Policy & Practice | Spring 2024

interesting news: caseworkers were making the good and hard choice to prioritize visits with the youngest children on their caseloads—and that the children in open cases who were still at home with their families were the hardest to locate. Additionally, the phenomenon of missed visits and overdue investigations was not spread evenly across the board. The great majority of these errors were committed by a very small set of employees. The need for training was urgent, and the agency lacked the infrastructure to provide it. And they thought hard about the need for external commu nications to drive partnerships. They knew they needed to convey to Scioto’s citizens that there was a great deal of good, hard work being done in the agency and that the safety of children was the entire commu nity’s job. About this time, Tammy leaned in. She’ll tell you she didn’t know much about child welfare, but she spied an agency in shambles from a mile away. She knew she was stepping into a pressure cooker and had to get the tem perature down a couple of degrees just so people could focus. From their collective point of view, Jeff and Tammy saw an agency com prised of people who were rushing around trying to put out fires while standing on an unstable foundation. With all they had learned, they set about the business of building a strong one. They started by merging the stand alone child welfare agency into Tammy’s department. This brought substantial infrastructure, including strong back-office functions like human resources and finance. They paid diligent attention to collective bargaining and merged two unions along the way. Jeff and his state team observed the gaps in caseworker training, which is a core set of modules provided by his office. It included an arduous sign-up process and an administrative schedule that had created a choke point for access to sorely needed training. With the stroke of a pen, he altered the process to be far more friendly to the

Mike DeWine is Ohio’s 70th governor. Commonly referred to as a “children’s governor,” he laid the foundation for progress in child welfare when he took office in 2019. He appointed a cabinet-level position to oversee and coordinate all child serving programs in the state. He doubled funding for children’s services in his first budget and added even more in his second.

A quick look at priority performance measures revealed frightening math: with the number of case managers on staff and the number of open cases, there simply were not enough hours in a month for every child to be visited and for every investigation to be closed on time. This meant impossible choices: which children would get visited and which would not? Which investigations would get attention, and which would get delayed? This perfect storm turned atten tion to a single, horrid data point: an increase in deaths among babies known to the agency. Would-be partners became adversaries. The local press went hog-wild. The county council became impatient and frus trated. Leadership in the state grew increasingly alarmed. The environment became reactionary and draconian. This set of circumstances is just shy of impossible in child welfare. Given the chance, 99 out of 100 administrators would walk away. But Jeffery Van Deusen and Tamela Moore didn’t. Jeffery, who goes by Jeff, recently became the chief of staff in the Ohio Department of Children and Youth (DCY). Prior to this role, Jeff was the state child welfare director overseeing Ohio’s 88 county system. He’s the kind of guy who makes you feel, right away, like you belong. Tamela, who goes by Tammy, is the director of the Scioto County Department of Job and Family Services (JFS). She has a smile that lights up a room. This is the story of these two leaders and the partnership they forged to bring child welfare back from the brink in Scioto County.

Tammy with her husband John and their dog Duke

And when Governor DeWine understood that some counties were struggling under the weight of their child welfare programs, he envisioned a way the state could help. He gathered the very best practitioners at the state agency and formed a Rapid Response Team, which was dispatched to Scioto County to provide intensive resources and support. In 2020, when Jeff became the child welfare director, he continued implementing the governor’s vision with the Rapid Response team and decided to continue the efforts underway in Scioto County. Working with the Scioto staff, Jeff and his team devoted themselves to learning. They listened closely, studied data, and con sidered ways to bring the community together on behalf of their children. Conversations with Scioto staff and their critical partners in the com munity focused on a single question: what would it take for children to be safer in Scioto? They found a big appetite for partnership, a desperate need for role clarity, and significant gaps in the administrative infrastruc ture of the agency. A closer look at data on visits and timely investigations revealed

Molly Tierney is a Managing Director at Accenture in Health and Public Service.

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