A recent federal policy brief on North Carolina’s past child welfare reform efforts didn’t mince words: “Children in North Carolina suffer the consequences of an inadequate child welfare system.”
But a sweeping bill that Gov. Josh Stein signed Thursday after unanimous passage last week by the General Assembly holds out hope for change.
The new Fostering Care in NC Act totally overhauls how social services are administered in North Carolina. It expands state oversight over county DSS agencies. Concurrently with its passage, the state Department of Health and Human Services began its rollout of a new case management system that will soon be mandated in all 100 counties.
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Those changes, by all accounts, are much needed.
A white paper published last week by DHHS called local social services agencies “overwhelmed and under resourced.”
The revamp is the state’s biggest step toward standardizing child welfare outcomes across all 100 counties. North Carolina funds a smaller portion of child welfare costs than in any other state. With counties solely responsible for administering services, the quality of care varies widely — and children facing abuse and neglect are often most at risk.
Carolina Public Press reported on counties’ inconsistent implementation of child welfare policies in its 2021 investigative series Patchwork Protection. A follow-up series, Dodging Standards, scrutinized hiring practices of county DSS agencies.
CPP has also reported extensively on individual or systemic cases that raised concerns, including children abused in foster care without the case being reported properly to law enforcement, improper adopting of children without notifying biological relatives and illegal seizure of children from families using fake documents on a systemic level over many years in Cherokee County.
Some of these cases have resulted in changes, as well as criminal and civil verdicts against DSS agencies. But questions about the lack of state oversight to compel compliance with legal and best practices have persisted.
The latest state-level changes aim to address many of the problems uncovered in previous reporting.
Expansion of state oversight for child welfare
Thursday morning, surrounded by a bipartisan group of lawmakers and a representative of DHHS’ child welfare division, Stein signed the Fostering Care in NC Act into law.
“I’m grateful for the progress that this bill represents in protecting our children, and I share all of your commitments to building on this work and continuing to improve it,” Stein said during his remarks ahead of the signing.
The bill is the first major legislation to address child welfare reform since Rylan’s Law in 2017. That bill, named for a Moore County toddler who died shortly after DSS reunited him with his birth mother, established a more strict procedure for reunification.
It also directed the state to create a more centralized child welfare system. DHHS opened seven regional offices — staffed by state-level employees — to improve supervision of local agencies, and it created corrective action plans to implement when counties failed to comply with state regulations.
Still, some of the worst abuses that CPP has reported on occurred or continued in spite of those modest reforms.
Lisa Cauley, who directs the human services division of DHHS, told CPP that the omnibus bill passed last week builds upon the reforms first introduced by Rylan’s Law.
The new law gives DHHS the authority to review child protective services cases, even if they have already been closed by the local agency.
Furthermore, when intake reports are not accepted for assessment by a county DSS agency, the individual who filed the report must be notified of the decision in writing. Appeals of a county’s decision may now be directed to DHHS for review.
“When a constituent doesn’t believe the right decisions have been made, it brings that to DHHS, which we have lots of people here who have done that work, who understand the screening tool and all that,” Cauley said.
“Then we can look at that (appeal) and either affirm the decision that was made or direct the county to move in a different direction.”
Although COVID-19 and a lack of funding led to a slow implementation of the reforms mandated in Rylan’s Law, the state has flexed its enhanced oversight powers in recent years. DSS agencies in five counties — Pitt, Davidson, Lenoir, Surry and Bertie — are currently undergoing corrective action plans mandated by DHHS.
In Vance County, the state fully divested power from the DSS director and took over social services operations starting May 14, following the county’s failure to improve after starting a corrective action plan.
The state has taken that extreme measure three other times since 2018, in Cherokee, Bertie and Nash counties. But its handling of the Cherokee case specifically pointed to the need for stronger state oversight even in a takeover.
Local officials resisted some corrective measures and rehired the former DSS director in a different role, even as she faced criminal prosecution and was eventually convicted. DHHS was powerless to prevent it, despite her never having had the qualifications to serve in that position under the state agency’s guidelines.
PATH NC rollout
The same day that the Fostering Care in NC bill passed the General Assembly, DHHS announced the rollout of a new case management system for county DSS agencies.
One of the goals of Rylan’s Law was to standardize documentation practices and improve data collection through a statewide case management system. The software first introduced to meet that goal, NC FAST, was widely panned as glitchy and ineffective, and it was never adopted by all 100 counties.
While some county DSS agencies use NC FAST to manage cases, more are using other systems or still reliant on paper records.
DHHS soon abandoned NC FAST and switched to a different vendor. The new system, PATH NC, went online in 15 counties last week.
The state’s plan is for all 100 counties to be using PATH NC by 2026. Once that happens, the state hopes it can use the data to inform future policy decisions.
Another advantage of PATH NC, Cauley said, is its built-in decision-making tools for screening intake reports. She believes the new system will reduce the variability of local agencies’ decisions regarding reports of child abuse and neglect.
“It's not just an IT system,” Cauley said.
“It's really a tool for workers to help them make better safety decisions.”
Reducing time to permanency
Issues with child welfare go beyond counties’ decisions about whether to remove children from their homes. Once in the foster care system, children often languish there while waiting for permanent placement.
The state’s goal is to place children in a permanent home within 12 months, but Gaile Osborne, executive director of the Foster Family Alliance of North Carolina, told CPP that children sometimes get stuck waiting for years on end.
“There should be no reason that our children are sitting in limbo like this, waiting, if we know that things need to be sped up to get to permanency,” Osborne said.
The Fostering Care in NC Bill includes some provisions aimed at reducing the time to permanency.
The child welfare reform measure gives assurances to foster parents and relatives who want to adopt a child that has stayed in their home for more than a year that DSS may not remove the child without a court hearing. Osborne said she’s seen cases where DSS removed children from these types of situations even though adoption was the long-term plan for the child.
The bill also allows for post-adoption contracts between adoptive parents and birth parents, which might include agreements about visitation or contact with the child.
Osborne said these contracts can reduce the time to permanency because birth parents will be more willing to terminate their parental rights with such an agreement in place. It could mean less time in court and fewer appeals by birth parents.
These measures alone likely won’t be enough to lower time to permanency down to the state’s goal. Osborne called the provisions “low-hanging fruit.”
Next, she’d like to see the state take a look at expediting child court procedures and doing more to support the child welfare workforce. Funding programs like Safe Babies Court, a pilot program which brings judges, parents and social workers together to find permanent placements for infants, would go a long way in her eyes.
“We have got to do a better job of getting these kids through faster,” she said.
This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.