Independent reviews of DCF improve the safety and wellbeing of children in state care

Independent oversight is a key tool to hold state agencies accountable to the people they serve. It is the reason why governments have watchdog agencies like the U.S. Office of the Inspector General and the Connecticut Office of State Ethics and why nonprofit organizations have boards of directors. These independent oversight bodies ensure that decisions are made transparently, without bias, and in the best interest of the people who organizations serve.

When the people who an agency serves are children who have been abused or neglected, transparency and accountability become a matter of life-or-death. For this reason, independent oversight of the Connecticut Department of Children and Families (DCF) is a hotly debated topic this legislative session.

In just the past few months, three new independent reports (two from a federal court monitor, the other from a federal agency) have left legislators with doubts about DCF’s transparency of reporting and accountability to children and families. Legislators have responded by proposing multiple bills with the intent of creating an independent oversight body for the child welfare system.

All three reports are alarming.

The first is the federal court monitor’s 2016 Juan F. report, one of dozens created to comply with the settlement of the 1989 Juan F. case in which the state was accused of failing to provide adequate child protective services. The report pointed out that although DCF has made great progress on a number of important outcomes, DCF is still far from achieving other crucial safety and wellbeing goals. For instance, DCF has a goal of creating appropriate and timely case plans for 90 percent of children and families. In 2016, case plans were only found to be appropriate and timely in 58 percent of cases reviewed. DCF has another goal of meeting the medical, dental, and mental health service needs of at least 80 percent of children and families. In 2016, they only met these needs in 61 percent of cases reviewed.

Why aren’t these goals being met? The second report implicates serious overworking of social work staff. The court monitor conducted a “time study” of DCF social work staff to assess staff’s ability to comply with DCF policies and federal and state requirements. The report found that there are currently not enough social workers to serve the number of children and families in care in a timely, accurate, and high-quality manner. The monitor recommended technological improvements, procedure streamlining, and increased funds for staffing.

The federal government also recently released their results from the Children and Family Services Review (CFSR), a periodic review of each state’s child welfare system. The report uncovered several troubling practices within DCF. Most worrisome is that assessments of risk, safety, and needs are not consistently and accurately used for families and children receiving services. Proper and consistent use of all three assessments are crucial for determining whether children are in immediate danger of abuse, whether families can stay together with the right interventions, and whether parents are able to provide for the needs of their children, as well as for determining the right interventions for a particular child or family. Failure to properly assess families can result in preventable reoccurrence of abuse and neglect, in dissolution of families, or in failing to provide necessary behavioral health services to children and families.

As Leo Tolstoy said in Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The problems DCF faces are complex, vastly different for each family, and often caused by external factors over which DCF has limited control. One factor that is the same for all DCF involved families, however, is the very fact of state involvement. Given that involvement, we as a state have an obligation to assure adequate funding and oversight to keep children and families safe and healthy.

Now, some legislators are proposing legislation calling for the creation of an independent child welfare oversight council to investigate and advise about how to solve the problems unearthed in these reviews. There is a lot of room for improvement, and many of the problems will require collaborative, creative solutions and a true commitment to funding services that prevent abuse and neglect. Creating an independent oversight body through which DCF can collaborate with legislators, other state agencies, youth, families, lawyers, advocates, and service providers would help Connecticut be more transparent about problems serving children and hold the state to higher standards of accountability in preventing child abuse and neglect.