RELEASE: June 8, 2004

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Commissioner Davy Outlines Sweeping, Statewide Effort to Reduce DYFS Caseloads

“Full-court press” plan would bring New Jersey 's caseloads to among the nation's lowest

Department of Human Services Commissioner James Davy today announced an 18-month plan to drastically reduce the caseloads of Division of Youth and Family Services staff and bring caseloads ratios in New Jersey to among the lowest in the nation.

The caseload reduction plan was submitted to the New Jersey Child Welfare Panel yesterday. It is a key part of the final draft of the child welfare reform plan that will be submitted to the panel today. The Panel is expected to approve the plan and submit it to the federal court tomorrow

“High caseloads are the source of many, many problems in the child welfare system,” said Davy. “I felt we had to do something major, something comprehensive—like a full-court press -- to clear the path for reform.”

Under the initiative, DYFS will hire 160 new caseworkers and begin dispatching “impact teams” of experienced social workers to offices across the state to help investigate new child abuse and neglect reports and close thousands of backlogged cases. In addition, DYFS will also contract with an outside agency to assist on the final work of cases already targeted for closing and to identify additional cases that could be safely closed.

Four counties – Camden , Essex, Mercer and Passaic – are scheduled to have every element of the reform plan up and running by January 2005. Camden , Essex and Mercer will be among the first counties targeted in the caseload reduction efforts, along with Gloucester , Davy said.

The plan announced by Davy today calls for hiring 160 new caseworkers in early July so they can be trained and assigned to various DYFS offices to help reduce the caseloads of veteran workers. Another 221 caseworkers will be hired later in the budget year.

At the same time, DYFS will redeploy 57 experienced workers to serve on “impact teams” that will be dispatched to various offices statewide. These teams will relieve DYFS workers in two ways:

Some will be assigned to intake – investigating allegations of abuse or neglect – to allow workers in that office to focus on managing their existing cases. Others will work to close cases on children who appear to be safe yet whose case files remain open because workers have been unable to complete paperwork and other requirements.

DYFS will also contract with an outside agency, PRN, which has offices in Pennsylvania and New Jersey , to assist on the case closing initiative. The value of the contract is $738,000 over the next year.

The agency will provide temporary social workers to relieve DYFS workers by conducting collateral contacts on cases; making visits to children whose cases were targeted for closure; and evaluating risk factors for children under supervision to identify additional cases that could be safely closed.

Davy stressed that PRN will work exclusively to close old cases that are lingering in the system.

“We began a special project early this year, paying workers and supervisors overtime to close such cases,” Davy said. “Yet, even as we closed more than 20,000 cases, we could not keep pace with the number of new cases that we opened. We must make a more concerted effort. And we must work on controlling the number of new cases.”

One measure that should help reduce the intake of new cases is the centralized screening center that is scheduled to open next month. Currently, calls during business hours are received and evaluated locally, and standards sometimes differ from one place to another, Davy said.

With centralized screening, all calls to DYFS will be evaluated using the same standards, and allegations that do not rise to the level of abuse or neglect will be referred to other agencies.

“For the past year, we have shown a tendency to open cases that would not have been considered before,” Davy said. “This has to stop. Opening these questionable cases does not protect children. It actually puts them at risk because the system gets bogged down and caseworkers cannot spend enough time working with the families who really need them.”

The Child Welfare Reform Plan is largely unchanged from a draft that was submitted in mid-May. The major additions are the plan to close the Arthur Brisbane Child Treatment Center by the end of 2005 and new timelines and benchmarks for achieving various goals.

The plan will establish caseload standards that are among the lowest – if not the lowest – in the nation, Davy said.

The reform plan also outlines sweeping changes to the entire child welfare system, such as:

• Development of community partnerships to foster a network of child abuse prevention and family support services;
• Expansion of, and increased access to, children's behavioral health services;
• Better recruitment, retention and support of foster and adoptive parents;
• A larger and better trained DYFS casework staff; and
• A new case practice model that calls for trained forensic investigators to assess new allegations of child abuse and neglect, permanency workers to provide ongoing services to at-risk families, and two new categories of workers who will specialize in serving adolescents and supporting foster and adoptive families.

The child welfare reform plan calls for investigators to take on no more than eight new cases per month, or 12 cases total, while permanency workers should be supervising no more than 15 families, Davy said.

DYFS' office structure will also be reorganized, establishing 46 district offices that will be supervised by 15 “area” offices that encompass either a single county or a multiple-county region corresponding to the Superior Court vicinages. The first four area offices will open in January 2005 in Essex , Passaic , Mercer and Camden counties.

The goal is to achieve the caseload standards for 95 percent of the permanency workers in those four counties by June 2005. Interim benchmarks will be established as well. For example, the goal is to reduce the caseload for 95 percent of the permanency workers in those counties to 20 families or less by January 2005.

The second phase of the initiative will target Cumberland , Gloucester , Hudson, Middlesex, Monmouth, Ocean and Salem counties. In those counties, the goal is to reduce the caseload for 95 percent of the permanency workers by September 2005.

In the remaining 10 counties – Atlantic , Bergen , Burlington , Cape May , Hunterdon, Morris, Somerset , Sussex , Union and Warren – the goal is to reduce the caseload for 95 percent of the permanency workers by January 2006.

For investigators, the caseload target will be achieved statewide by August 2005.

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