PA State of the Child Action Plan

Posted by Pennsylvania Auditor General on June 11, 2018

PA Auditor issues child welfare reform recommendations

Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale has released the State of the Child Action Plan that includes 28 recommendations aimed at improving the state’s child welfare system, many of which are focused on the challenges of county children and youth workers.

PA Department of Human Services Secretary Teresa Miller stood with DePasquale and noted that since Pennsylvania has a state supervised and county administered child welfare system, solutions must be driven by a shared commitment to resolve system challenges and indicated home visiting should be considered as part of the solution.

She also highlighted improvements underway to caseworker training curriculum and reducing caseload sizes.

Recommendations in the report include:

• Increasing funding from the General Assembly to provide adequate resources for proven preventive and diversionary programs that help strengthen families and prevent children from formally entering the foster care system, including home visiting services.
• Reducing unnecessary mandated data that must be entered for each case into counties’ case-management systems and allow for an elongated timeline before all mandated data must be entered.
• Continuing changes to the Child Welfare Information Solution (CWIS), which prevent incomplete forms from being submitted to ChildLine.

The full report and action plan can be found here.

http://www.paauditor.gov/Media/Default/Reports/RPT_StateofChild_Action_Plan_051618_FINAL.pdf