Illinois' child welfare agency goes on a hiring spree

The child welfare agency in Illinois has been in crisis since the 1990s, regularly sparking outrage when abused kids in its care die or children in state custody languish in hospitals or jails for months instead of finding a home with families. The Department of Children and Family Services has suffered from frequent leadership changes and chronic underfunding, but one big problem that officials say has contributed to the agency’s troubles has been a persistent staffing shortage.

To recruit more workers and ultimately achieve better outcomes for children across the state, DCFS has cut the hiring time for frontline workers from nine months to just a few weeks, according to agency officials. Sometimes, the department can even offer candidates a conditional job offer after a single day of interviews.

DCFS has focused on replenishing its ranks as part of a broader strategy to address the long-standing issues with the agency. Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat in his second term, has made new hires a central part of his plan for turning the agency around.

“DCFS is more focused than ever on how to best protect Illinois children,” he told lawmakers during a February budget address. “Of the more than 94,525 investigations conducted last year by DCFS, 99.7% were initiated within 24 hours. And within seven days, 96% of children have been seen by an investigator. With an additional $14 million in funding in [the next fiscal year], DCFS will reach a headcount of 4,000 staff for the first time in more than two decades.”

That would be a significant turnaround for an agency that had just 2,500 employees a decade ago. But getting the headcount to 4,000 by next year would still mean gaining a net of about 500 workers.

Jassen Strokosch, the DCFS chief of staff, told Route Fifty that delivering better services started with building out a more robust staff.

“There’s no strategy that’s going to overcome not having staff,” he said. “You have to have the right people, smart people, trained people, committed people to do this work really well. And there’s nothing more important to delivering services than that.”

But that required changing the hiring process. DCFS officials went back to interview job candidates who received offers from the agency but did not accept them to find out why they passed on the state job.

One problem, Strokosch said, is that the state took too long to make the job offer. People needed an answer within three months, but the state process could take nine months to a year, depending on the position.

Another major obstacle was that there were wide regional variations on the salaries needed to be competitive. In the northern city of Rockford, the agency had more than a 50% vacancy rate for child protection specialists, but those positions were completely filled in southern Illinois. That’s because there were more jobs for college-educated candidates in the north, particularly in health care, that offered better salaries than the state, Strokosch explained.

The agency made regional salary adjustments, but cutting down the application time was a bigger challenge.

The hiring process involved 30 different steps. Some were required by federal consent decrees. Others involved communications between DCFS and Central Management Services, a state agency that handles functions like IT and human resources. Others involved the union to ensure that the agency followed preferences for existing state employees and abided by seniority rules.

Even if the individual steps didn’t take long to complete, the “back-and-forth” added weeks or months to processing times, Strokosch said. “Something that’s very common to state government—and government in general—is that things sit on desks or in someone’s inbox for a little bit of time at every step in the process, so when you add 20 or 30 steps together … you end up with a very long process.”

One way the agency has addressed that is by holding regional job fairs where all of the people in state government who would need to review the applications would be in the same place. HR specialists help candidates determine if they met the qualifications for an opening before they apply. Current DCFS employees are on hand to help applicants get a better understanding of what their job entails. A candidate could go through job interviews with their prospective bosses, while HR employees would process the applications. Then, the candidate could even submit their fingerprints for a criminal background check on site.

“When you walked away from that event, if we had a good match for you, you would have a conditional offer of employment right there on the site,” Strokosch said. If the applicants cleared the background check, they could start their job within four to six weeks of the event.

More than 300 people came to DCFS’s first regional event in Rockford last year, and the agency made conditional offers to half of them. Since then, the agency has held two other hiring events in different parts of the state. It has also participated in smaller scale events at job fairs, universities and virtually.

Strokosch said the Pritzker administration’s focus on hiring more staff has made a big difference for the children DCFS serves. In 2015, he said, the state employed 481 child protection workers (in Illinois, unlike in many other states, the state is the main governmental provider of child protection services). Today, Illinois has 765.

“That’s a dramatic shift in terms of the number of people who are out there responding to hotline calls, knocking on doors, talking to families, talking to children and conducting investigations,” he said. “That dramatic shift means every single day [child protection workers] have more time to do their job.”

