DCFS child placement audit finds problems
Troubled kids in Illinois spent weeks in psychiatric hospitals and emergency shelters unnecessarily over the past two years. That’s one of the problems at the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services uncovered by an audit report released last week.
DCFS struggles to place troubled children in appropriate settings and has trouble tracking those children, the audit found. It’s a complex problem made more difficult by antiquated computer systems, but the agency says some fixes are already in progress.
Illinois Auditor General Frank Mautino released the DCFS audit report on Sept. 8. The report was prompted by Senate Resolution 140, which called on the auditor general to examine how many children DCFS places in certain facilities, how long the children remained there and why, among other things. Ultimately, the report found that DCFS doesn’t know the answer to most of those questions.
“The Department of Children and Family Services did not track and could not provide the majority of the information asked for in the audit resolution,” the report says, noting concerns about the accuracy and completeness of the data DCFS could supply.
Besides investigating child neglect and abuse, DCFS is tasked with finding safe, appropriate placements for children with behavioral issues, mental health problems and criminal histories. Often, the agency must temporarily place those children in psychiatric hospitals, emergency shelters or detention facilities because of their severe behavioral problems and tendency to run away from caretakers. Once it’s no longer necessary for a child to be in such a facility, DCFS must find them a foster home or other semi-permanent setting – a job that’s easier said than done.
The audit looked at cases from 2014 and 2015 in which DCFS placed a child at a psychiatric hospital (50 cases), emergency shelter (50 cases) or detention facility (100 cases). In the psychiatric hospital and emergency shelter cases, the audit found that children stayed in those settings well past when it was no longer necessary.
In 2014, children in the cases examined stayed at a psychiatric hospital on average 28 days longer than medically necessary. That number rose to 40 days in 2015.
While there’s no law saying when a child must be removed from an emergency shelter, DCFS is under a court decree not to keep children in shelters longer than 30 days. During 2014, children stayed in shelters on average 42 days beyond the 30-day limit. In 2015, the average increased to 50 days beyond the limit. One child stayed at a shelter 357 days.
Department spokeswoman Veronica Resa notes that DCFS doesn’t start counting a child’s days in one of those facilities until a court has established legal ties between the child and the agency.
Among the 100 detention facility cases, only seven children were found to have stayed past their scheduled release date. However, the audit report stresses that DCFS doesn’t track scheduled release dates and couldn’t provide that information to auditors.
The audit attributes the delay in placing children to many factors, such as a lack of timeliness in matching children to foster families, delayed meetings between DCFS and placement specialists, waitlists at longterm care facilities, uncooperative youth, difficulty finding appropriate placements because of a child’s special needs and more.
The audit also found that DCFS doesn’t always use its own internal forms to document cases, and the agency uses 38 different computer systems for case management. Some of the systems interface with one another, the audit found, but many don’t, making it difficult to collect and analyze data about a case.
DCFS director George Sheldon says the agency is already working to fix the problems uncovered in the audit.
“This is one of the most intractable issues we have been dealing with,” Sheldon said. “These are very challenging categories of youth.”
He says DCFS has created emergency foster homes to reduce time in emergency shelters, lowering the number of kids in shelters from 136 in June 2014 to 91 in 2015. That number stands at only 43 now. Sheldon also says DCFS has two new contracts for placement of children in detention facilities, and a third is in negotiation.
“We are working on the prevention side as well, meaning we want to avoid having youth go into detention in the first place,” Sheldon said.
Children in psychiatric hospitals are especially challenging, Sheldon says, adding that the goal is to prevent lockouts, which occur when a family refuses to accept a troubled child back out of safety concerns. DCFS is creating a pilot program to address the problem, combining expert knowledge, services and case management. The agency is also upgrading its computer systems.
“We have more data tools in place now,” he said, “and our placement staff is tracking each and every child or youth in these categories.”
Contact Patrick Yeagle at [email protected].
