A few years ago, among the swirl of publicity over sweeping, unpopular changes in the Indiana Department of Child Services, I consistently heard from some in the child-protection system that the agency's family case managers were overworked to the point of endangering children.
But back in 2012, DCS insisted it did not have caseload numbers to share. The data the agency released — the data that because of confidentiality laws, only it controls — indicated merely that all of the state's regions but one (Marion County) complied with the law regulating the number of cases each worker should carry at a time. Indiana law mandates that family case managers, or fcms, should shoulder only 12 cases under assessment, or 17 ongoing cases.
Even then, some who were suspicious of the agency's accounting alleged that by reporting only vague "regional" numbers, DCS could hide too-high workloads for the largest counties by averaging their case numbers with lower-population counties in their regions. For instance, in Region 3, high caseload numbers in St. Joseph County might be balanced by better-looking data in nearby Marshall County.
So I asked for lists of all of the staff members in Indiana's county DCS offices, including vacant positions, and the current numbers of cases in each. But even after doing the math myself — dividing the numbers of children whose lives were being overseen by the numbers of caseworkers in each county — I could not find any evidence that workloads in DCS' county offices exceeded the state caseload mandate.
Then in 2013, a new director was named. Soon after former Lake County Judge Mary Beth Bonaventura moved into her Indianapolis office, she was hearing that caseworkers in the field were overwhelmed.
By spring 2014, Bonaventura acknowledged that family case managers in all of the state's regions were carrying more than their mandated workloads. They discovered those who tallied the data had been including the large staff of family case managers who man the consolidated hotline in Indianapolis but don't actually monitor any cases. That was making the numbers look better than they were, all over the state.
I never understood how that would skew numbers outside of Marion County, the only county that housed the hotline workers at the time. But at least the issue was being addressed.
This time last year, DCS appeared before the lawmakers who prepare the state budget. The agency said its annual compiling of caseloads indicated 77 new workers would need to be hired statewide to meet the statutory levels. But DCS did not request money for more family case managers. Instead, Bonaventura and her staff hired a consulting company to study their operations and determine whether they were being as efficient as possible.