to place siblings in the same foster families, Mitchell said.
Social workers also did well in adoption, such as being able to shift gears where "you saw reunification was no longer realistic, you made a timely change in that goal to something more permanent to that child," she said.
House Health Chairman Dennis Arakaki and Senate Human Services Chairwoman Suzanne Chun Oakland said the cry for more resources to tackle child welfare issues is not new to them.
"This could be another Felix consent decree if we don't start meeting the standards and the requirements," Arakaki said, referring to the costly federal mandate imposed on the state to improve services for special needs students. And while the economy may be in the doldrums, he said "that's not an excuse to provide the resources that are needed to protect the children."
