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The Children's Services Committee of the North Carolina Association of County Directors of Social Services met eleven times during Fiscal Year 2003-2004. The committee had an average of 25 individuals at each meeting. The majority of these individuals were program staff who represented their county's director. The NC Division of Social Services averaged 3-5 staff present. Attendance by county directors improved since last fiscal year; however, director attendance for this committee continues to be low.
The role of the committee is to identify, clarify, and frame children's social problems and advocate for state policy and action to deal with them and to serve as a resource to the Division of Social Services for review and advocacy for appropriate, clear policy to be disseminated among the 100 county departments of social services in North Carolina. This is accomplished by implementing goals and strategies from the NCACDSS Strategic Plan as appropriate to the committee's scope of work and leading by results. The following is our year in review.
We establish a work list as part of our scope of work that would help guide the work of the committee. We also attempted to revamp our policy review process to consider impact on line workers, impact on workloads and impact on results being measured. Over this past year, we reviewed and made recommendation on the following policies, procedures, programs and work groups:
• State Maternity Home Fund Application
• Cross-County Policy
• QSAP's in CPS
• Health of Foster Children Project
• Family Services Case Plans
• LINKS Allocation
• Domestic Violence Policy & Training
• All Aspects of MRS Policy to include update/monitoring of 10-pilot counties, implementation of next phase of counties, fiscal note, IV-E revenues and statewide plan for implementation
• Child Fatality Review Protocol
• Domestic Violence Policy & Work Group
• Structured Decision-Making Work Group
We spent much of the year prioritizing areas of the Program Improvement Plan and reviewing policies that would assist in meeting the plan goals. Much of this included all aspects of MRS pilot county implementation and MRS expansion.
The Stumbo case and the publicity as it related to child deaths in DSS custody, child deaths in child care facilities and CPS data card generated much of our work for the committee. The Task Force on Investigating Abuse and Neglect in Child Care Facilities and the House Interim Committee on Abuse & Neglect kept the NCACDSS Office, the committee and the Division of Social Services busy with issues such as:
• Criminal record checks and the AOC Database Project
• Child Welfare Staffing Survey
• Inconsistency in the CPS Data
• Central Registry and it's Use and Purposes
• Caseload Standards Survey
The Children Services Committee will continue to work to improve services for children and their families and to improve the working conditions for local DSS's especially the child welfare social workers. During this upcoming fiscal year the Committee will work on issues related to early intervention services, continue work on MRS and domestic violence policy, training and implementation, the Hopkins lawsuit, fiscal notes, and methamphetamine procedures.
Respectfully Submitted:
Brenda Jackson & Donn Gunderson
Children's Services Committee Co-Chairs
