Feb 25, 2018 4 min read

It’s a statistic that will never cease to amaze me.

As of 2017, roughly 11 percent of all babies in Washington County are born drug-addicted.

Eleven percent. That’s one baby out of every 10 starting life by battling debilitating drug withdrawal.

And yet Washington County Children & Youth Services – like most other child-welfare agencies across the state – has been plagued with turnover and hiring difficulties, leading to as many as 20 vacancies at one time.

This story is just one that I’ve heard in the past few months as I’ve toured the state following the release of my 80-page special report titled “State of the Child,” which evaluated how the commonwealth’s child-welfare system is functioning.

As part of the year-long review, my team interviewed nearly 130 people involved with all levels of the child-welfare system, from state officials to county workers to families who have been involved with the system.

What I found was appalling.

Pennsylvania spent nearly $2 billion in 2016 to protect children – and $1 billion of that came directly from state funds – yet 46 children died and 79 nearly died from abuse and neglect. What really concerns me is that nearly half of those children’s families were known to county Children and Youth Services agencies.

Pennsylvania’s child-welfare system is broken. This is not an exaggeration. And we must act now to fix it.

During my review, I determined that there is not enough support for those on the front lines working with at-risk children: CYS caseworkers, who assess children’s safety. My report highlighted five interlaced challenges that severely affect caseworkers’ ability to do their jobs:

• Difficulty hiring enough qualified caseworkers and
• Inadequate training for new hires leads to
• Caseworkers who are not equipped to deal with overbearing caseloads and tremendous paperwork they must handle.
• Add in remarkably low pay and the stress of facing dangerous situations, and the result is
• Breath-taking turnover rates – which, research has shown, are much less likely to lead to safe, permanent homes for children in the system.

I have now visited more than 10 county CYS agencies and talked with caseworkers, administrators, nonprofit leaders, district attorneys, coroners, county officials, private providers and more. Among the topics we have discussed:

• Challenges that arose in CYS agencies, particularly in 2015, in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky scandal. Major changes to the state’s Child Protective Services Law led to sudden and dramatic increases in the number of calls to ChildLine, the state’s child-abuse hotline, which resulted in an equivalent increase in workload and cases for CYS caseworkers.
• How the opioid crisis is putting yet another strain on CYS caseworkers as they strive to keep children safe. Without exception, caseworkers in every county have told me that the opioid crisis has dramatically increased caseloads and increasingly jeopardized child safety and well-being.
• How the ridiculous paperwork load – so much of which is redundant and duplicative – is preventing caseworkers from being able to spend the time they need in the field, with the families they are trying to help. Caseworkers have told us that, for every one hour with a family, they can spend up to three or four hours doing paperwork.

Though I offered 17 recommendations in the “State of the Child,” I am currently working on an action plan to be released this spring, which will focus on specific measures and steps that CYS agencies and the state can implement to keep Pennsylvania’s at-risk children safer.

It’s important to recognize that a large part of keeping these children safe rests upon providing adequate resources for CYS caseworkers, who are facing increasingly complex family situations. Among those increased complexities is dealing with drug-addicted newborns such as the ones in Washington County.

I’ve also heard plenty of stories about caseworkers being confronted by caregivers with guns or encountering meth labs during a home visit.

Being a children-and-youth caseworker is an extremely difficult and stressful job, and our dedicated workers should be forced to toil in the shadows no longer.

CYS employees work to create and sustain healthy families, the very backbone of our society. It is long past time they were given the resources and assistance they need to do their jobs – and do them well – so that no child dies from abuse or neglect.