New Hampshire’s Division for Children, Youth and Families has seen its funding swell, its allotted employee positions rise, and its status in the Legislature jump to the highest priority.
But one problem still persists: Caseloads for its employees remain stubbornly high.
Even as state health officials race to build up the burdened agency and attract new talent, the workload for its employees has stayed near the same level since January 2018 – and far above the national standard.
Last July, DCYF assessment workers – those who investigate and follow up on allegations – faced over 40 new assessments each, according to the agency. That means each of the then-112 assessment workers had an average of slightly more than 40 assessments open at once on the last day of that month.
High workloads are problematic in any social services agency. A backlog of assessments can mean a delay in action in life and death cases and less time for those who finally do investigate to check out every lead. New Hampshire officials have been trying to reduce New Hampshire’s workload for years.
But this January, despite efforts to boost staff levels and fund services, assessment workers still faced an average of 38 open assessments, DCYF Director Joe Ribsam said in an interview Friday. That baseline number has not improved much since January 2018, in which assessment loads also hovered around 40 per worker.
The Child Welfare League of America, a non-profit governmental organization based in Washington, D.C., recommends an average caseload of 12.
Department officials say the continuing high workload reflects a transition period as the agency works to incorporate its new resources.
They say it dovetails with a surge of incoming reports of abuse last year that has surpassed previous years. They argue it’s partly a function of slow training time – new assessment workers are unavailable for months as they train up. And they say the picture will improve as hiring at the agency picks up.
“The caseload numbers are kind of a lagging indicator behind the hiring numbers,” said Ribsam in follow-up interview Monday. “You should expect to see a corresponding decrease.”
Still, New Hampshire’s stagnant figures come in the face of an effort to reduce the caseload to 12, a priority that some larger states like New York and New Jersey have achieved. And they persist despite $6 million in two-year funding to grow the agency approved by the Legislature and Gov. Chris Sununu in June.
Department of Health and Human Services officials say they have made strides to fill a slew of new DCYF positions created by the Legislature last year.
In June, Senate Bill 6 activated the $6 million to create 36 of those positions. That included nine supervisor positions and 27 child protective service workers for the first year of the law, with an additional 30 positions set to be created in July 2020.
As of this week, the child services agency had hired a net total of 31 positions since the new money came in, Ribsam said Monday. The allotted child protective service workers were evenly split between assessment workers – who investigate initial reports – and family services workers, who work with families the agency is helping.
Yet despite those hires, agency officials have been hit by high turnover, a powerful headwind that has slowed its expansion. DCYF hired a total of 73 people since June, Ribsam said – but 37 left during that same period, creating new vacancies. Further vacancies were created by 14 child protective service workers who were promoted – some to the new supervisor positions and others elsewhere, Ribsam said.
In the end, despite making 73 hires, the department only netted 31. Still, Ribsam said it was progress.
“We’ve been hiring at an incredibly rapid pace,” he said. “Seventy-three people in the past seven or eight months is pretty impressive and better than you’d see anywhere else. It’s just a complicated thing to hire the right people for these very complicated and challenging jobs.”
Attracting social workers to New Hampshire can be hampered by lower relative pay and negative perceptions about the department, officials argued Monday. One additional factor: the high caseloads.
As officials argue they are making headway in hiring, some lawmakers have expressed frustration at the pace of progress. In a letter addressed to Gov. Chris Sununu and DHHS Commissioner Lori Shibinette Monday, Democratic Sen. Jon Morgan took aim at the department for not making its hires faster.
Morgan and other Senate Democrats have criticized a request by the Department of Health and Human Services this month to transfer a portion of funds meant to hire DCYF employees into other funds. In a Feb. 14 request to the state Fiscal Committee, DHHS asked to transfer $1.9 million meant for DCYF personnel to other accounts.
That $1.9 million would have gone to social workers’ salaries had certain positions been filled. Shibinette defended the move, arguing that the money transferred only affects the past salaries for positions that weren’t filled, not future salaries for any applicants. And she said not transferring the money would have caused it to lapse back into the general fund if it weren’t used by the end of the year.
But Morgan said that it was a sign that the department should be hiring faster.
“It was the inaction in the first place that led to that money being there in that account,” he said in an interview. “If we had been adequately prepared to take action against this crisis, that money would not be sitting there.”
Shibinette pushed back on the characterization.
“On the cont rary, I think that we have made great progress,” she said. She pointed to the workload in 2016 – more than 90 cases per assessment worker – and said the 31 net hires were a sign of forward momentum.
“I think what’s not helpful is there’s on a regular basis incorrect information being circulated across the state,” she said. “That creates problems for DCYF and recruitment and retention. When we have to constantly correct misinformation, it has the ability to impact morale. And it becomes very cyclical.”
(Ethan DeWitt can be reached at edewitt@cmonitor.com, at (603) 369-3307, or on Twitter at @edewittNH.)