Senate Health and Welfare Chairman Patrick McMath unveils his plan to fix the state agency responsible for child welfare. The Department of Children and Family Services has been criticized for not preventing child deaths after they were alerted about dangers in the home. McMath wants to move many of the functions of DCFS within the Department of Health and put State Police in charge of handling child abuse reports.
“We have heard many reports where DCFS didn’t accept a report or a worker failed to make contact with a child, and the next call received by DCFS was that the child was now dead,” McMath said.
McMath’s legislation would also put the Attorney General’s office in charge of making sure parents are making their court-ordered support payments.
The proposal is 111 pages long so members of the Senate Health and Welfare Committee will spend the next week going over the major changes. Alexandria Senator Jay Luneau is one of several lawmakers displeased with DCFS’s inability to protect abused and neglected children.
“It’s just time. We can’t keep having these terrible outcomes,” Luneau said.
Luneau’s biggest concern with the proposal is funding and workforce to do the job. McMath says current employees of DCFS would not lose their jobs, instead they would be transferred into LDH and that agency’s new name will be the Louisiana Department of Health and Human Services.
“They would be folded into, what I believe to be, a more robust system. We’ll have greater levels of support and potentially significant avenues, increased avenues, in funding,” Luneau explained.
The Advocate asked Governor Landry about McMath’s plan, and he told the news organization that he’s frustrated with the proposal because no one talked with him about it. He questioned the idea of having State Police handling the child abuse hotline and how that would cost the state.