Ernestine F. Jones, General Receiver
Child and Family Services Agency
Testimony to the Subcommittee on the District of Columbia
May 5, 2000

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Chairperson, Tom Davis and members of the Subcommittee on the District of Columbia, my name is Ernestine F. Jones and I am the court appointed General Receiver for the Child and Family Services Agency. Thank you for the opportunity to present to you information on the current reforms being undertaken by the Child and Family Services Agency. These reforms were made to improve services to children and families and to bring the Agency into compliance with the requirements of the Modified Final Order (MFO). The Child and Family Services Agency continues to operate under the mandates of the MFO issued by U.S. District Court Judge Thomas F. Hogan on January 28, 1994 in the LaShawn vs. Williams Federal Court Order.

I am pleased to share with you specific information about the work that we have completed thus far and to provide you with my assessment of the remaining work that needs to be completed. I cannot, in the time allotted to me, provide you with full details about each of the areas for which there was an expressed interest. I will, however, highlight some of the most critical areas of work to date. If there is interest in further detail, I will be happy to make additional information available to you.

We are making progress in our efforts to achieve compliance, but I would be the first to admit that this job is much tougher than I expected. There were some big surprises with respect to the work conditions and the levels of dysfunction in the day-to-day operations that make the challenges a lot more difficult to overcome. However, I am confident that we can achieve the goals that have been set forth.

Facts about the agency

To put in perspective my comments to your concerns, let me give you some facts about the clients we serve and the agency. These statistics are based on fiscal year 1999 data.

• We received an average of 1826 calls per month on the hotline. Seven percent were reports of abuse and twenty four percent were reports of neglect. The remaining sixty nine percent were for community resources and general information. While the investigations are usually initiated within the prescribed time on the reports, we have regularly had backlogs in this unit due to the volume of reports and the time that it takes to complete the work. The shortage of social workers and the increased numbers of reports has made this more problematic this year.
• There are 3225 children in-out-of home care.
• Of the children in out-of-home care 664 are in group care and 128 are in residential placements (primarily outside of the District).
• There are 350 CFSA licensed foster homes and 731 licensed foster homes under the supervision of private agencies.
• There are 69 contracts with private agencies who provide services to CFSA children and families 35 personal service contracts for specialized services for individual children.
• There are 1102 children in the adoptions program. Two hundred fifty were adopted in fiscal year 1999 for an increase of forty nine percent.
• There are 2108 children placed with relatives receiving services through the Kinship Care program that was established in June 1998.
• There are 1453 birth families with 2220 children under agency supervision in their own homes receiving services through our Family
  Services program.
• There are eight neighborhood service centers (Healthy Families\Thriving Communities Collaboratives) that provide preventive and support services to 987 families with 2200 children.
• There is a comprehensive health care system (DC KIDS) which was implemented on October 1, 1999, that has more than 800 children enrolled.
• The child welfare information system (FACES) which was implemented on October 1, 1999 tracks case and payment data and provides information for the required reports.
• The staff has been consolidated into a single office site with improved physical work conditions.

Identifying at-risk children and families, and making services and supports available to them

The most effective way to make critical services available to at-risk children and families is through the development of a system of preventive services.

We have done this in the District through the development of the Healthy Families\Thriving Communities Collaboratives. The Collaboratives are developing the capacity to become the gatekeepers to the child welfare system. On numerous occasions they have been the difference in our being able to keep a family together or having to remove the children. Services through the Collaboratives are tailored to the unique needs of each community and include case management, preventive and support services, parent education, substance abuse education and treatment, foster home recruitment, respite care, fathers' support groups, emergency and transitional housing, and support services for teens.

Even though this community support system is now in place, there will always be situations that require agency involvement. To make it easier for the public to report instances of suspected abuse and neglect we have put in place a single reporting hotline (202-671-SAFE). After reports are made, CFSA is responsible for investigating child neglect. The Metropolitan Police investigate child abuse in the District. The splitting of this responsibility is a major area of concern in developing a well-managed child welfare intake system. In the District of Columbia the authority and responsibility for child abuse and neglect investigations is not under the single state agency as it is in other states.

