Auditor general discusses burgeoning CYS caseloads due to opioid epidemic
State Auditor General Eugene DePasquale, visiting Washington Thursday, addressed the high turnover rate and difficulty recruiting child services caseworkers at a time when the opioid epidemic has jeopardized the safety of a record number of children.
“We recently met with the state Civil Service Commission with the objective of writing a more accurate job description” for social workers, he said. The job description has not been updated since the early 1980s.
Basic information, such as working with children and the child welfare system, must be added to the job description because agencies like Washington County Children and Youth Services “are not able to get the type of talent in the door that they want to make sure our children are protected,” DePasquale said.
Washington County officials, faced with high job turnover rates at CYS, want the civil service test to be administered locally instead of requiring job seekers to go to Pittsburgh. The local agency currently has 12 vacant caseworker positions.
According to Kimberly Rogers, CYS administrator, during the most recent quarter, the agency served an average of 1,463 children and 775 families per month.
CYS receives more than 4,000 calls concerning children each year. In the first part of its fiscal year, which encompasses July through December 2017, the agency received an average of 340 reports per month, up 12 percent from the same period in 2015.
Forty-four percent of all cases accepted for services during fiscal year 2016-17 involved parental substance abuse.
“The state has not given additional funding to the CYS offices, so the strain at the county level is growing more severe, and it’s got to be addressed,” DePasquale said after the closed meeting at Courthouse Square.
Commission Chairman Larry Maggi, who was among the officials who met with DePasquale, said afterward, “being a policeman, a former trooper, I used to go with” CYS caseworkers who investigated horrific circumstances of child abuse.
What the public doesn’t realize about the caseworker’s job, he said, is that “if you go into a person’s home to take somebody’s child, you’ve got to get them to sign 50 pieces of paper.”
When DePasquale first audited the statewide ChildLine hotline for reporting suspected abuse and neglect, he found a 25 percent error rate and 42,000 unanswered phone calls. He said the error rate is now under 2 percent.