Somerset Home for Temporarily Displaced Children
Jeffrey Fetzko, ACSW, LSW, CFRE
Vol. 4, No. 15, July 27, 2006
The Executive Director's News is published every two weeks, specifically for the employees of the Somerset Home. This issue and past issues are available on our web site at http://www.somersethome.org/main/pages/employee_newsletter.htm.
Major Changes to the New Jersey Child Welfare System
This issue summarizes sweeping structural and policy changes to New Jersey's child welfare system.
Commissioner Kevin Ryan and legislators applaud after Governor Corzine signed the law creating the new Department of Child and Family Services (DCF)
Corzine Makes Child Welfare a Cabinet Department
Mr. Corzine said that by removing child welfare from the Department of Human Services and elevating it to the status of a separate department, he hoped to give its newly appointed director, Kevin Ryan, the authority to make sweeping changes.
“Aggressive reform of this system requires a degree of focus that simply is not possible under the current structure,” Mr. Corzine said as he signed the new law during a ceremony in the State House.
For more than a decade, governors have been frustrated in trying to fix a welfare agency rattled by a parade of ghastly cases of children abused or killed while they were under state supervision.
Mr. Ryan, who as the state’s child advocate for the past two years pressured state officials to provide more resources, said that Mr. Corzine’s actions had helped the negotiations to settle the court case. He expressed confidence that the reorganization would avert a court takeover.
Mr. Ryan said that the state had recently published a 12-month turnaround plan that concentrated on protecting children by strengthening their families and that would serve as a blueprint for his policy changes. He also pledged to help trim the 13 percent turnover rate among caseworkers by offering them better training and lower caseloads.
Above all, he said, he would help the caseworkers, who perform a difficult job in frequently dangerous circumstances, by providing them with “the basics” — logistical support and clear guidelines.
“The least that we owe them,” he said, “is clarity about our expectations.”
The new DCF web site is http://www.state.nj.us/dcf/
New Jersey Settles with Children's Rights
Marcia Lowery (Children's Rights/plaintiff), NJ Governor Corzine, NJ DCF Commissioner Kevin Ryan and Judith Meltzer (Court Appointed Monitor) (left to right) at the settlement announcement
Department of Children and Families Sets New Course for Child Welfare System
Read the full modified settlement agreement
Summary of New Settlement Agreement
New Jersey’s Department of Children and Families (DCF) is pleased to have reached a new, modified agreement in the lawsuit filed by Children’s Right. This new agreement better supports child welfare reform by:
* focusing on the fundamentals
by prioritizing key first steps, including reductions in caseloads, workforce
development, and management by data;
* incorporating the best thinking of New Jersey stakeholders and frontline
workers and supervisors, which inspired changes in adoption practice, resource
family development, services, and placements;
* supporting a collaborative relationship with a single Monitor of the settlement
agreement, allowing the State increased flexibility to make improvements and
adjustments when needed; and
* establishing accountability on outcomes for children and families, rather
than on a crushing checklist of more than two hundred legally enforceable
tasks.
In the context of this litigation, the creation of the new cabinet level Department of Children and Families, which elevates child welfare issues to the highest level of government, and the building of a new executive team, were important signals of how serious Governor Corzine is about child welfare reform.
These concrete commitments by the Governor and DCF Commissioner Kevin Ryan convinced Children’s Rights to take a step back from litigation and allow the State the time and flexibility necessary to construct a sound foundation for long-lasting reform.
Since 2003, New Jersey has struggled to comply with an ambitious settlement agreement, which all initially hoped would achieve better outcomes for children and families. But that agreement transformed into an exhaustive list of legally enforceable demands that dictated virtually every area of child welfare practice; eliminated most of the state’s discretion and flexibility; constrained experimentation; and inadvertently created competition for resources and focus between very fundamental, cornerstone issues and secondary and tertiary areas of development. It also moved critical responsibility for oversight and planning to an expert panel and away from the State.
The end result was exactly the opposite of what everyone had hoped – rather than moving reform forward, progress stalled While small improvements in safety were achieved, critical areas, such as adoption, slid alarmingly backward. Children’s Rights was so dissatisfied with the State’s performance on the enforceables that in December 2005 they filed a motion to hold the State in contempt. With the advent of a new administration and the naming of a new leadership team, Children’s Rights agreed to allow the Corzine Administration time to diagnosis the state’s child welfare system and develop a turnaround plan before re-negotiating a modified settlement agreement.
Commissioner Ryan and his leadership team convened a group of staff and stakeholders to work together to diagnose the critical issues and construct solutions to provide the foundation for a new modified agreement.
The New Agreement
The new modified agreement is divided into two phases. The first phase, which runs from July 2006 and through December 2008, focuses on the fundamentals, including continued improvements in the development of data and institutional investigations. The second phase, which begins in January 2009, looks for return on the investments in Phase I and focuses on outcomes. Phase I references ten key areas of practice, including:
Development of a New Case Practice Model: design a new case practice model that allows the State to synthesize best practices and test different approaches to better serve children and families.
