Child-protection service in disarray

The children. Has anyone considered the health and well-being of the children during these times of financial hardship? Monetary burden gives rise to child abuse and neglect. Some of those families that struggle with day-to-day survival issues and mounting financial pressures may be pushed over the edge and culminate in taking their pain, anger and frustration out on their children.

As the economy continues to take its toll on families, crisis centers are seeing a sharp rise in child-abuse and neglect cases. Our children greatly need and deserve to be protected regardless of the life challenges and circumstances of their parents.

Unfortunately, the Division of Youth and Family Services (DYFS) can no longer be trusted to care for children in home care. As a registered and certified school nurse, I have struggled with this agency on numerous occasions, viewing firsthand this poorly managed child-welfare system. Departments are fragmented, and a tremendous lack of supervisory checks and balances exists. Its workforce is inexperienced, with 80 percent of directcare staff (those who work directly with clients, i.e. therapists, psychologists, etc.) having less than five years' experience, and 25 percent of the casework staff (staff members who arrange for client services) are trainees with less than one year of experience. Children are not visited by DYFS workers regularly, sometimes not for months at a time. Physician referrals are made but not enforced, and cases are closed with uninvestigated complaints of abuse. This is in violation of ethical, professional standards of practice, those principles that express values or standards of conduct.

If malpractice lawsuits punish physicians, what method of punishment will be used when an agency such as DYFS is negligent and fails to protect a child? Who will be the children's advocate when the so called "child-advocacy agency" fails them? In order to ensure child safety and to capture evidence before it is compromised, investigations must be prompt; this was seldom the case in my experience.

How then is New Jersey spending the $1 billion over nearly the past six years to expand and improve the child-welfare and mental-health system, thereby benefiting the 23,500 troubled families DYFS supervises, if children continue to be neglected and ultimately die while the agency has been under the supervision of a federal-court monitor?

It should be an undying commitment by all legislators to reform DYFS for the sole well-being of the child. The state's child-protection system is in tragic disarray and in need of meaningful transformation. DYFS requires complete restructuring, better management, increased training and a greater emphasis on accountability, which will lead to fundamental institutional reform.

We, the people, need to see our hard-earned money work for us in an agency whose core mission is indeed the protection of the child.
Katherine Shkolar
Spotswood