Ten years on, there’s still no way to track kids in NC’s child welfare system online
By Rose Hoban
After tens of millions of dollars and nearly a decade of false starts, the state Department of Health and Human Services is finally poised to roll out caseload software designed to assess and track children monitored by the state’s child welfare system.
The April rollout will come more than five years after the state Division of Social Services tried a different software system that was so glitchy it inspired howls of protest from county social service directors. Staff in counties testing the system logged numerous complaints, and caseworkers even quit in frustration.
Eventually, at the insistence of lawmakers, DHHS stopped implementing that faulty software program.
That was just one component of the NC FAST, or North Carolina Families Accessing Services through Technology, computer system that was created to be a statewide one-stop shop where social service workers could help beneficiaries sign up for services like Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)benefits or even help with heating and cooling bills.
But the child welfare component of the NC FAST suite of programs was not just besieged with snafus that hampered its usefulness — it also was expensive. All told, that portion cost about $120 million — $60 million in state funds and $60 million in federal money — all spent between 2015 and 2023.
There are still a handful of counties making do with the old system, but eventually it will be completely scrapped.
After lawmakers told DHHS officials to abandon development of that NC FAST component in 2021, the department went back to the drawing board.
In 2023, they contracted with a new vendor, Deloitte, to create an entirely new software system. To date, North Carolina has laid out $14.4 million for this project, and the federal government has kicked in $6.7 million.
In April, DHHS will roll out the Partnership and Technology Hub, or PATH NC, that’s supposed to allow county-based caseworkers who are following the lives of vulnerable children to keep up with what’s going on.
Advocates are hoping this will finally be the better way forward.
“There’s been a lot of money that was wasted and efforts that just did not ultimately result in a case management system,” said Karen McLeod, who runs Benchmarks, an advocacy organization focused on child and family service providers. “It’s been very frustrating — not just as an advocate for kids, but also as an advocate for the counties to be able to do their work well.”
State-managed, county-run
One of the primary challenges in North Carolina is that DHHS manages the child welfare system, but the department doesn’t actually run the day-to-day system. That’s left up to counties.
Each of North Carolina’s 100 counties does things a little differently. They have their own ways of documenting child welfare cases and foster care cases, plus children’s and families’ personal information, medication history, history of services and other key details needed to ensure that children aren’t neglected or abused.
Nearly three decades into the internet age, many county DSSs still use paper files to keep records about child abuse, neglect and the services kids receive. This means that social workers lack the basic ability to track troubled families with vulnerable children who may move across county lines. They also can’t access criminal records.
“As a caseworker, you get a case, you know nothing about their previous involvement. You don’t know what all has happened and the details of who was in that family who wasn’t,” McLeod said. “It … just should be a baseline of expectation to receive when you get a case.”
But without a statewide tracking system, it’s not, she said.
“As a result of that, you’ve got counties that are flying blind and trying to do good work, but without the knowledge,” McLeod continued.
“That information is not easily shared and accessed by the state or by other counties,” Francisco Celis Villagrana, an analyst with the General Assembly’s Fiscal Research Division, said during a presentation to lawmakers at the Joint Appropriations for Health and Human Services in late February. “As you might imagine, this presents a challenge for the state, which is supposed to be supervising and overseeing how the counties are conducting their child welfare operations.
“It also makes it a challenge when children in foster care move across counties. Sometimes that information is not easily accessed, shared or maintained in the same way across the state,” he added.
And some of these families do a lot of moving, McLeod pointed out.
“A lot of the parents of children who are in foster care are very poor, and so it might be that they’re moving somewhere to have a place to stay — a family member or a friend,” she said. “It could be that they’re looking for some kind of work. For instance, if you look in some … parts of the state, like the coastal area, it’s transient work, seasonal-based.”
She also noted that in families where there’s been domestic violence, moms frequently take their kids and move to another county or across the state to get away from an abuser.
Some families are also trying to get away from the social service system because county officials in one place have identified them as having problems — and they know that because county social service agencies still keep their files on paper, they’ll be hard to track.
“Move one county over, and you’re lost to follow-up,” McLeod said.
A child’s death spurs reform
When kids get lost in the child welfare system, bad things can happen. Such pitfalls were highlighted by the case of 3-year-old Rylan Ott, whose tragic 2015 death in Moore County inspired an eponymous law intended to overhaul the child welfare system.
That same year, North Carolina landed in the sights of federal regulators, when the federal Children’s Bureau issued a scathing report that the state failed to protect children from abuse or neglect and did not meet standards in any of the quality categories examined.
A separate, private audit that same year also found that the state provided inadequate funding, overloaded its caseworkers and churned through staff. It also found that the state needed to better train its child welfare workers and that the state department needed more authority to step in when counties were troubled.
“North Carolina’s system of practice is not designed in a way that consistently protects vulnerable children in North Carolina,” read a synopsis of the audits ordered by the legislature and prepared by the North Carolina Association of County Departments of Social Services.
Having paper files has made it difficult to get information where it needed to go and has allowed troubled families to disappear. The reports cited this lack of data, the inability to track where families are, and an inability to find children who fall through the cracks.
Getting buy-in from counties
McLeod is frustrated that it’s taken more than a decade to roll out caseload tracking software that should help seal up those cracks.
It’s also been a frustration to Susan Osborne, who works at the state health department’s Division of Social Services. Osborne was working in the Alamance County Department of Social Services when the management information system saga began, and now that she’s working at the state level, she’s determined to make this software rollout better. She said the current process has been much more collaborative — as opposed to the top-down approach of a decade ago.
“Counties have worked alongside us as we have developed this system,” Osborne said. “It has decision-making tools built in that help workers drive to the right decision and to know what comes next.”
She said they’ve been testing the intake and assessment parts of the new system with front-line workers for months.
She’s hopeful this, and other reforms, will help improve the state’s child welfare system.
When Rylan’s Law was passed in 2017, it allowed DHHS to create regional offices to provide training and guidance to counties and provide better oversight. Lawmakers also gave the DHHS secretary the ability to take over a county department of social services if it becomes clear the county can’t or won’t make things better, as happened in 2018 in Cherokee County.
Good money after bad
Meanwhile, the federal government has been dinging North Carolina financially for the state’s failure to implement a better tracking system. During the development of the 2015 NC FAST system, the federal government and the state split the cost of developing the software 50-50.
With the failure of the old system, that’s changed.
“Since 2019 when development was paused, the [federal government] has been reimbursing the system’s expenses at a lower rate of about 25 percent, and that’s what the rate has been for the last five years,” legislative analyst Celis Villagrana told lawmakers at the February committee hearing.
If North Carolina receives federal approval for the new software, the reimbursement rate would go back up to 50 percent. The feds could also choose to retroactively reimburse North Carolina for software development expenses incurred as much as 24 months before the approval date, helping the state recoup some of the outlay.
“We’re very excited,” Osborne said. “Social work and the workforce challenges and the complex family situations that families face — this will make the documentation part easier so social workers can do social work.”
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