By Lindsay Street, contributing writer | The state’s embattled child welfare agency, emboldened by more funding and staffing, is doing more investigations for child abuse and neglect, but officials say there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done.
“I don’t know if there’s a single fix to any of this,” said outgoing Democratic Sen. Joel Lourie of Columbia, one of three senators on a state Department of Social Services oversight panel. “I think it’s just continuing to work with the agency and holding them accountable.
“We still see child deaths at a high level … but you have to judge this looking as to where we are based on where we were and what we were experiencing two years ago was an absolute disaster in crisis. I’ve never seen anything like it in my time in public service.”
Recent data show the agency, which has received more than $8 million in new funding for staffing and training, received 20,309 reports of abuse and neglect in 2015, a 21 percent increase over the 16,794 cases reported the previous year.
Data also show the number of child maltreatment deaths reported by the agency rose from 22 in 2014 to 28 last year. Of the fatalities reported, 11 percent of those deaths were of children seen by the agency in the last 12 months, and 25 percent of those deaths came from within families investigated by DSS in the last five years.
Sen. Katrina Shealy, a Lexington Republican who also is on the Senate DSS Oversight Subcommittee, said it may take years to lower the state’s child fatalities from abuse and neglect, but there has been progress at the agency.
“There’s still got to be accountability,” Shealy said. “We can’t let it go back to where it was.”
As a result of the subcommittee recommendations, there are now more cases being reported in a centralized, anonymous hotline, and county DSS offices must use a standardized assessment tool on whether to open investigations. Additionally with increased reporting from the hotline serving 22 counties, there is an increased need for caseworkers, putting more pressure on the agency as it reforms.
Agency is moving forward, director says
DSS Director Susan Alford took the helm of the beleaguered agency in the end of 2014. In a statement to Statehouse Report made in lieu of an interview, she said the General Assembly’s fiscal support for the 2017 budget has gone a long way toward helping the agency keep South Carolina children safe.
“We don’t want to miss a report,” she said. “What we have to be careful of is maintaining our staffing levels to support that increase — we need to assure we have adequate numbers of highly-trained intake workers to do timely and effective screening of incoming calls, and we need to retain enough caseworkers to manage increased caseloads.”
According to DSS spokesman Karen Wingo, Alford went to each of the state’s 46 county DSS offices since taking charge and discovered a high number of staff turnovers were related to safety concerns and burnout from witnessing traumatic situations. In Richland County, for example, the turnover was as high as 100 percent, Lourie said. To address the issue, two new positions with the state agency were created.
Another concern was internal training. Six new positions have been created to train DSS workers. Previously, the agency relied solely on external training for caseworkers.
But despite all of the new efforts underway, more children died of abuse or neglect in 2015. However, data also showed the relative percentage of child fatalities compared to the number of children served by the agency nearly remained constant in 2014 (0.131 percent) and 2015 (0.138 percent).
“From our review of the data, what we know is that implementation of intake hubs is producing what we want — an increase in calls received, and an increase in our screening of reports of abuse and neglect,” Alford said in her statement.
What’s ahead
Shealy said she plans to reintroduce more legislation in 2017 to keep the pressure on the agency to reform. A list of bills that didn’t pass in 2016 is at the bottom of this story.
“I had a restructuring bill for the Department of Social Services and I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to reintroduce that and if so, in what form,” Shealy said. “There are some things we still need to change.”
Subcommittee Chair Tom Young, R-Aiken, said the next meeting of the oversight panel in August or September would likely focus on the rise in child fatalities from neglect and abuse in 2015. He also said the subcommittee will look at new legislative ideas in addition to previous legislative proposals to continue improvements at the agency.
“We’re putting together a list to see what we need to pursue, what new items we need to pursue,” Young said.
Lourie said the key to keeping DSS moving forward will be the continued legislator oversight.
Shealy said there have been nearly a dozen proposed bills stemming from the subcommittee’s work, and her office estimated that $8.4 million has gone toward fixing DSS since 2014 through hiring 258 full-time employees, and focusing on recruitment and retention. The goal is to get caseloads to 24 children per caseworker.
“We need to make sure we’re getting more boots on the ground,” Shealy said.
A 2014 state audit reported that no one knew how many children were dying or remaining neglected or abused as the result of inaction by DSS, and that DSS was woefully underfunded. In early 2015, the subcommittee released a report that said it was “not satisfied” with child fatality data and made recommendations on fixing the agency.
Outstanding legislative reform measures
Legislation proposed but not passed regarding Social Services during 2015-2016 session*:
- S.C. Child Welfare Reform Act (S 150), an agency restructuring bill.
- DSS investigations (S 288), which would allow the agency to collect and share information related to the military affiliation of child custodians.
- Child abuse (S 363), which is similar to the bill above.
- Persons required to report child abuse/neglect (S 547).
- Department of Child and Family Services Act (H 3079), which is related to S 150.
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