Chairman Cryan, Vice Chairwoman Oliver and Members of the Committee:

Thank you for the opportunity to update you on our child welfare reform efforts. As you know, in July, Governor Corzine signed legislation you enacted creating the Department of Children and Families, which is enabling us to sharpen our focus. The Governor also reached a settlement this summer with Children’s Rights, resolving their pending contempt motion, and refocusing the reform on the fundamentals, including better outcomes for kids.

I would like to update you on our efforts to lower caseloads, improve training, increase the number of foster families, achieve 1,100 adoptions this calendar year for children who are legally free, and reduce the number of children in out-of-home placement outside New Jersey.

As the first chart indicates, 2006 brought an historic surge in referrals of child abuse and neglect, which had a direct impact on caseloads statewide. Many of these referrals appear to coincide with improved reporting from schools and health care institutions.

As of this summer, we employed 2,155 active caseload carrying staff throughout DYFS, in the permanency and intake units within our local DYFS offices. This does not include 35 staff on leave and excludes 75 new DYFS trainees who are in pre-service training and have not yet started to carry a caseload. We are implementing significant caseload reductions across the board between now and December 2008, according to a timeframe established in the new settlement agreement with Children’s Rights. We are tracking caseloads office by office, and reporting that data quarterly on our Web site. Over the next several months, we will be hiring more frontline workers and are also working to improve staff retention. So far this year, attrition among our frontline staff is down from 15.1% in 2005 to 12.8% as of August. Last month, we hired 70 trainees, and experienced 14 departures, yielding a net increase of 56 frontline staff for the month of September.

Training our staff is critically important and our Pre-Service Training program for new workers now includes a mandatory module on abuse and neglect investigative training. We initiate four new classes of recruits every month. The program involves 176 hours of training: 32 classroom days and 20 field instruction days. Our new are staff matched with special field training supervisors who coordinate the development of new staff with our training academy.

We’ve re-established our ties to the higher education community with some promising first year results. Twenty-three of our staff are enrolled in our new Public Child Welfare Intensive Weekend Master Program at Rutgers School of Social Work. The program is an intensive weekend program where current DYFS employees earn their M.S.W. degree within three years and agree to continue their work at DYFS for another two years upon receiving their degree.

In addition, 73 new DYFS fellows are enrolled in our Baccalaureate Child Welfare Education Program at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. These are college seniors who are majoring in social work, are receiving a stipend, attending special classes geared toward child welfare and participating in a yearlong internship at DYFS. Students graduate and make a commitment to work at DYFS for at least two years.

And 25 of our staff are enrolled in Montclair State University’s model Child Advocacy Certification Program. The Certificate in Child Advocacy (post B.A.) is a 15 credit program, with specialized, multi-disciplinary courses created for employees working in our child welfare system.

We are working to increase the number of foster families, which involves an intensive, office-by-office focus, and a meaningful collaboration between our licensing staff and our resource family support staff at the local level. The last page of charts shows that through September, the indications are promising. In August and September, we licensed 114 new homes each month and our net gain for the year is, so far, 103 families. We still have an enormous amount of work to do in each of our offices to hit our targets and create more family homes for our kids, but we are on the right track.

More than 2,200 children within our care are legally free for adoption and waiting to be adopted by their new forever families. Office-by-office, we’re making a concerted push to meet our target of 1,100 adoptions by December 31, 2006. We have reached 761 adoptions for children through August, which represents 69% of our December target. Because of the disruption to adoption practice over the last two years, the task at hand is a challenge – we’ve had to rebuild our tracking systems, our specialization practice and our select home matching process. We also continue to make headway on moving our adoption cases into specialty practice units in every office, a key strategy to achieving 1400 adoptions in calendar year 2007.

The final chart reports that so far this year we have decreased the number of children in out-of-home placements residing out of state, down from 325 children in February to 288 children in September. This is a difficult standard to maintain because of the scarcity of appropriate resources for children with serious emotional disorders in our densely populated state, but it deserves and receives our focused attention and management. Later this year, we will be issuing Requests for Proposals to expand the number of program slots in New Jersey for children with serious emotional disorders, including dually diagnosed children with developmental disabilities and behavioral health needs.

The challenges before us are many, and we will continue to need your partnership in order for reform to succeed. We are making steady and incremental progress to strengthen this system for children and families, and I believe we are on the right track.

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