DHS chief: Overtime and workloads up, staffing down
The city's Department of Human Services is paying high overtime costs to keep up with hotline calls and investigations as it deals with staff vacancies and a growing number of children in its system, its acting commissioner said Tuesday.
The city's Department of Human Services is paying high overtime costs to keep up with hotline calls and investigations as it deals with staff vacancies and a growing number of children in its system, its acting commissioner said Tuesday.
Jessica Shapiro, in charge since January while Mayor Kenney continues a nationwide search for the next commissioner, testified at a City Council hearing that the department will pay $12 million in overtime in 2016. Most of the money goes to keeping the child-abuse hotline staffed, she said.
The agency has seen a huge increase in hotline calls and investigations since new child-abuse reporting laws went into effect following the Jerry Sandusky scandal. Hotline calls are up 30 percent over 2015, and investigations are up 12 percent.
The number of children in out-of-home placement has increased from 4,600 before the laws changed in 2014 to 6,100.
The agency also spent $12 million on overtime in the 2015 fiscal year.
Councilman Allan Domb brought up the overtime costs, calling it "unusual" that 20 people on staff made more money in overtime than in salary and that about 200 of the agency's 1,500 workers made more than $20,000 in overtime last year.
DHS has 308 vacancies agencywide, most of them in the juvenile justice system.
Shapiro said the agency was making a round of hires and would transfer social workers to cover hotline calls and investigations.
"As I begin to fill that staff, I anticipate overtime will go down as well, as I'll be able to assign investigative staff fewer reports each month," she said.
The hires come as DHS was expected to be shrinking its staff.
The agency has been undergoing an overhaul, turning nearly all case management work over to 10 neighborhood based "community umbrella agencies," or CUAs. No DHS workers were laid off, but 132 positions have been eliminated through attrition.
The CUAs are also feeling the stress of a swelling system. They handle all but 100 of DHS's more than 8,000 cases. Shapiro said that on average each CUA caseworker has 13 families, and in some cases as many as 30 children across those families. Shapiro said the goal is five to seven families.
"Our caseloads are too high because we have too many families in the system," she said. "We're looking at what we can do from the front end to the back end at shrinking the system."
Shapiro said the agency was working on ways to speed up permanent placements for children and curb the influx of children into the system.
She said she would talk with the state about the possibility of increasing the money flowing to CUAs.
On Tuesday, Shapiro requested a $490,000 increase for the DHS budget because of a dip in federal funding. The city's portion of DHS's budget is $103 million.
Shapiro also reported the number of children placed with relatives rather than foster parents had increased, that more siblings were being placed together, and that fewer children are being placed in group homes.
215-854-5506 @juliaterruso