There is pressure on DCFS from lawmakers, advocates and even the agency’s own workers to make dramatic improvements in the agency’s performance. 

DCFS has been in crisis for decades. Before the current administration, it had 15 top executives in 16 years. The last director was held in contempt of court seven times for failing to find placements for children. A two-year budget impasse a decade ago decimated service providers the agency depends on because payments to the providers stopped. The aftereffects of that standoff to the state’s safety net are still felt today.

Since the start of the pandemic, DCFS also has seen increases in the numbers of investigations it has conducted, the number of youth it has direct responsibility for (in foster care, adoption proceedings or guardianships) and the number of intact families it serves.

Officials from the chapter of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees that represents DCFS workers and Illinois state employees say that chronic understaffing has exacerbated the agency’s problems.

“Frontline reports paint a stark picture of the working conditions DCFS staff face every day: constant fear that working too many cases will make them miss a sign that a child is in danger; working overtime—often uncompensated; meeting timeliness mandates but feeling that more could be done for families if there were more time; stress-related illness; and strained family life,” AFSCME Council 31 wrote in a report last year.

Understaffing also raises safety concerns for DCFS employees, especially when they have to respond to calls alone. Two DCFS employees were killed on the job in the last five years.

Ron Hudson, an AFSCME labor relations specialist who works with DCFS employees, said that, even with the current administration’s focus on hiring, bureaucratic delays are still too common, both in posting openings for positions and for processing applications once they come in. He said the recent hiring spree hasn’t yet changed the day-to-day experiences of most DCFS workers.

But Hudson is part of a hiring and retention committee that works with state administrators to make the hiring process more effective. One promising development, he said, is the creation of a mentorship program for new DCFS employees that will pair them with colleagues in similar positions. That could help reduce turnover, which is a major concern because about a third of new DCFS employees quit within a year. “DCFS is one of the leaders to try new things like the mentor program,” Hudson said. “Hopefully other agencies will see that and model their programs after what we’re doing.”

(Strokosch said AFSCME has been “really cooperative” with the agency in helping to streamline the hiring process.)

Charles Golbert, the Cook County public guardian, who advocates on behalf of children in the Chicago area, has been one of DCFS’ biggest critics in recent years. He brought the cases that ended with contempt charges for the previous agency director. Golbert said he’s “cautiously optimistic” that new money for DCFS and a new director will help improve the agency’s performance, but he hasn’t seen big changes yet.

“Have we seen the increased resources translate into actual improved outcomes for children yet? The answer is ‘no,’” he said.

A big reason for that, he said, was that there were so few places for kids in state custody to go. The number of children who have to stay in hospitals after their medical needs are met, who stay in jails after they serve their time or even who stay in DCFS offices while waiting for outside beds to open up continues to increase, Golbert said.

“DCFS could hire 100,000 new people, but if there are no placements for kids and no services for kids, those 100,000 new people will continue to spin their wheels and get frustrated, spending all of their time trying to find placements for kids that don’t exist,” he said.

But Anders Lindall, a spokesperson for AFSCME Council 31, said Golbert’s criticism doesn’t acknowledge all of the different duties that DCFS employees must perform.

The goal of DCFS for several decades has been to keep families intact whenever possible, Lindall said. So the agency needs people to handle hotline calls, investigate those tips, determine whether the kids should remain with their families, offer people parental coaching, connect parents to substance abuse treatment or help parents find jobs. DCFS workers are also responsible for foster care and overseeing child care centers, Lindall noted. “Workers are needed for all of those.”

Strokosch said DCFS is trying to work across the board to improve its services, but he said the amount of work to be done shouldn’t stop agency leaders from trying new things.

“As leaders in child welfare and human services, in state hiring sometimes we tend to get overwhelmed by all the different things that need to be improved at once,” he said. “So onboarding is great, but if you’re not dealing with retention and high caseload and salaries and all the other things, it can be overwhelming at times, right?”

“This is one of those things where you just have to dig in and try new things and not be scared to say, ‘Listen, we don’t have everything solved. We don’t necessarily know whether this is going to work. No one else is doing this … But we’re going to invest a ton of time, energy, effort and collaboration and just do it. We’ll see what happens,’” he said. “And it worked.”