The Post-Standard, June 20, 2009 Saturday

Copyright 2009 Post-Standard

The Post-Standard (Syracuse, New York)

June 20, 2009, Saturday

HEADLINE:

DSS Boss to Ask for More Staff; Request to Oswego County Legislators will be for 27 Caseworkers, Supervisors

BYLINE: By John Doherty Staff writer

BODY:
Oswego County's social services commissioner will ask county legislators next week to significantly increase the number of caseworkers dealing with children in the county.

The request, which calls for hiring 27 additional caseworkers and supervisors, comes on the heels of a report that found the department's child protective unit is severely overworked and understaffed. The current staffing is 40 people.

The plan will be presented to the county Legislature's Health and Human Services Committee on Wednesday. The plan also will be reviewed by the county's finance and personnel committees.

It could go before the full Legislature on July 9 and the first of the new caseworkers could be hired by the end of August.

"I don't like the idea of raising taxes to pay for this, but it's something we may have to do," said Legislature Chair-man Barry Leemann, R-Amboy.

The state has given the county $500,000 to pay for additional staff through March 31.

"That's just seed money to get things started," Leemann said.

The report, prepared by Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, was one of three studies that looked at the social services department after the death of 11-year-old Erin Maxwell.

The girl died Aug. 30 after being asphyxiated in her squalid Palermo home, where more than 100 cats lived. Case-workers had investigated the Maxwell home three times between 2002 and 2006.

Erin Maxwell's stepbrother, Alan Jones, has been charged with her murder. Her father and stepmother, Lindsey and Lynn Maxwell, are facing child endangerment charges.

"One of the highest priorities we have is to protect our kids," Leemann said. "We don't want to have any more tragedies, though I don't believe we were responsible for what happened (to Erin Maxwell)."

The Cornell report found that when Erin Maxwell died, two years after the last social service investigation, case-workers were handling an average of 139 cases a year -- nearly double the national and state standard of 72 cases.

The department's staffing crisis goes back to 2004 when, in the face of a budget crisis, more than 100 county em-ployees lost their jobs, said Legislator John Proud, chairman of the Health and Human Service Committee.

"When we made our staffing cuts back a few years ago, social services was hit very hard," said Proud, R-Mexico. "They reorganized and tried to do things differently to compensate for the loss of personnel. What the report shows is we got people who are too overloaded and that's got to be addressed."

The plan, prepared by Department of Social Services Commissioner Frances Lanigan, calls for increasing the numbers of caseworkers and supervisors in the department's child protective and family services units.

The number of child protective caseworkers would grow from 20 to 36 and the number of supervisors would in-crease from four to seven.

Staffing in the family services unit, which provides on-going help to children and their families, would increase from 16 to 24 caseworkers.

Other positions called for under the plan include additional clerical workers and a supervisor to monitor the de-partment's quality and training.

John Doherty can be reached at jdoherty@syracuse.com and 592-7140 or 470-3235.

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