At the time we receive a supported report of neglect our first efforts are directed at keeping children and families together whenever possible. This is also a mandate of the federal and local Adoptions and Safe Families Act (ASFA). We have established two agency operated programs directed toward this end: Intensive Family Services and Family Services. These programs are required by the MFO and enable us to meet the federal expectation to make reasonable efforts to prevent the out-of-home placement of children. In the Intensive Family Service program, social workers provide services to families who have serious problems through the intensive use of support services, such as home-management and parental skills services, day care, close supervision with increased visitation, and counseling. The social workers in this program maintain lower caseloads so that they can give these families the attention and services they need.

For many children the most appropriate caregiver is a relative. This is our fastest growing service. While this program is not a requirement of the MFO specifically, it is one that we have had to address because of the need. As a result we were selected to be a kinship care demonstration site by the Department of Health and Human Services. This five-year demonstration uses a family group model for service delivery that involves work with the kinship caretakers, the natural parents and the children in a team approach. We believe that this method will allow us to maintain family relationships while building a support system for the entire family. In using this approach, we hope to be able to stabilize the family in a more timely manner, thereby ending our direct involvement in their lives. A service team that includes an agency social worker, the family advocate from one of the Collaboratives, and other representatives from the community will provide the support services needed by the families. Four Collaboratives will participate initially in the demonstration project. The remaining four will be added at a later time.

Developing and supporting out-of-home care

In an effort to increase support for children requiring out-of-home care we have focused our efforts on increasing and improving our foster care and kinship care programs. To do this we have taken the following actions:

• Increased our foster care board rates by $4.40 per day - a twenty eight percent increase.
• Implemented a Foster Parent Support Unit to improve foster parent access to supportive services.
• Established a Teen Life Options program for youth in independent living that includes educational and life skills development. In FY 99, fifty three youth received their diplomas or GEDs, and twenty two were on the honor roll.
• Implemented a comprehensive health care program for children in out-of-home care (DC KIDS). This system is a time-sensitive process to ensure that every child entering care is given a full health screening and good follow-up care.
• Requested funding in the FY 2001 budget to develop a kinship care subsidy program for relatives who become legal guardians.
• Implemented a system of regular staffing of cases to ensure that permanency plans are developed for all children in care.
• Established a special unit (Abscondence Unit) to quickly locate children who have runaway. This unit also includes a mentoring program to reduce recidivism.

Meeting the Adoptions and Safe Families Act requirements

The permanent legislation enacting ASFA was passed and signed by the Mayor and City Council on March 31, 2000. We have developed a Memorandum of Understanding between the four agencies responsible for implementing the legislation that was effective February 2000. We have held joint training sessions with the judges, lawyers, guardian ad litems, and social workers. This training is ongoing. Although implementation of the legislation was delayed, we proceeded to put into place the changes needed to improve our adoption program. The number of finalized adoptions increased from 168 in FY 98 to 250 in FY 99. Building on this success we have established a goal of 350 adoptions for FY 2000.

Meeting these goals is important for children. Children need to grow up in loving, nurturing, and caring families and this will always be our priority. We must be aggressive in finding new ways to recruit foster and adoptive parents. Last year we established a single recruitment hotline number for prospective adoptive and foster parents (202/671-LOVE). We have also expanded the Diligent Search Unit to include additional investigators to locate parents for reunification or to terminate parental rights.

Meeting the needs of children with special physical and emotional needs

This is the area where we have made the least amount of progress. While we have certainly provided services for some children and families, we are not meeting the needs of all of our children in this area. Our ability to make progress in this area is directly tied to the ability to secure additional resources to either stimulate new development or to expand the current capacity. This is our highest priority for fiscal year 2001. I will briefly highlight for you some of the key areas where we have made requests for additional funding in order to increase services.

While we are providing services to some children and families in all of the areas listed below, we cannot meet-the needs of the majority of our clients with our current resources. We are particularly short of services for parents and children who require substance abuse and mental health treatment. We are projecting that more than 1700 families will need treatment and services.

We are required by the MFO to assure that children and their families receive mental health services to prevent neglect and abuse, to avoid placement disruptions, and to provide for the child's safety. These services are very intensive and require clinicians with specialized training. We believe that these services are needed for 200 additional children, especially victims of sexual abuse who require intensive therapy.

Substance abuse treatment services are particularly inadequate for adolescents, pregnant women or women with young children who have dual diagnosis such as mental health and substance abuse. There are virtually no treatment beds for adolescents. The current waiting period for inpatient treatment is eight months or longer. There are only two detoxification centers in the District. We need funds to develop and expand programs that are already experienced in serving these populations. These funds would cover testing, start up costs for new programs, additional treatment, and follow-up services.

