Analysis: Arizona child welfare agency still needs changes
Jun 30, 2015, 4:02 PM | Updated: 4:02 pm
PHOENIX — A new analysis released Tuesday showed Arizona’s overhauled child
welfare agency still needs major changes if it is to deal with rising caseloads,
a growing number of children in out-of-home care and mistrust among community
partners and the children it helps.
The report by the University of Chicago’s Chapin Hall Center for Children
contains a host of recommendations. The report found the agency has an
inadequate system for prioritizing calls to the Arizona Child Abuse Hotline and
investigations, puts too many children in foster care, and provides too few
support services. It also still has too few workers, the report said.
Overall, the report recommended a
comprehensive strategy that improves hotline and investigations responses while
adding services in an effort to cut the number of new cases. It also recommended
more interaction with police agencies on criminal cases, improving the court
system to move cases through the system faster and better outreach to the
community of childcare providers.
In a detailed response, agency Director Greg McKay said he agreed with many of
the recommendations and said some were already being implemented. He declined to
comment further.
Rep. Kate Brophy McGee, who sits on the Legislature’s Child safety Oversight
Committee, said the report was crucial to fixing the troubled agency.
“We have to know how bad this is in order to fix it,” the Phoenix Republican
said. “And in order to, rather than before.”
The study was required by a 2014 law that created the new Department of Child
Safety as a stand-alone agency. That law was prompted by after the discovery in
November 2013 that the state’s Child Protective Services agency had for several
years been improperly marking some calls to a hotline as not worthy of being
investigated.
The 2014 law boosted funding for the agency, adding positions to deal with a
huge backlog of cases and worker caseloads that were overwhelming staff. McKay,
named to lead the agency early this year by Gov. Doug Ducey, has yet to produce
a drop in caseloads, the backlog of the number of children in state care, which
now exceeds 17,000.
“We have to make this agency work. But that requires someone with a good
understanding of how this system works,” said Rep. Debbie McCune Davis (D-Phoenix). “And that’s what Chapin Hall brings to the table. What they are
doing is basically saying that what we’re doing isn’t working, which we know,
and that we need to do it in a way that people trust the system and engage in it
for the best interest of the kids.”