State making progress in hiring child welfare workers but still has 49 vacancies and caseload challenges

LINCOLN — A wage increase has helped Nebraska reduce a shortage of child welfare workers, but the state still has 49 job vacancies in overseeing the care of neglected and abused children, state officials said Tuesday.

From March to July, 105 new employees were hired in the Omaha area, officials said, in large part because of a 20% increase in caseworker pay made possible by a $30 million increase in funding approved by Gov. Pete Ricketts.

Caseload standards not met

But despite that, only about 40% of all caseworkers in the Omaha area — where the state recently took over case management from Saint Francis Ministries — have caseloads that comply with statutory requirements.

“We started behind the eight-ball,” said Ricketts, adding the lack of compliance with caseload requirements was among the reasons Nebraska cancelled its contract with Saint Francis.

The governor joined officials with the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services on Tuesday to sign a proclamation designating September as “child welfare workforce month.”

The state has been working since December to take over case management in the Omaha area after it terminated its contract with Kansas-based Saint Francis Ministries and ended its experiment with privatizing case management.

Saint Francis won a five-year contract with the state in 2019, but officials later acknowledged that the agency had severely underbid the work. Despite an additional $110 million in emergency state funds, Saint Francis continued to fail to meet state performance standards, leading to the termination.

Caseworkers still in training

Stephanie Beasley, director of children and family services for DHHS, said the 105 new hires are in various stages of 14 weeks of training, after which they will gradually get families and kids to oversee. That, she said, should improve compliance with caseload counts, which officials have said is critical in improving outcomes for children.

Officials said that attrition of child welfare workers has improved from about 4.75% to about 3.1% over the past few months.

Meanwhile, child welfare cases had increased by about 29% during the pandemic, from July 2019 to October 2021. That has increased the challenges for the state, officials said.

Recently, Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson announced that his office would investigate whether the state was a victim of fraud in the Saint Francis contract.

FBI seizes assets

The Kansas Reflector recently reported the FBI moved to seize some assets of a subcontractor of Saint Francis, WMK Research, and its owner, William Whymark, after it was discovered that Whymark had submitted millions of dollars of fraudulent invoices to Saint Francis.

The invoices inflated Whymark’s expenses and overstated information technology work he claimed to have performed as part of a contract with the State of Kansas.

State Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh of Omaha had urged the Nebraska Attorney General’s Office, in the interest of taxpayers, to explore whether Nebraska was also a victim of fraud and might warrant some repayment.

Ricketts said Tuesday that he’ll let the attorney general decide if steps should be taken by the state.