THE NEWS MEDIA recently have made many of us more aware of the plight of Baltimore's abused and neglected children, alerting the public to children being harmed in the child welfare system in Baltimore City - a system whose responsibility it is to protect them.
The problem is serious enough that a report has been filed in U.S. District Court in Baltimore asserting that the city's Department of Social Services (DSS) is "sitting on a time bomb" and is putting children in the system at risk because of "a lax approach and overburdened caseworkers."
This reflects a Department of Legislative Services' audit several years ago of Maryland's Social Service Administration, which concluded that there are significant questions about the monitoring and delivery of services to the children in out-of-home care programs throughout the state.
The audit noted that about 10 percent of the children studied were subject to reported abuse or neglect while in foster care. It said there was no evidence in 28 percent of the cases that the child was receiving recommended therapy and there was no documentation in 35 percent of the cases to substantiate that the child was attending school.
Sixty-two percent of Maryland children in out-of-home placements are from Baltimore City, where DSS caseworkers carry between 30 to 60 cases. A hiring freeze has limited the numbers of caseworkers for several years. Fewer workers mean higher caseloads. Higher caseloads mean less time on each case and more stress, which ultimately leads to an extremely high rate of burnout. Burnout leads to high staff turnover, for which replacements cannot be hired.
What this translates to for the lives of children in the system is, for example, teen-agers who don't know if they have graduated from high school when they ask their caseworkers about applying to community college or vocational programs. Children medicated and institutionalized for years, neglected in the system when family resources could be investigated and approved for placement. Children without the therapy they need who exhibit behaviors that are disruptive and sometimes dangerous to others or themselves, which then results in a cycle of court hearings and out-of-home placements that may be only marginally better environments than the ones from which they were removed.
What can be done to help the system recover from years of diminishing budgets and neglect? Mayor Martin O'Malley does not think the answer is Floyd R. Blair as DSS director. According to Mr. O'Malley, Mr. Blair does not have the required managerial experience for the job.