We also need to develop resources to bring children who are in out-of-state residential treatment facilities back to DC homes. There are over 100 children that have been placed in residential facilities more than 100 miles from the District. We are proposing to target these children for return to therapeutic foster homes and other specialized placements in the District.

Agency's progress on improving the quality of social work practice

The Child and Family Service Agency has one of the highest educated workforces of any child welfare agency. All of our social workers are required to be licensed Masters level social workers. Because of the high turnover we have a relatively inexperienced workforce. We provide an additional 80 hours of initial training to all new social workers before they are assigned caseload responsibilities as well as ongoing in-service training to improve their skills and knowledge about practice. Since February 1999, we have provided training to more 1000 social workers.

With the assistance of a professional consultant we are developing performance standards for all positions in the agency. These standards will become the benchmarks for performance evaluations.

We have a Quality Assurance office with staff that is responsible for reviewing cases to determine the level of compliance with federal and local policies and procedures. This office also conducts special reviews of cases to ensure that practice requirements are being met and identifies corrective actions necessary to improve practice.

Caseload size is dictated by the requirements of the MFO and is a major factor impacting the quality of practice. These caseload requirements are based on national standards set by the Child Welfare League of America. Unfortunately because of the high turnover of the Masters level social workers we are not meeting the requirement at this time. We do expect to meet the caseload requirements through our current recruitment efforts and by early summer 2000.

We are putting more emphasis on supervisory training this year in order to provide more support for our social workers. We have updated our policy manual and are in the process of preparing it to be computerized thereby allowing staff to access it through their desktop computers.

Agency's ability to support a stable and qualified workforce

One of the most difficult problems that we have had to deal with has been the recruitment and retention of social work staff. We have been hampered in our recruitment and retention efforts for a variety of reasons, including the decreasing labor market for social workers, the continuous negative publicity that damages the image of the agency, and competition with agencies that can offer better benefits (such as the school system and the federal government). We have launched an aggressive campaign to level the competitive field by implementing such actions as: offering a referral bonus to staff who recruit new social workers, offering a signing bonus for social workers that commit to remain for a fixed time period, paying relocation expenses for up to 50 social workers in one year, and paying a hardship differential for staff who work in Intake because of the risk and stress of the job.

We have implemented a career ladder for our social workers making it possible for experienced social workers to be compensated at the level commensurate with their experience.

Effectiveness of the current inter-agency system to investigate child abuse and neglect cases

In the District of Columbia child abuse and neglect are not under the single state agency as is the case elsewhere. The Youth Division of the Metropolitan Police Department handle all reports of suspected child abuse; there is a special unit within the MPD that handles all reports of suspected sexual abuse; the Corporation Counsel makes decisions about what cases to take into court; the Court Services Division of the District Court handles services to abused children as long as they remain in their homes; and CFSA receives and assesses all reports of child neglect and provides the necessary services for neglected children and abused children who are removed from their families. There is a fine line between child abuse and neglect in many instances with the distinction often resulting from the professional judgement that is made by a social worker or police officer. This situation is further exacerbated by the fact that a CFSA social worker does not have the authority to remove a child from immediate danger--only the law enforcement authority may take this action.

This situation is even worse when children who are being supervised by Court Social Services end up in placement by CFSA without any family or child history. Placing children in this way is almost a guaranteed failure. There is no question that we need to work toward developing a single, unified system that, at a minimum, has the single state agency as the lead agency with the police assisting with investigations of child abuse (conducting only the criminal investigation). Legislation is being prepared for introduction in the City Council in the near future to end this fragmentation of child protection services.

Status of the inter-state compact between the District of Columbia, Virginia, and Maryland for child welfare services.

There are no substantive issues regarding the inter-state compact with the State of Virginia. These placements are handled through a private agency (Lutheran Social Services) that is licensed in the State of Virginia. In the State of Maryland, we have encountered some difficulties due primarily to the large number of children that are placed there, especially those placed with relatives. The urgency of the need for placement resources as well as the advance notice required by the interstate compact makes it extremely difficult to use the current process. We are, therefore, in the process of attempting to develop a border agreement between the District and the State of Maryland which will allow us to develop a more workable process that can accommodate the volume of cases that are located in Maryland.

