As Gov. Paul LePage’s administration reacted to the tragic deaths of two young girls from families involved in the child welfare system earlier this year, it pursued changes that stand to make an already stressed child welfare system even less effective at engaging with families and keeping children safe.
In March, the Maine Department of Health and Human Services directed four outside organizations that handle lower-risk child abuse and neglect cases to comb through their files dating back to Aug. 31, 2017, and report to the state child abuse hotline any families they couldn’t locate, who had declined their services, or who had stopped them prematurely. The department asked the same of the contractors going forward.
The reports to the hotline were to trigger DHHS to send its own Child Protective Services caseworkers to those families to investigate the abuse or neglect allegations that originally brought them to the department’s attention.
The new policy added new cases to the caseloads of Child Protective Services workers whose responsibilities had already grown in recent years, and to go over work the department had previously assigned to contractors. And it likely has diminished the department’s chances of engaging with some families at all.
The March policy change — one of several DHHS has rolled out following the deaths of 10-year-old Marissa Kennedy and 4-year-old Kendall Chick — also partially undermines the reason for the state to even have a program that assigns lower-risk abuse and neglect cases to contracted social workers, as opposed to Child Protective Services investigators.
The program, known as alternative response, began more than two decades ago as a less intrusive approach for handling child welfare cases DHHS determined to be lower risk. The idea behind the approach was that a less adversarial and more collaborative approach to addressing an allegation of child abuse or neglect could yield a better outcome than a full-fledged Child Protective Services investigation. It could spare children the trauma of a needless separation from their parents, the thinking goes.
Social workers from the four organizations across the state that carry out alternative response try to work with families to make their homes safer — perhaps by connecting parents with needed services such as substance use treatment — rather than investigate them. Whether families engage with alternative response workers is voluntary.
But the department’s new policy requiring the alternative response contractors to report to the child abuse hotline any families that exercise their rights and decline services compromises that voluntary nature. When a family knows that a supposedly collaborative process could result in an adversarial investigation by a DHHS caseworker, it can make the family more reluctant to accept any outside help at all.
That’s been the experience of workers from at least one of the four organizations that carry out alternative response, according to a BDN report.
Several studies have shown that the alternative response approach can make children safer — in fact, safer than if those same children were subjected to typical Child Protective Services investigations. And DHHS hasn’t pointed to any specific shortcomings of the alternative response contractors.
Yet, steps the department has taken in reaction to two tragedies risk undermining a program that’s decidedly more family friendly than a Child Protective Services investigation — all while giving overburdened child welfare investigators more work. (DHHS hasn’t indicated it has any plans to expand its staff of Child Protective Services caseworkers.)
As Richard Wexler of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform recently told the BDN, that increased workload raises the risk that a child welfare caseworker will miss a case in which a child is actually in danger.
That should be the last thing the LePage administration wants to happen on its watch.
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