State outlines plan to improve foster care

The plan calls for many of the 9,000 foster care children in Tennessee to get into permanent homes more quickly, a long-standing failure cited by Children’s Rights in its successful federal lawsuit.

Among other changes outlined in the long-range plan for improvement are plans for DCS to decentralize its decision-making process and to raise the pay of caseworkers from a starting salary of $22,500 a year to $29,000 within the next three years.

After Children’s Rights Inc. sued the state over the quality of its foster care, the state pledged in July 2001 to improve within 4 1/2 years. There were guidelines set to gauge any improvement.

Then the court monitor said last year the state still was out of compliance on 84 of those 136 provisions, and in compliance with only 24. It was in partial compliance with the rest.

As a result, late last year Children’s Rights asked U.S. District Judge Todd Campbell to hold the state in contempt. Not only had the state failed to improve, Children’s Rights claimed, it didn’t even have a plan for doing so.

Before the judge could step in, the state and Children’s Rights reached an interim agreement.

Since then, Gov. Phil Bredesen has hired a new DCS commissioner, Viola Miller, who has been working with Children’s Rights and teams of experts to move toward meeting the court-mandated improvements. The plan submitted Monday outlines how the state plans to get there.

DCS hopes to move decision-making authority downstream from headquarters to the regional level, where caseworkers are more familiar with the details.

“That really and truly is the solution to many of these problems,” said David Raybin, a Nashville attorney representing Children’s Rights.

“A final decision on the spot, in the field, tends to be a better decision and a quicker decision. There’s a lot of communication that’s going on by e-mail and letter that needs to be going on face-to-face.”

The department also wants to increase the number of black foster and adoptive families, and to make its staff more diverse and “culturally competent.”

DCS says it will enlist the help of universities to improve its training for caseworkers and supervisors.

The department also wants to be able to retain its experienced workers and recruit qualified candidates, the reason for the salary increases.

The plan “is just the beginning of our long journey,” said Miller, the DCS commissioner. “We have a tremendous amount of work before us, which is accented by a sense of urgency.”

She promised that Tennessee would eventually have a “first-class child welfare agency.”

Tennessee still has a long way to go before its services to foster children improve, said a Children’s Rights official, who described a history of DCS management failures.

“It’s forcing them to sit down and think about how they are going to do things,” said Doug Gray, a Children’s Rights attorney in New York.

“We wish this had happened sooner,” he said. “But this is an important step, and now we have something that hopefully will take us to the next level — which is compliance with (the) agreement.”

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Information from: The Tennessean, http://www.tennessean.com