Back in 2013, it emerged that Child Protective Services employees had, in essence, been stuffing backlogged cases in a drawer and shutting it.
Those were the 6,600 cases reported to CPS between 2009 and 2013 that were labeled “Not Investigated.” The scandal over that practice led to abolishing the agency and replacing it with the Department of Child Safety.
Now the man who blew the whistle on those uninvestigated cases, Greg McKay, runs the department. But he introduced an idea Thursday for reducing the 15,000-case backlog that could lead to putting some cases back in drawers. The main difference is the drawers would be carefully labeled with names and dates.
McKay told legislators the agency can’t touch its huge backlog of uninvestigated cases if it must conduct “A to Z” investigations of every case — a requirement that stems from the discovery of the backlogged cases. He wants authority to give less attention to lesser cases and full investigations to the big ones.
It seems no matter who heads our child-welfare agency and what it’s called, they face the same main issues — the backlog, cases slipping through the cracks, and too many kids needing foster care. Triaging cases makes sense, sure, but it underlines the fact that McKay is now in the same position as his predecessors and must soon come to the conclusion that many have before — we need to spend our time and money getting ahead of child-welfare problems.
“He’s in the same mess that Flanagan was in,” said Susie Huhn, CEO of Casa de los Niños, referring to former director Charles Flanagan.
McKay needs to find his way to the only known long-term solution — early intervention to help families in danger of entering the DCS system — quickly.
The evidence is that Arizona still is working too much on the “back end” of the problem, dealing with kids who have been removed from their homes. Arizona’s foster-care population has been exploding at a time when the vast majority of other states are reducing theirs, said Eric Schindler, president of Child and Family Resources in Tucson.
“We are seeing the fruits of what we sowed in 2009, when we decimated funding for family preservation, early intervention, home visitation and other programs that help on the front end,” he said.
Now we have more than 17,000 children in out-of-home placements — largely foster care, but also group homes and even sleeping in DCS offices. DCS is working to recruit more foster families, but that’s only a short-term help.
“We’re over-emphasizing removal, particularly in cases where in other states, a variety of other interventions can be brought to bear,” Schindler said.
“There are many cases where you can work intensively in the home and work with the parents, work with the guardians to try to develop the kind of healthy parenting that could keep the kid out of the foster care system.”
Rep. Kate Brophy McGee, a Phoenix Republican who has been an avid reformer of our child-welfare system, cautiously approves of the approach McKay is proposing. Not fully investigating some cases is OK, she said, as long as those families receive services instead of investigations.
The problem has been that the governor and legislative majority look enthusiastically upon recruiting new foster families but somewhat suspiciously on early interventions to prevent kids from getting into the foster system.
“We keep having that lesson learned over and over again. But it’s not resonating with some of my conservative colleagues,” she said.
I asked Brophy McGee if the state can cut its backlog of cases or slow the flow of children into foster care without more emphasis on early intervention and services for families in danger of losing their children.
“In my view it’s not possible,” she said.
Yet when I asked Doug Nick, the spokesman for DCS, about the possibility of reducing removals, he expressed enthusiasm for foster parenting and caution about reducing the need for it. “We don’t like the idea that there are so many kids in out-of-home care,” he said. “We would love to get that number down. We have made an appeal for more Arizonans to look into their hearts and decide if being a foster parent is something they want to do.”
When I asked him about lowering the number of kids funneled into foster care, he expressed caution. It’s a caution the agency has learned over the years thanks to child deaths and the resulting scandals, when we in the press discovered the agency had not done enough.
“That’s fraught with potential problems we want to avoid,” he said.
I get that — DCS has been caught acting inadequately so many times that the agency is erring on the side of caution. But that’s no way to correct the problem in the long run.
“If we continue to pull kids out and not support the families up front, we’ll never have enough foster care,” Huhn of Casa de los Niños told me.
Only when we start helping families in need at the outset of their problems will we be able to minimize the foster-care problem — and stop filing cases away in drawers altogether.
