Because of new state guidelines, the Sherburne County Board last week approved the addition of a new Child Protection Investigator in the Health & Human Services (HHS) Dept.

 

After media coverage last year of a child neglect case, Gov. Mark Dayton appointed a task force to examine issues in the state’s child protection system and make recommendations.

 

That task force came up with 93 recommendations, some of which have already been put in place.

 

At a board workshop in January, Sherburne County HHS Director Mary Jo Cobb said there was a chance she would be requesting additional staff because of the task force recommendations, which would add a significant amount of work to her department.

 

“I warned you that I might be coming back to you to ask about realigning some money in HHS to address the issue,” she told the board last week.

 

Cobb said the immediate issue was legislation that changed the guidelines for investigations by social workers.

 

“So far, the legislature passed two bills related to child protection,” said Cobb. “The first one says the safety of the child is paramount. That’s a difference from the past  where family preservation was paramount.

 

Cobb said that change in itself doesn’t seem like an issue, but it changed the way HHS handles investigations.

 

“Now we do fewer family assessments, which are a gentler way to approach a situation,” she said. “Now we need to be looking at more investigations or fact-finding, which is much more adversarial and also requires a lot more time.”

 

The second bill past by lawmakers wants HHS to look at past maltreatment reports that may have been screened out.

 

“Until recently we were told we could not do that. So if there had been multiple reports on a family and they’d all been screened out we couldn’t take that into account when we looked at a new report,” said Cobb.

 

She said an example is, years ago she would get calls from social workers saying kids were coming to school with no mittens on. Even though the child could have been hurt, nothing bad actually happened, so there was no further investigation required. “Today we would look back and if there had been previous reports about children dressed inappropriately for the weather, we wouldn’t need frozen fingers to investigate. We would need to look at that right away,” she said. “So that has really lowered the bar of what we need to look at. And that is making a huge difference in the numbers that we need to screen in.”

 

The cost to add the new Child Protection Investigator/Case Manager is $64,781, which includes salary and benefits. Cobb said that cost will be covered by state and federal reimbursements, so there will be no county money required.

 

But she said there will likely be other costs to different county departments because of the new guidelines.

 

“Every time we increase these numbers, we increase the chance of out-of-home placements. We also increase the chance of court involvement,” she said. “One of the proposals is, our screening team should involve law enforcement, the county attorney and other people in the county. Those are the things that will end up costing more money as well.”