Children’s ProteCtive serviCes— reduCing the risk of Abuse And negleCt

Although the state provides some guidance, its standards or guidelines are not clear about when a case should be closed. This causes considerable variance between supervisors’ judgments and opinions as to when cases are to be closed. Some supervisors are more lax and some are more stringent. Supervisors and their social workers are entrenched in doing things their own way with regard to closing cases. As a group, supervisors are inconsistent in interpreting rules, regulations and codes.

If a closed case is later re-opened because of a new allegation, there are no written procedures and no encouragement for a social worker or supervisor to request that the closed case be reviewed if it is thought that the assessment or the case closure decision was lacking.

In a small, but important number of cases, children have suffered the consequences of inadequate case assessment. However, the FYC director appears to be conscientious and is striving to remove inadequacies in case management and is to be commended. FYC has adopted the Structured Decision Making tool (SDM) and, based on recommendations from an in-house committee, it is revising all of its ER policies and procedures to improve assessment and case closure decisions. It appears that the SDM will help meet the needs for improving assessment and decision making about, and the management of, child safety, risk and parental adequacy.

With regard to FYC’s self assessment and the three-year System Improvement Plan that resulted from it, the work and input received from various people and groups are very commendable, but the social work staff appears to have little awareness or memory of either the self-assessment process or the plan except for the change to using the SDM tool.

Conscientious employees in ER are at risk of having low morale and being exhausted, partially due to inadequate supervision and management, time pressure to close cases, inconsistencies in interpretation of regulations for case closures, as well as the many cases that require investigation. However, the FYC’s implementation of new ER policies and procedures and the hiring of case social workers could reduce this risk.

FYC Policy/Procedure “II-16 B. General” concerning the subsequent review of randomly selected cases was not known to managers or supervisors who were interviewed and is not followed. It appears that no one looks to see if this policy is followed.