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| Officials: Child Abuse Allegations Swamping State Investigators
By John Finnerty
Sharon Herald
April 20, 2018
http://www.sharonherald.com/news/officials-child-abuse-allegations-swamping-state-investigators/article_f982a703-dba8-523f-8ec3-b4883bb0a2f4.html
Advocates and county officials await a promised action plan from Auditor General Eugene DePasquale for fixing the state’s struggling child protection system.
Susan Woods, a spokesperson for the auditor general, said those recommendations are expected in mid-May.
The system is challenged by the state’s push to make sure abuse doesn’t get ignored in the wake of the molestation scandal that put former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky in prison.
That push has left county caseworkers swamped with tips, said Brian Bornman, executive director of the Pennsylvania Children and Youth Administrators.
While the number of cases of suspected child abuse has spiked in the wake of law changes intended to help better protect kids, the number of cases of actual abuse verified by investigators hasn’t increased nearly as much, Bornman said.
In 2016, there were 44,359 allegations of suspected child abuse passed along to the state, almost double the 26,352 allegations made in 2012, according to Department of Human Services reports. Almost 40,000 of the tips received in 2016 didn’t lead to a finding of abuse by county investigators.
The state Department of Human Services is planning to release its 2017 data on child abuse on May 1, Colin Day, an agency spokesperson, said Thursday.
County officials want the state to come up with a better way of quickly recognizing what is actual abuse, so the time and energy needs for full-blown abuse investigations don’t get squandered, Bornman said.
Bornman said he wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the state saw even more reports of alleged child abuse in 2017 than it did in 2016.
The issue of correctly characterizing whether a report seems like abuse is also important because abuse allegations taint the way the family will interact with the county caseworkers, Bornman said.
People accused of abuse are read their Miranda rights and are required to notify their employer that they’ve been accused of child abuse if they work with children, he said.
On the other hand, if caseworkers approach a family believing that the accusation falls short of abuse, they will be there in more of a supporting role, Bornman said.
“It’s much less confrontational,” he said.
Bornman said he hopes that changes intended to solve the problem will be included in the follow-up report promised DePasquale. The auditor general released an initial report last fall that found that the child protection system in the state has been overwhelmed by the spike in reports, complicated by increased demands from families ravaged by the state’s opioid abuse epidemic.
His conclusion, shared in a briefing with lawmakers on the House Children and Youth Committee, was clear: “Pennsylvania’s child welfare system is broken. This is not an exaggeration.”
After DePasquale released the September report, he traveled the state to continue discussing his findings with those involved in child protection and began working on an action plan to fix the child welfare system.
“I’ll be curious to hear what Eugene’s report says,” said Cathleen Palm, founder of the Center for Children’s Justice.
DePasquale’s initial report brought attention to the problems facing the child protection system, but it didn’t reveal a lot of new data to quantify how bad things are statewide, Palm said.
The auditor general is not the only person who’s been working to reform the system, Palm said.
State health officials used Gov. Tom Wolf’s opioid emergency declaration to order hospitals to begin quickly notifying the state when they treat babies born with drugs in their system.
That will allow state and county officials to more rapidly discern when there are spikes in drug activity and what drugs are involved, she said.
Beyond the danger to newborns, the drug activity is also often linked to abuse and neglect in children whose parents are addicted, she said.
Wolf’s 2018-19 budget calls for a $44 million increase to the $1.18 billion the state directed to the counties for child welfare this year.
The governor has also proposed spending $4 million specifically to expand home visiting programs to allow professionals to coach parents in opioid-ravaged communities and another $2 million to increase funding for Community-Based Family Centers and the Nurse-Family Partnership program, according to information provided by Wolf’s office on Thursday.
In addition, the state House this week passed legislation that would create kinship navigator program to help grandparents caring for their grandchildren understand what kind of help is available to them. Bornman said he thinks the navigator program legislation would benefit if the state would add some dollars to cover the cost of legal advice for grandparents. The House also passed a bill that would allow grandparents to standby guardians if their children are in drug rehab.
Both measures now await action in the Senate.
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