Missouri child welfare workers say restructuring is putting children’s safety at risk

By late afternoon on Sept. 25, Missouri’s Children’s Division was struggling to find enough workers to respond to reports of suspected child abuse and neglect. According to an email obtained by The Independent, every available worker had been assigned at least three reports, yet 29 reports across 20 counties remained unassigned. 

Fifteen of those reports had been open longer than 24 hours — the deadline in Missouri law for division workers to locate the child and verify their safety in most cases.

“We have utilized all of our workforce and assigned at least three reports to everyone and still have many left to assign,” the email to division staff said. “I am asking that you all look for any supervisors who could possibly ensure safety on any of these reports please. Some of these are from yesterday that we have been unable to find coverage for.”

A Sept. 1 restructuring in the division assigned workers to specialized teams organized along regional lines. Instead of reporting to local supervisors and responding to reports in their county or circuit, workers answer to regional supervisors and are assigned cases spread across larger swaths of the state.

Twelve current and former division employees across seven circuits spoke with The Independent over the past month about their experiences since the restructuring began. All but two spoke on condition of anonymity because they didn’t have permission to speak publicly and feared retaliation. 

Workers said they are increasingly cutting their safety assessments short as they scramble to reach children within statutory timeframes. Their caseloads are rising as they postpone tasks needed to close outstanding cases and inherit cases from colleagues who quit.

And while division leaders promoted the restructuring as an opportunity for frontline workers to develop expertise in areas such as chronic neglect, sexual abuse or newborn assessments, workers said the changes haven’t narrowed the scope of reports they’re assigned.

Amy DeGraw, a former investigator on the chronic neglect team who resigned last month, described a day when she was asked to drive from the division’s Laclede County office in Lebanon to respond to a report in Rolla and then another in Nevada. That’s a round trip of about 340 miles.

DeGraw said it can take two or three hours to collect the information needed to ensure safety and close a case. 

Add a few hours of travel time, DeGraw said, and “one hotline call could take us anywhere from six hours to complete.” 

“They started making us do two or three of these a day,” she said.

Daniel Johnston, a former investigative supervisor in the southwest region who resigned last month, described running out of workers to assign reports. 

“One day, we got 40-plus reports that we had to assign in the region, and I ran out of staff,” Johnston said. “Everyone was getting three to four of them, and I was sending people two, three hours away. It was utter chaos.”

Internal Children’s Division records show caseloads climbed in the weeks after the restructuring.

Between Sept. 30 and Oct. 13, the average number of open cases per worker on the child abuse and neglect response team increased from 33.1 to 38.5, according to photos of an internal data dashboard obtained by The Independent. The division’s goal is no more than 15 open cases per worker.

During those two weeks, the number of cases open longer than 45 days increased by 13.5%, from 10,171 to 11,544. State law generally requires investigations to be completed within 45 days, though extensions are permitted under certain circumstances.

Sara Smith, director of the Children’s Division, told The Independent the division has made adjustments to reduce workers’ travel time, including creating a centralized team to assign reports within a maximum 90-minute radius from workers’ base offices.

“We have a team that is helping make sure the assignment is within a certain radius, that we’re looking at the specialization, the workload that they have and the geographical space,” Smith said. “So just because I’m a supervisor and someone is next in the rotation and a report comes in to my specialized team, they might not be the one that we need to go.”

But current employees said that even with centralized assignments, they are still rushing their safety assessments and struggling to see children within statutory timeframes. 

Workers also said division leaders promised less time on call, but they are now required to cover longer and more frequent on-call shifts.

During an Aug. 26 legislative hearing, Smith told lawmakers the division was hiring workers for night and weekend shifts, saying “asking people to be available around the clock just isn’t sustainable.”

That week, division employees in some regions were told they would have to begin covering seven-day on-call shifts starting Sept. 1, fielding calls throughout the night and reporting for work as usual in the morning.  

Workers described sleeping in their cars, living off of gas station food and talking on the phone with relatives or colleagues to avoid falling asleep while driving through the night. 

Responding to calls far outside their home circuits also leaves workers unfamiliar with local resources that could help keep families together — and with the procedures of juvenile offices and courts when removing a child becomes necessary. On-call supervisors based hours away face the same problem, workers said.

One current division worker described fielding calls from four different supervisors during a recent on-call shift. The worker was pulled away from responding to a hotline report from the day before to work another case 90 minutes away. The first hotline report wasn’t reassigned, so the worker ended up responding during regular working hours. By that time, the report was four days old.

Johnston submitted his resignation letter during the last week of August, after learning about changes to assignments during on-call hours.

Before the restructuring, Johnston said, the division’s hotline unit routed reports directly to on-call workers based on where the report originated. He only stepped in if the hotline was having trouble reaching the on-call worker in his county or to provide backup.

Johnston didn’t cover an on-call shift during his last weeks on the job, but he explained how on-call responsibilities changed for supervisors.

“My time commitment went from me only touching a report every once in a while when they couldn’t get in touch with a worker,” Johnston said, “to me literally touching every report that comes in for southwest Missouri — notifying a worker, and if they can’t take it, finding someone who will — for a week straight.”

The division has advertised open positions for dedicated night and weekend workers, and Smith told The Independent she hopes to reduce the need for on-call shifts on top of workers’ usual hours.

“We’re working to hopefully over the next few weeks transition the number of team members on call to dedicated positions for nights and weekends to get that better work-life balance across the board for our teams,” Smith said.

