RELEASE: May 7, 2004

Previous Screen

DYFS Office Restructuring under Child Welfare Reform Plan to Begin in Four Counties

A more integrated, effective child welfare system will debut in January 2005 in Essex, Passaic, Mercer and Camden counties, counties deemed “high need” after an evaluation of the child welfare caseload, Human Services Commissioner James Davy announced today.

New offices of the Division of Youth and Family Services will be developed in each of the counties to implement sweeping changes outlined in the child welfare reform plan that will be submitted to a federal judge next month. Today, Davy released a new draft of the plan that had been given to members of an expert panel overseeing the
reform effort.

“The reform process will not be completed overnight. But we must get to the families and areas in need, and we will do it with some urgency,” Davy said. “We want the reforms to reach the greatest number of children in the shortest time possible. So we will fully implement the elements of our reform plan in four high-need areas.”

The child welfare reform plan proposes an overhaul of DYFS’ network of offices. More than 40 district offices will be created and organized under 15 “area” offices. These area offices will encompass a relatively small geographic area – either a county or a multiple-county region matching New Jersey’s Superior Court vicinages.

These area offices will have:

• The capacity to train and retrain workers on state-of-the-art case practice;
• The staff to support the recruitment and support of hundreds of new resource families;
• Staff from our two new divisions, Behavioral Health and Prevention and Community Partnerships, to fully integrate those new entities into our work with communities;
• Links with active community collaboratives to shape and direct local services.

The new district offices will have:

• Specialized forensic investigator/intake units;
• Workers using a one-worker/one-family model (meaning once a case is out of intake a permanency worker takes over until the case is resolved either through adoption, ongoing supervision or reunification);
• Special workers specifically devoted to serving aging out youth and providing support to resource families;
• A police officer on site to assist in investigations;
• A nurse on site to handle medical screenings and to ensure that the medical needs of children are assessed and addressed.

“Our new district offices will be fully integrated, full service, family-centered offices that are located where the needs are greatest,” Davy said. “It’s important for us to be in the neighborhoods, because we need to develop relationships. We are going to assign cases on a geographic basis, and we are going to dramatically reduce each
individual worker’s caseload. So we will certainly expect our workers to build tight relationships not only with the families on their caseload but in the community.

“We will continue to move forward with key elements of the plan throughout the state, but we have to start somewhere with the full complement of reform elements – and we have decided to go where the numbers tell us the needs are most acute.”

The remaining area offices will be phased in, with five offices opening in July 2005 and the final six offices in January 2006.

Other elements of the reform plan will go statewide right away, particularly in the critical area of training.

All DYFS supervisors and workers are being trained in Structured Decision Making, a series of research-supported tools that enable workers to better identify and address risks to children. That training is underway and will be completed by August.

Training in family team meetings will begin in August. These meetings, along with Structured Decision Making, are case practice cornerstones of the entire reform effort.

“We also are working, through our training academy, to develop a training curriculum for all DYFS management and for conducting forensic investigations,” Davy said. “This fall, we will begin training in both of those areas.”

Meanwhile, steps are underway to bring caseloads down to manageable levels and give workers greater resources. For example:

• 72 new caseworkers and 78 case aides were hired last month. Another 219 caseworkers and 84 aides in the budget year that begins in July.
• Centralized screening of child abuse and neglect allegations and a statewide toll-free hotline for reporting child maltreatment will be established in July.
• Nurses will be hired and assigned to every district office in the state by July.
• Human Services police officers will be hired and assigned to every district office and every Institutional Abuse Investigations Unit. Hiring of new officers will begin shortly and will be completed by July 2005.

In the area of children’s behavioral health:

• Mobile response services will be expanded to cover Passaic, Mercer and Middlesex counties by the end of this month. The service will be available statewide by August 2005.
• The state will also add more than 90 contracted youth case managers in the current budget year and Fiscal Year 2005. Some of the youth case managers will be stationed at juvenile detention centers – as they already are in Camden County and Union County – to ensure that children in detention have access to behavioral health services.

###