Status of agency's neighborhood-based service collaborative to strengthen and preserve families

The Collaboratives have become the gatekeepers to the child welfare system. They are the means by which families can get help without having to fall completely apart. The Collaboratives have faced many challenges but I can say that on numerous occasions they have been the difference in our being able to keep a family together or having to remove the children. For example, the Collaboratives recently assisted 15 families with 29 children who were living in a shelter by getting them settled into more stable living arrangements, thereby avoiding the need to place their children. Those 29 children would have cost the District government over a quarter of a million dollars ($198,645 for board and care alone) if we had to place these children for one year.

In FY 99 the eight Collaboratives performed well, having served 987 families and 2220 children. Thus far in FY 2000 they have served 637 families and 1798 children. They are truly making a difference in the lives of the children and families in the District. The value of having preventive services immediately available is that we can preserve families, not pull them apart. An independent evaluation of the Collaboratives is being conducted to assess both the quantitative and qualitative outcomes. Once this assessment is completed we will review the recommendations and make any necessary adjustments to assure ongoing success.

Budget requirements of the agency

Last month I presented the third operating budget during my tenure as the General Receiver. It was constructed by using the Agency's spending experience in FY 99 ($149,547,368) and the expected spending level in FY 2000 of $147,414,512 which is the amount required to maintain current operations and services. The budget being requested for FY 2001 ( S 184,581,643) includes the funding required to initiate the remaining requirements of the MFO, but more importantly to meet the needs of the families and children of the District of Columbia. This FY 2001 budget request is a twenty five percent increase over the FY 2000 maintenance budget. We are pleased to note that Mayor Williams has indicated his support of the FY 2001 budget request. In preparing this budget we have identified revenue sources to fund the request, including federal funding through Title IV-E, Title XIX (Medicaid) and TANF. In the past three years we have increased federal revenues by more than one hundred seven percent in Title IV-E. We are now working to increase the federal revenue in Title XIX. We have a newly appointed Chief Financial Officer who has made great inroads in improving our overall fiscal operations ensuring that payments are being made for services in a timely and accurate manner.

Agency's contract monitoring and development of performance-based contracts

Of the children in out-of-home care, 664 children are in group care and 128 children are in residential treatment facilities. All contracts, with the exception of very specialized and unique services (35 personal service agreements), are competitively procured. During this current fiscal year we developed three performance-based contracts for adoption services. We also established the Healthy Families\Thriving Communities contracts as performance-based contracts. An assessment of the private agencies, under contract to this agency, is being conducted by an outside entity to determine their current capacity as well as capability to meet the expanded need for services. We are beginning to define the performance requirements for other contracts and plan to implement these changes, where appropriate, during our next contract cycle. The information that we obtain through the assessment will help us to better target the type of services that included in the contracts.

We have established a Contract Monitoring unit that is responsible for review and assessment of the performance of all contractors. Site visits (announced and unannounced) are regularly made to all vendors to ensure compliance. These visits may be done anytime of the day or night and on weekends. When deficiencies are cited follow up visits are made until corrections are made or a notice of contract suspension is issued. A written report is prepared annually on all vendors.

Summary

While I cannot say to you today that we are in compliance with all of the requirements of the MFO, I can say that we have made substantial progress. I am confident that we now have the infrastructure in place that will allow us to make steady progress toward compliance. We have an administrative organization that allows responsibility and accountability to be maintained. We have a personnel system in place that ensures that all jobs are clearly defined and roles and responsibilities are clear for all jobs. We are in the process of developing performance standards for each position classification. We now- have the capacity to provide initial and ongoing training for all staff. We have a fully automated work environment that not only supports the work but will also track casework and fiscal actions. We have a new Chief Financial Officer in the Agency who has made progress in shoring up our fiscal operations. I am confident that we can manage the funds and ensure accurate and prompt payment of bills for services rendered and strict accountability for all revenue and expenditures.

Furthermore our working relationships with the other District government agencies are improving as well as our work with the Court. We will continue our close coordination and cooperation with the Deputy Mayor for Children, Youth, and Families.

It is my opinion that we will be able to make substantial progress during the remainder of FY 2000 and with approval of the budget request for FY 2001 we can make substantial progress towards meeting the remaining requirements of the MFO.

Thank you again for the opportunity to address this committee. We hope you will support our efforts to achieve compliance and the FY 2001 budget request, thereby allowing the return of the Agency to the District government as quickly as possible.