May 30, 2016 3 min read

It’s frustrating enough when you’re placed on hold for yawning stretches of time when you call a toll-free number after your laptop has gone on the fritz or your flat screen is displaying nothing but fuzz.

But it pushes the boundaries of frustration – and could well be fatal – if you’re trying to get through on a child-abuse hotline and waiting … and waiting … and waiting … and waiting. Or, even worse, your call is dropped because the system is overloaded with too many other callers.

That, unfortunately, is what has been happening with Pennsylvania’s ChildLine, the Department of Human Services’ hotline. According to an ongoing evaluation by Auditor General Eugene DePasquale and his office, it was found 42,000 calls to ChildLine went unanswered in 2015. That’s 22 percent of all calls made to the hotline.

Half of those were deflected because the queue used by ChildLine can only handle 30 calls at a time. On average, ChildLine gets 20 calls per hour, per day.

Wait times were also excruciatingly long for some callers. According to a preliminary report, one caller waited 51 minutes before they could get through to a caseworker, while another hung on the line for 53 minutes before bailing out.

In a news conference at the state Capitol last week, DePasquale explained “it is very possible that something happened to a child” thanks to the calls that went unanswered. “But we have no way of knowing that one way or another, and that’s our biggest problem.”

Some of the increase in calls to ChildLine is likely being driven by changes in state law regarding the protection of children that were put in place following the Jerry Sandusky scandal. The list of mandated reporters of child abuse in Pennsylvania is lengthy, encompassing police and teachers, along with clergy, library personnel, funeral directors and adults in other professions, and it’s possible some were calling ChildLine with questions about their role or training opportunities they could take advantage of. Nevertheless, that so many calls went unanswered when lives could have been at stake is disturbing.

The Wolf administration has said that it inherited the problems with ChildLine from the regime of Gov. Tom Corbett and, according to the audit, the number of unanswered calls had fallen to 12 percent in March of this year. Like the long lines at airports in recent weeks, which can be blamed on underfunding in the face of increased demands, ChildLine has been buckling under the strain of too few workers and too many callers.

According to the audit, ChildLine was never adequately or fully staffed at any point in 2015, and many employees were forced to work overtime in order to deal with the onslaught of calls.

The Wolf administration is asking for $1.8 million to improve ChildLine. Though the Legislature seems locked in a permanently adversarial relationship with the governor, this is one area where they should give ground. As DePasquale said last week, “While strengthening laws to combat child abuse was a critical achievement, not providing the funding to enforce those laws was a disturbing failure.”