CPS MUST HAVE RESOURCES
Does anybody care? Really care. We know the standard answer: People are deeply moved by stories about abused children. Politicians weigh in on the importance of the family.
But when it comes to supporting the state agency that’s supposed to protect vulnerable children and help their families, Arizona is playing air guitar.
The only way that’s going to change is if people who care — we believe most of you really do — make this your cause.
Despite a year of intense scrutiny and promises of improvements to come, Child Protective Services remains a basket case. The need for an effective child-welfare agency remains as heartbreakingly real as the latest report of a child beaten to death.
The massacre in Newtown, Conn., has an entire nation talking, as you would expect when 20 young children are killed. Contrast that with the 71 Arizona children who died of maltreatment in 2011. CPS had been involved in 34 of those cases and was still investigating 15 at the time of the child’s death.
The number of children in foster care is up 22 percent. Caseworkers struggle with workloads well above recommended standards, leading to high turnover. The backlog of cases numbers into the thousands. CPS fails to investigate 100 percent of abuse and neglect reports, according to reporting by
Mary K. Reinhart. A record 14,500 children are in state custody because they are not safe at home. Arizona is their parent. But Arizona doesn’t staff its childwelfare agency well enough to check on each and every one of those kids at least once a month, as the law requires. Neglect? You bet. The failure of CPS to meet the needs of foster kids is overshadowed by bigger tragedies. The recurring stories of children brutalized and murdered make people ask what’s wrong with CPS.
Gov. Jan Brewer set up a committee to try to answer that question last year.
Last November, Brewer told her Child Safety Task Force that she was looking forward to “fabulous results” from the group, headed by Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery and Department of Economic Security Director Clarence Carter.
Montgomery’s year-later assessment: “The need for reform is no different today than it was last year,” he told
in October. “We are still seeing the same tragic circumstances.”
The few improvements have not reduced the neglect.
The task force made 70 recommendations. A few were completed administratively. Five became law. Lawmakers put up $3.7 million to staff a new investigative team that was a priority of Montgomery’s. Some of the money also went to raises for senior caseworkers.
Lawmakers also voted unanimously to create a CPS oversight committee that was supposed to have made recommendations last month. None came, because legislative leaders never appointed members.
They didn’t even go through the motions.
The committee might have discovered what Reinhart detailed in a recent story: a multimillion-dollar midyear budget shortfall at CPS. The gap might run as high as $35 million, and much of it involves the costs of increased numbers of foster children.
Before news of the shortfall, Carter requested a $50 million increase in next fiscal year’s budget. Carter told Reinhart he was unlikely to ask for a midyear budget increase to make up for the current shortfall.
But an agency memo obtained by says the inability to keep up with costs “is affecting the service delivery on our cases.”
In other words, an agency that couldn’t do the job before is in worse shape now.
It’s time Carter stopped pretending otherwise.
More to the point, it’s time the governor treated this crisis with the urgency it deserves. Brewer no doubt gave Carter the OK to ask for more money (she’s his boss, after all), and she is expected to make child welfare a significant focus in her State of the State speech in January.
She gets credit for both. She may face a fight at the Legislature just to get a funding increase that does little more than help the agency stay even.
But if Brewer really cares — if she really wants to make a difference — she’ll have to lead an effort to get CPS the long-term attention and resources it needs.
If Arizonans really care — if you really want to make a difference — it’s time to let the governor and the Legislature know that Child Protective Services has to have the resources to do the job.