On November 19, the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Human Resources heard testimony on efforts to monitor children in the custody of the states. This is the second in a series of briefings to examine the national child welfare system. The first hearing was held on November 6 (see The Source, 11/7/03).
Chair Wally Herger (R-CA) explained that these hearings were prompted by highly publicized cases of abuse and neglect of children in the protection of state child welfare agencies in New Jersey and Florida. “It is unfortunate that the Post Office does a better job tracking packages than some states have done monitoring children,” he lamented. Ranking Member Ben Cardin (D-MD) agreed, stating, “There are too many examples of children literally being lost in the system.”
In 1993, Congress authorized funds for the development of statewide automated child welfare information systems (SACWIS) to better monitor children and families served by state child welfare agencies. A provision of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (P.L. 103-66) also required the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to compile information on the children served by state agencies.
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) testified before the subcommittee. He noted that, “between 1993 and 1997, Congress spent at least $1.3 billion to encourage states to develop these systems, and now states receive open-ended matching funds from the federal government at 50 percent.”
Cornelia Ashby of the General Accounting Office (GAO) summarized a July 2003 GAO report that examined state efforts to develop SACWIS systems and how child welfare agencies were using the compiled data. She said that while 47 states are developing or operating a SACWIS system, challenges in developing the system included receiving state funding approval, reaching agreement on system development, and creating a system that reflects child welfare work processes and is user-friendly. Only five states have completed developing a SACWIS system. In addition, “almost all of the states responding to our survey reported that insufficient caseworker training and inaccurate and incomplete data entry affect the quality of the data reported to HHS,” Ms. Ashby noted.
Testifying on behalf of the Norfolk Department of Human Services, Jill Baker said that Virginia’s SACWIS system has helped the city to protect children from abuse and neglect. “These systems have moved us from a requirement that social workers complete their paperwork within 90 days to an expectation that information will be ‘in the system’ within 24 hours of the social worker taking any action on behalf of a child or family,” she stated.
Deputy District Administrator for the Florida Department of Children and Families, Michael Watkins, highlighted the success of the state’s SACWIS system in its first year of implementation. “…Every case manager, supervisor, and manager can determine with a touch of the button when children have been visited, by whom, and the outcome of that contact. Supervisors and managers can determine effortlessly caseload distribution, how long each child has been in care, the number of placements the child has experienced, pending court cases, and more,” he stated.
Robert McKeagney of the Child Welfare League of America, Inc. noted that a major flaw in the SACWIS system is that it “results in a national child welfare system that is actually a collection of fifty-one different systems bound together principally by the need to report a core set of data elements to the federal government.”
Fred Wulczyn of the Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago stated, “The modern SACWIS system is a model of technology for capturing and storing data, with extraordinary potential for producing information. Sadly, that potential is realized too infrequently.” Arguing that most states are not using the collected data appropriately, he highlighted the importance of training because “caseworkers, their supervisors, and the administrators who manage these complex systems will not make better decisions if the data in front of them cannot be transformed into information.”
