DSS Chief: Child Welfare System Must Learn From Errors, Support Staff
By Michael P. Norton for the State House News Service

       Saying he will not defend negligence but will defend inevitable errors, the overseer of the state’s child welfare system told lawmakers Monday that the Department of Social Services needs to support its employees and move away from a “culture of betrayal.”
       DSS Commissioner Harry Spence, testifying before the Committee on Children and Families, also said he hopes the department would never again have to cut back on foster family recruitment, touted the potential of teams of social workers sharing caseload management, and warned of the ramifications of too many group residential placements.
       Spence said errors are inevitable in a system where individual social workers make scores of life-and-death decisions after analyzing complex
family dynamics.  The question, Spence said, is whether the state only punishes people, both justifiably and without merit, in response to public
outrage, or whether DSS learns from mistakes.
       Three and a half years into his stint as commissioner, Spence said DSS needs sustained leadership to truly excel at placing and protecting abused and neglected children, and told lawmakers, who generally praised his work at the agency, that he will stay in the job for three and a half more years if the governor wants him to.
       At the informational hearing, Spence defended the work of department employees and social workers, saying they are all extraordinarily dedicated. Some are worn out, he said, but all are committed to child safety and well being.
       “There are no free riders,” said Spence. “It’s too painful to do this
work. Everyone is serious about the task.”
       Describing the department’s core goal of not creating “lost souls” at huge public expense, Spence told lawmakers his job involves supporting social workers charged with protecting betrayed children. In many cases, he said, the workers themselves feel certain they will be betrayed by department leaders if they make errors.
       Spence said social workers have become acclimated to a professional
environment where their work is largely not acknowledged until a child in
their custody or under their watch is abused, injured or killed. At that
point, Spence said, workers expect to be fired, whether or not their
decisions in a particular case had been reasonable.
       “The newspapers explode in a story of child harm,” Spence said. “And then there is great tumult. And then the department disappears and goes
underground again . . . The story is the same in every state.”
       In that vein, committee co-chairwoman Rep. Shirley Owens-Hicks (D-Boston) began today’s hearing by noting it was not intended to focus on Dontell Jeffers, a four-year-old foster child who died this year under the
department’s watch, but was meant to let lawmakers learn how they can help the department do a better job.
       In some cases, Spence said without elaborating, punishment of employees has been justifiable; in other cases, it has not. The so-called culture of betrayal was prominent in the hospital industry, where nurses were traditionally blamed for fatalities, but has diminished, Spence said.        “The system of blame and punishment led every nurse and doctor to do a purely defensive practice,” he said. “The culture of secrecy in fact increased the number of fatalities.”
       Cautioning that social workers are constantly involved in risk management and analyzing incredibly complex family dynamics, Spence said: “We need to move from a punitive culture to a learning culture. Error occurs every day. The question is how quickly we learn from it.”
       Decisions that appear perfectly reasonable are often judged “after the tragedy” to be in error. “There will be decisions that go south.” But if
department social workers are interested primarily in covering their own
tracks and feel intimidated about making decisions, “we will increase risks
to children and damage children,” said Spence.
       Rep. Gloria Fox (D-Boston) told committee members there needs to be
stronger checks and balances on about 500 companies that provide care under contracts with DSS. Fox said it’s critical that the department learn from the Jeffers case and others like it over the years.
       “It’s true that there have been less and less deaths and less incidences of abuse and neglect and death, but the complaints come in every day,” said Fox.
       Edward Malloy Jr., president of the DSS chapter of Service Employees
International Union Local 509, said Spence is the best DSS commissioner he has seen during his 30-year career in child welfare. Malloy says Beacon
Hill has never delivered enough funding to enable caseloads to get below
the recommended 18 per worker. “We have some social workers who are
overtaxed and overburdened, just as we have some foster parents that are too,” Malloy said
       Spence had worked in public housing and education prior to being appointed commissioner in 2001. During his 30-year career leading up to his appointment, he said that only once had he met someone who identified themselves as a client of the Department of Social Services. That reality, he said, means the department is a mystery to most.
       In most cases, he said, the department makes and generates public
discussion only when a child dies or when families, largely in low-income
areas, make references to the department taking people’s children, Spence said.
       Spence described several areas targeted for improvement.

       -- When the fiscal crisis hit in 2002, Spence said he authorized the
elimination of foster care recruitment to save as many direct care workers
as possible. In retrospect, Spence said, cutting back on recruitment can
lead to inappropriate placements and pose safety issues. “I would hope in
the future we’d resolve never to cut foster care recruitment,” Spence told
the committee.

       -- Spence said too many children are in DSS residential placements and the risk there is that when these children turn 18, they will not have family networks to support them into adulthood. He urged lawmakers to examine potential laws that would facilitate permanent family placements and adoptions so that residential placements are limited to children with
severe developmental disabilities. The department is reprocuring $300
million worth of child services and intends to make community placements a focus, he said.

       -- The department, working with the help of a $1 million grant from the Casey Foundation, is experimenting with the use of teams of social workers and encountering promising results. For instance, rather than have one social worker handle 18 cases, five workers will share 90 cases. Saying workers are making “life and death decisions constantly,” Spence said “that weight, that burden of responsibility is too huge to ask anybody to do alone.” With teams, workers can more readily share expertise on domestic violence, mental health and special education, he said. “To formalize it in a team setting has never been done before in child welfare,” Spence said.