Child welfare agency found ways to protect vulnerable kids in N.J. last year despite pandemic, monitor says – NJ.com

Despite the pandemic forcing the state’s child welfare agency to work remotely for months, the 6,700-member workforce didn’t lose ground meeting dozens of court-ordered improvements aimed at keeping vulnerable kids safe, a monitor’s report said Wednesday.

From January to June 2020, the Division of Child Protection and Permanency continued to meet 44 of the 48 metrics, which include limiting employee caseloads, ensuring foster children visit their parents and siblings and completing child abuse and neglect investigations on time, according to the latest report from Judith Meltzer, president of the Center for Social Policy in Washington D.C. and the state’s court-appointed monitor.

Meanwhile, the division’s parent agency, the Department of Children and Families, cut checks to contracted service providers to help pay for personal protective equipment, prevented older foster children from “aging out” of the system when they turned 21 and issued 1,200 older foster youth a one-time stimulus check of $1,850.

Aside from investigation complaints of abuse and home visits for “priority” cases which were handled in person, child welfare employees worked by phone and through teleconferences from March through July, the report said.

“DCF’s leadership has been impressive during this crisis,” Meltzer said Wednesday during a televised hearing before U.S. District Court Judge Stanley R. Chesler. Progress was not made in areas requiring in-person visits, deficiencies Meltzer attributed to the pandemic, the report said.

The state “took clear steps to assure they were still attending to the safety of children, staff and providers while making sure efforts towards permanency were not derailed,” Meltzer said.

Even Marcia Lowry, executive director of A Better Childhood, a national nonprofit and plaintiff in the lawsuit against the state that led to the court-ordered monitoring, offered only praise for the work “during this very difficult time for everyone.”

“What is most important here is this is an agency that is running well,” Lowry said, acknowledging the state has taken “many proactive steps…to keep their eye always on the goal of helping families and children.”

What the report doesn’t measure — and what child welfare professionals across the country don’t know — is the pandemic’s impact on reporting of child abuse. In New Jersey, as schools and child care centers were forced to close under Gov. Phil Murphy’s stay-at-home orders, calls to the child abuse hotline fell from 12,398 in March to 7,917 in April. By July, the hotline logged 11,499 calls.

There are fears that remote learning has hidden the signs of child abuse and neglect often spotted by teachers, coaches and school nurses.

The state departments of Children and Families and Education, according to the report, addressed this issue by embedding a “quick response” code on remote learning materials teachers shared with students that contain hotline numbers. Students can use their cell phone to scan the code to see this information.

““For children and youth who may have been sheltering in homes that were less than safe, we felt this was an option to get them the information that they might need in order to ask for help, without alerting an abuser that they were seeking out help, which might exacerbate an unsafe situation,” Children and Families spokesman Jason Butkowski said.

In an interview after the hearing, Meltzer said it is also possible that abuse and neglect cases have fallen because they had been over-reported before, “due to the over-surveillance of people of color and families living in poverty.”

Black children make up 33% of kids in foster care despite making up only 15 percent of the child population, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

“We have always struggled with (defining) what is child neglect and what is poverty,” Meltzer said. The pandemic “is raising up that issue more starkly. That’s good.”

Children and Families Commissioner Christine Norbut Beyer said in the past year, her office has created a race equity steering committee, to address the “systemic racism” that is present in all child welfare systems. That work continued during the pandemic, she said.

“The trying times of 2020 demonstrated that the DCF of today is characterized by strength, stability, leadership and resiliency,” Beyer said. “Through everything, DCF has continued to be able to identify, and to meet, the changing needs of New Jersey’s children and families.”

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Susan K. Livio may be reached at slivio@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @SusanKLivio.