Fundamental Training: prioritize training for new frontline staff, new supervisors, and investigators, while phasing in the development of in-service training for existing staff, beginning with concurrent planning, which supports improved permanency practices, and training in new data and management tools, such as Safe Measures and NJ Spirit.
Critical Services, including Healthcare: improve delivery of critical services that help keep families together, reunite families that are separated, address the well-being of children in out of home care, and help foster families and adoptive families provide for our children. Key stakeholders and staff have identified several structural barriers, highlighting the need to develop new policies and practices to improve service delivery, and the importance of making concrete commitments to expand services in critical areas.
Placements: change the focus from eliminating out-of-state placements to placing children close to home and where the child’s individual needs are best met. In some cases, this means sound placement practice could result in a placement in Pennsylvania or a facility that provides highly specialized services not currently available in New Jersey. As with critical services, this priority action responds to feedback from well-informed stakeholders.
Caseloads: continue new State investments in staff in order to achieve caseloads that are manageable and support good practice. Recent and extensive analysis of our staffing records, data and management will allow us to target future staffing and placement to address staffing shortfalls and caseload issues by local DYFS office.
Adoption: invest in developing local adoption expertise in every office and create impact teams to address the alarming backlog of children awaiting permanency. This priority will reverse the previous settlement mandate to eliminate specialized adoption practice and, instead, support specialized practice in each local DYFS office.
Recruiting and Licensing Foster and Pre-adoptive Families: links the efforts of resource family recruiters and support staff more closely to licensing in order to transform the welcome recent surge in applications into a wider pool of available families for our children.
Management by Data: implement and support Governor Corzine’s broader initiative of “government under glass” by collecting and making public critical child welfare indicators.
Phase II begins in January 2009 and is divided into three parts:
* Outcome indicators:
Targets safety, permanency, and stable and appropriate placements for children.
* Performance indicators: Targets achieving reasonable caseload standards;
executing timely investigations; supporting a sufficient pool of resource
families; ensuring visitation for children with parents, siblings, and caseworkers;
and maintaining high quality in healthcare, adoption, and overall case practice.
* Advanced practice: Targets development of improved practices in contracting,
quality improvement, and needs assessment, while requiring maintenance of
high levels of practice in the areas of resource families and workforce development.
The measurement of the performance and outcome indicators will begin in June 2009 with the first Phase II report from the Monitor expected in early 2010. If the State achieves its targets and sustains achievement, the lawsuit can be dismissed at any time after 2010.
Finally, the agreement also streamlines the dispute resolution process and reconstructs the monitoring role to make it more collaborative and less constrictive.
Beyond the Agreement
This agreement represents the realization that reform must begin with the fundamentals, that the house needs a foundation, long before you can build the rest of the structure, put on the roof and declare the house – and the reform – accomplished. This agreement is not an end and further represents only part of what must be a larger plan to deliver on the promise of safety, well-being, and permanency for New Jersey’s children.
The leadership team at DCF wants to thank all of our staff and the many, many stakeholders who helped us diagnose the issues, formulate a turnaround plan for enduring reform and build a vision and commitment for keeping children safe and families strong in New Jersey.
Task force targets juvenile program
Report urges putting commission under new Department of Children and Families
The Juvenile Justice Commission, an independent authority that operates more than two dozen facilities and programs for delinquent kids, would be more effective if it merged into the new Department of Children and Families, according to a governor's task force.
In a soon-to-be-released report, the task force notes that one in three juvenile offenders is the victim of abuse or neglect, and two in three suffer from a mental illness. They would benefit from the department's access to hundreds of millions of dollars for treatment and rehabilitation programs, writes the Governor's Policy Advisory Council on Human Services Restructuring.
Gov. Jon Corzine will have the final say on whether to adopt the recommendations.
The commission operates independently within the Department of Law and Public Safety. It has an annual budget of $160 million, employs 1,800 people and operates five detention facilities, including two medium-security centers, 15 group homes, and seven day programs for juveniles on probation.
The suggestion to consolidate juvenile justice programs inside the new children's department was made "strongly and unanimously" by the council, consisting of 22 health and social service advocates and professionals.
Somerset Home News
Whitney House Deck Project Begins
On Thursday July 20th we broke ground for our newest construction project. Deck-Pros, our contractor expects the project to be finished in a couple of weeks.
Summer "Spruce Up" Project Begins
When we finished constructing the Passages building sixteen years ago we realized the Brahma House program needed a lot of work to make it as nice as our new program and ultimately proposed a $600,000 renovation.
Similarly, after finishing My Place and Whitney House we took a fresh look at Passages and Brahma House and thought, "these facilities could really use a little sprucing up". And so we have officially embarked on our "Summer Spruce Up Project". We have compiled a list of things to be done including, cleaning, painting, furniture replacement, flooring, carpeting, blinds and a million other things. I look forward to everyone helping with this project!
As always, thank you all for your continued hard work on behalf of our youth.