In response to an emailed request for the current turnover rate and the number of child abuse and neglect staff who have resigned since Sept. 1, the Department of Social Services asked The Independent to file a formal request under the Missouri Sunshine Law.

Ensuring safety

High caseloads and investigative backlogs are not new to the division. Neither is high staff turnover. 

Turnover of frontline division staff, including investigators, foster care case managers and hotline workers, reached 55% in fiscal year 2022, after former Gov. Mike Parson cut almost 100 jobs from the division in 2020. After the number of backlogged investigative cases surpassed 10,000 by September 2023, lawmakers approved funding to add back 100 positions. By September 2024, the backlog had decreased to fewer than 2,000 cases.

Smith told lawmakers during the legislative hearing in August that frontline turnover was 40%, with about 90 vacant positions. The current state budget funds 1,781 field positions, which is the same as last year.

Current and former division staff interviewed by The Independent before the restructuring attributed growing caseloads to new rules and increasingly prescriptive policies that require more steps to move cases forward. 

A statement from the Missouri Department of Social Services in August said the restructuring was intended to address “longstanding nationwide workforce pressures, including high caseloads and staff turnover” and “create greater consistency in how we respond to children and families across Missouri.”

State law gives workers 24 hours from the time of a report of possible child abuse or neglect to assure the safety of each child who is an alleged victim. Division policy gives them three hours in emergencies. 

The tool the division uses to assess safety, called Structured Decision Making, or SDM, calls for  workers to attempt to interview parents, verify the safety of all other children in the household and document their findings and evidence within 72 hours of the hotline report.

But workers said they are increasingly doing only the bare minimum to document that they ensured a child’s immediate safety — locating the child, interviewing them, checking for visible injuries or signs of neglect and moving on. 

DeGraw said that in the first weeks of the restructuring, supervisors instructed workers to just “ensure safety.”

“If we don’t meet our contact time, we are going to fail ensuring their safety,” DeGraw said. “So that’s what they are requesting now: just drive, see the kid, verify they’re safe, and be done with it.”

A former division worker said the message came from multiple higher-ups.

“We would get told by our supervisors and even higher than them, ‘Go ensure safety. You can work everything out later,’” they said.

The worker said it wasn’t unusual to have to triage tasks before the changeover — to get an emergency call and have to drop work on another case. But because reports were limited to the county where they were based, it was easier for them to pick up where they left off.

“You can’t work four reports (a day) and also do a follow-up visit on a house that’s an hour and a half away,” they said.

Between Sept. 30 and Oct. 13, the number of open cases more than 72 hours old without documentation that a child’s safety had been assessed increased by more than a thousand, or 12.6%, from 8,104 to 9,128. That number rose faster than the total number of open cases, which increased from 18,063 to 20,324, or 12.5%.

A current division worker described pressure to get their “initial contacts” entered into the division’s database. If they don’t have time to do a home visit or interview parents, they said they just write, “Ensured safety.”

They said that while it’s “technically” possible to complete the SDM after those initial steps, “really what (safety) comes down to is about the parents and the home environment.”

“But they require you to have it in,” they said, “and they say you can change it at any time.”

Among other things, the SDM asks workers whether a child’s physical living conditions are hazardous and whether caregivers acknowledge and show a willingness to address safety threats.

Sufficient information

The SDM is also one of the models being used by members of an 18-member child welfare task force established by Gov. Mike Kehoe in August.

Kehoe’s executive order directs members to propose “a statewide child welfare safety definition” and recommendations to incorporate that standard into the practices “of all child welfare partners, including Children’s Division frontline staff, juvenile offices, court systems and private providers.”

Members discussed draft legislation during an Oct. 19 meeting that would establish many of the steps the SDM requires division workers to take as part of the framework the division, juvenile offices and the courts must share when determining if children are unsafe.

During an Oct. 5 task force discussion of the SDM, members emphasized that the safety assessment depends on workers’ ability to collect sufficient information.

Emily van Schenkhof, executive director of the Children’s Trust Fund of Missouri, said “this whole safety assessment hinges on the child welfare worker having the capacity and training and tenure to be able to get sufficient information and to make these decisions.”

Missouri State Courts Administrator Kathy Lloyd said that “with the new process…we’ve had a couple of occasions where we’re running up against statutory timelines.”  

“Getting that sufficient information in the restricted amount of time is really a challenge,” Lloyd said.

Jessica Kruse, a circuit judge for the 38th Judicial Circuit in Christian County, said she had heard from emergency room nurses in Branson that workers had been sent from as far as St. Louis to respond to certain types of cases.

“That’s even less time to gather the information,” Kruse said. “It’s all travel time to get to the family.”

Smith said she had “heard about a few of these.”

“That should not be the case moving forward, especially as we get some more staffing,” Smith said.

Johnston said that unlike other members of a case’s multidisciplinary team — including juvenile officers, judges and guardians ad litem — division workers develop firsthand knowledge of how families are functioning by regularly visiting children and parents in their homes. 

But he said the restructuring, combined with the addition of policies that make cases harder to resolve, prevents workers from building that knowledge and earning families’ trust.

“This whole process is disempowering Children’s Division,” Johnston said, “who are the only people in the home of the child’s parents and of the placement, collecting the reports and talking to everyone.” 

If workers are too rushed to thoroughly evaluate reports of abuse and neglect, they can’t assess safety or link families with help, Johnston said.

DeGraw said she worries workers will miss something important.

“What if there is a severe emergency and these children are not being seen in a timely manner?”