The Child Welfare Services Stakeholders Group:
Putting Social Work Back in Child Welfare?

By Richard Bermack

September 2002

Two years ago, in August 2000, California Department of Social Services Director Rita Saenz formed a working group to address the crisis in child welfare. The impetus for the group was, in part, the Senate Bill 2030 caseload study, which documented the critical shortage of social worker staff. Other studies by the state auditor's Little Hoover Commission documented the system's failure to protect children from family abuse and the failure of children to thrive within the foster care system.

The Child Welfare Services Stakeholders Group, as the name implies, is composed of representatives from the constituencies concerned with child welfare, including social services agencies, community groups, the judicial council, academics, youth groups, and labor organizations.

At last May's Stakeholders Group summit meeting in Los Angeles, the group released an interim report, CWS Redesign: Conceptual Framework. The study is a comprehensive survey of the contemporary wisdom on what the ideal child welfare system would be. The work addresses four major areas of concern: “safety and change” (social work procedures); “human resources” (staffing); “flexible funding” (budget); and “fairness and equity” (addressing class and race). This article cannot do justice to the 230-page report, but will attempt a working summary. The entire report can be found on line at http://www.dss.cahwnet.gov/cdssweb/ChildWelfa_285.htm along with the other documents produced by the Stakeholders Group. Anyone seriously interested in child welfare reform will find this a valuable resource.

Safety and Change: Improving Practices

The stakeholders considered social worker procedures from the standpoint of child safety. They looked at ways to determine whether a home is safe or can be made safe or if the child needs to be removed. The report examined several approaches.

Collaborative Approaches: These included team-based decision-making models, such as the Annie Casey Family to Family Model, in which social workers bring in as many community and other professional parties as possible to make decisions collaboratively on what is best for the child. The concept behind this model is to get the community to share in the decision-making and to be invested in supporting the family.

Risk Assessment Tools and Evidence-Based Decision-Making: Can objective standards be created to assess whether a child will be at risk if left in a home? The group surveyed different risk assessment tools used by various states and counties to guide social workers in evaluating home safety. This approach also involves training social workers in evidence-based decision-making. It is hoped that these tools will help new workers make better decisions, as well as standardize the criteria that all workers use. How to create one standard model flexible enough to work in the extreme range of counties, from rural to urban, is a problem that transcends all aspects of a unified statewide child welfare system, but it is particularly problematic with respect to standardizing risk assessment criteria.

Prevention: Another work group focused on prevention programs. These programs allow social workers to provide services to children and families before there is an emergency crisis. These are programs like school-based, school-linked social work, and community-based programs in which social workers work with probation officers and other professionals to target at-risk kids. These programs are seen as the most promising, for obvious reasons.

Human Resources:
Dealing with Caseload/Workload

The report acknowledges that social work is based on a relationship between workers and clients. Therefore, having a well-trained work force at full capacity is an essential component of any redesign plan. At present, this is the system's weakest link. The report recognizes that the three key issues confronting the child welfare system are “recruitment, workload/caseload, and retention.”

The document acknowledges that a key to a viable child welfare workforce is “effective supervision.” One of the workers' most frequent complaints is the lack of adequate training and supervision. Workers also often complain that management makes completing mandated documentation a priority over seeing clients. Recognizing this problem, the stakeholders called for “management initiatives and programs that foster and reward [the client-worker] relationship.” This requires creation of a management culture that will “build, maintain and reward the skills and competencies of the workforce.” The human resources work group has issued a report calling for the implementation of the SB 2030 findings.

Use of private agencies and paraprofessionals: The group is analyzing how private and non-profit community agencies can work collaboratively with the public child welfare system to provide resources such as community mental health agencies. The report examines ways to restructure the job so that some of the social work tasks could be done by either paraprofessionals or clerical workers to lessen the workload of social workers.

The bottom line is that although the group acknowledges the caseload/workload crisis, the report hints at trying to make workers more efficient (which could lead to higher workload), contracting out, and wide use of paraprofessionals.

Increased Funding

The present system is underfunded. There is not enough money to hire adequate staff. Moreover, the way the programs are funded penalizes counties for utilizing prevention programs that keep children out of the system and for providing comprehensive reunification services that help parents get their children back sooner.

Core funding for county child welfare services comes from the allocation of federal Title IV- E funds, the entitlement program for foster care. The funding is based on the number of cases in the system. This creates a “perverse incentive” to increase the number of children in the system.

Child welfare advocates would like to create a funding system that, instead, would be linked to the quality of outcomes. They would like to see fiscal reform that would reward counties for providing better services. They would also like more funding for critical services such as substance abuse treatment and mental health services, more access to housing programs, and better integration with CalWORKS services. One strategy suggested would be to enable the county to recapture the foster care money saved by keeping children out of the system through prevention and better reunification services. However, fiscal analysts warned that setting up a funding system based on flexible outcomes is not easy.

Fairness and Equity

How does one create a system that does not discriminate against people who are poor or of a minority race or culture? One of the most apparent problems of the present system is that it does not do an adequate job of helping the disproportionate number of African-American children in the system. “Developing a culture of fairness as an overarching theme for a redesigned CWS system was one of the most challenging tasks for the Stakeholders Group. The very complex and emotive nature of the concept makes it difficult to grapple with. And there is general uncertainty among decision makers and practitioners within CWS as to how best to address it.

The CWS literature, while highlighting several issues related to fairness, does not provide any roadmap for tackling these issues, nor has any state child welfare system addressed the subject in a systematic and comprehensive manner. Yet fairness is a construct that is very central to questions and issues of public policy making and execution, especially in an environment such as California where the population is both multiracial and multicultural,” the report states.

The group considered several modest strategies for dealing with this complex issue. The suggested criteria for removing children from a home were made as racially and culturally neutral as possible. Better outcomes for African-American children were specified as a goal. One of the recommended strategies to achieve that goal is to encourage the use of family relatives as legal guardians as a form of permanent placement in order to keep the child in the extended family.

The Stakeholders Group has done an excellent job of mapping out the universe of child welfare services reform. The next question is whether they can chart a route that will lead to meaningful results. The answer may depend on whether the union can work with other child advocacy groups to use the results of the study to hold the state Department of Social Services and county boards of supervisors' feet to the fire to make changes.