(AP) — Child-welfare experts said on Tuesday that Nebraska needs to improve its oversight of private groups to ensure they will properly care for thousands of foster-care children and expressed concern that state officials may be rushing reform.
While stopping well short of full-on privatization of the foster-care system, the state is beginning to farm out services such as finding foster homes for children and coordinating day-to-day activities such as doctor visits and counseling sessions. State officials say it will improve care by giving state workers more time to comprehensively review and manage foster-care cases while putting more clinical work in hands of private providers who are often better at doing such work. They say they are now positioned to make sure contractors are adequately providing services.
“We are not relinquishing our critical decision-making authority,” said Todd Reckling, who oversees child-welfare services for the state Department of Health and Human Services.
The switch over is expected to be completed by April.
“I don’t think we have as an intense of a structure as we need,” to provide the type of state oversight of contractors that is needed, said Carol Stitt, director of the Nebraska Foster Care Review Board. The group is an independent arm of state government that tracks foster-care cases to ensure children are being cared for properly.
Stitt and others spoke on Tuesday as the group released its annual report of foster care and issued recommendations, including rigorous oversight of private groups by the state Department of Health and Human Services.
Critics have questioned the competency of the department’s contractor oversight in recent years following embarrassing findings.
Last year, a woman who worked for a private group that had a contract with the state was arrested for having a blood-alcohol level five times the legal limit while transporting a foster child in Sarpy County.
In April, the State Auditor Mike Foley released an audit showing that a nonprofit group that served about two dozen special-needs children overcharged Nebraska taxpayers to the tune of $15,000 a month for three nondescript buildings outside Kearney.
State oversight has been a “mixed bag,” said Mario Scalora, a psychology professor and member of the Foster Care Review Board.
“There’s obviously substantially more room for improvement,” he said on Tuesday.
There are about 4,300 children in out-of-home foster care, including homes of foster parents and group homes.
Reckling said that even though private groups will be providing more services to foster children than they have in the past, it will be easier to track whether the contractors are doing a good job.
Instead of having contracts with more than 100 groups, the state has contracts with five to serve the thousands of children.
“Instead of being spread thin and overseeing 100, I can focus on five,” Reckling said.
The new contracts, he said, also have performance-based, stick-and-carrot measures that give groups incentives to fulfill their obligations.
Reckling said increased reliance on private contractors isn’t expected to increase costs for the state and that it could eventually save the state money by helping keep more children in the homes of their biological parents.
