A legislative panel on Tuesday signed off on Gov. Asa Hutchinson's request to transfer $1.05 million in rainy-day funds to hire 40 more employees for the Division of Children and Family Services.
Without debate, the Arkansas Legislative Council's Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review Subcommittee approved the Republican governor's written request to transfer the funds to the division to "increase case worker staff in order to reduce caseloads within the division."
The division is part of the Department of Human Services.
The transfer will leave the state with $43 million in rainy-day funds, Bureau of Legislative Research senior legislative analyst Wendy Cartwright told lawmakers.
State Rep. David Meeks, R-Conway, the subcommittee's co-chairman, said the division needs the money because "we know we have a foster care crisis.
"We have gotten a lot more kids into the system than what we've ever had before, and we need the workers to be able to take care of those kids, take care of those cases and make sure that they don't fall through the cracks," he said in an interview after the meeting.
The division will hire a combination of caseworkers, supervisors and program assistants with the rainy-day funds, Human Services Department spokesman Amy Webb said.
Twenty-nine of the 40 additional employees will be caseworkers, she said.
About 450 of the division's approximately 990 employees are caseworkers, she said.
The division's other employees include about 200 program assistants, about 180 supervisors and 120 central office staff members, Webb said. The agency is responsible for about 4,540 children in foster care, for 7,500 children in protective service cases, and for 3,300 investigations on a monthly basis, she said.
The national recommended average workload for social service caseworkers is 15 cases. Arkansas' caseload is now 27 per worker, and 30.5 per worker after factoring in those workers who are new and in training and cannot carry a full caseload, Webb said.
Asked what the state's average caseload would be after the 40 employees are hired, Webb said that "depends on how quickly they can get trained and carry their own loads.
"The governor's long-term goal is to get to 20," she said.
When the 40 employees will be hired "depends on a number of things -- applicants who meet minimum qualifications, quality of applicants on the registers, number of applicants, number of staff being hired in each county, etc.," Webb wrote in an email.
"We are reluctant to give a date as so many factors impact hire dates," she said.
"We are experiencing difficulty in a number of our counties in finding applicants who meet the standard qualifications and quality/desire to do this work," Webb said.
At the start of the two-day Restore Hope Summit on Aug. 25, Hutchinson announced his intent to ask lawmakers for about $1 million. His office organized the event to encourage faith-based organizations, nonprofits and other entities to help provide better services for foster children and inmates re-entering society.
On July 16, Hutchinson said Arkansas must hire 200 more caseworkers to ease pressure on overwhelmed employees in Children and Family Services after the release of a report that he requested on problems in the division. At that time, he pledged to work with the Republican-controlled Legislature to come up with the money for the new positions, roughly $8 million.
Hutchinson sought a study of the division and an accompanying report from The Child Welfare Policy & Practice Group, a Montgomery, Ala.-based consulting firm, after state Rep. Justin Harris, R-West Fork, accused the division of failing foster and adoptive children and the families that take them in.
Harris had "rehomed" his 3- and 5-year-old adoptive daughters to a man who later sexually assaulted one of them.
Harris said the girls had been damaged by previous abuse and that he couldn't manage them, and he feared that Human Services Department officials would have gone after his own biological children if he had attempted to return the girls to state care.
Hutchinson said in a written statement Tuesday that his request for $1.05 million is "part of my overall commitment to hire 200 new caseworkers over the next three years as recommended by the Paul Vincent report."
Vincent heads The Child Welfare Policy & Practice Group. Vincent formerly led Alabama's social-services department and has conducted studies for numerous states.
Asked whether Hutchinson plans to request more money in the fiscal session starting in April, the governor said that "whether it's in the fiscal session or not, my goal is to work with the Legislature and their recommendations to achieve the funding necessary to fulfill this need in our state."
Metro on 09/23/2015