State Auditor General Eugene DePasquale last week released a report on a year-long review of Pennsylvania’s children and youth services system, which he characterized as “appalling”, with “wholesale system breakdowns that actually prevent CYS caseworkers from protecting children from abuse and neglect.”
The “State of the Child” special report shows Pennsylvania spent more than $1.8 billion last year to protect children, yet 46 children died, 79 nearly died, and almost half of the deaths were children who were already known to CYS agencies.
In Indiana County, the number of substantiated child abuse cases rose in 2016 from 25 the year before to 36. There were 203 reports overall in 2015, and 260 last year. One child died and one nearly died. 61.1 percent of the victims were female.
Indiana County’s Children and Youth Services responded to 923 child welfare reports last year, not all of them for suspected abuse. One hundred of them were repeat assessments of children for the same reason as at a previous time. $1,392,896 was spent on protecting children in Indiana County in 2016.
DePasquale noted five “interlaced challenges” that are impeding CYS caseworkers’ ability to do their jobs effectively: Difficulty finding enough qualified professionals, who then receive inadequate training to handle the job’s heavy caseloads and burdensome paperwork, plus “remarkably” low pay, leading to “breath-taking” turnover rates.
The auditor general is recommending seventeen changes to the child protection system, the most important, he says, being the creation of an independent ombudsman position with the Department of Human Services with one person in charge.
