Armed with new tools, child welfare caseworkers help more families address underlying problems

By Camalot Todd

Monday, April 10, 2017 | 2 a.m.

Every day, Kisha Earhart and Malou Steele balance the need to eliminate risks to children with the value of preserving families.

Earhart is a Child Protective Services (CPS) investigator for kids 4 and younger who have experienced extreme abuse or neglect, and Steele is a former investigator-turned-permanency caseworker who helps displaced youths find stable homes. Combined, the women have worked for the Clark County Department of Family Services (DFS) for 20 years.

They described the moment after CPS knocks on a family’s door — the tension seeping through those few inches of wood. On one side, parents fear losing their children. On the other, an agent weighs the consequences of allowing vulnerable youths to stay in unstable homes or placing them in foster care, each path with its own spectrum of potential trauma.

“At the end of the day, we’re just there to make sure that the children are safe. And we want to work with families to make sure their kids are safe in their home,” Earhart said.

DFS labels child abuse and neglect “a symptom” of underlying family conditions that critically affect a child’s safety and well-being, ranging from substance abuse and mental health concerns to domestic violence and poor resources. To that end, the department recently beefed up offerings that help at-risk families while children remain in the home.

In 2015, the federal government granted Clark County DFS a Title E-IV waiver through 2019, allowing some block-grant funds to support preventative services focused on keeping families together.

“We do so much more for families and for children that we work with now in 2017 than we did when I first started in 1999,” Earhart said. “We really have more of a focus to maintain children in the homes with their parents and to put services in place.”

The waiver led to the creation of Safe@Home, a set of social services for struggling families whose situations might not justify a child’s removal. Parents can be connected to food banks or programs for drug rehab or anger management. If a single mother were reported to CPS for leaving her young child home alone because she couldn’t afford a babysitter, free or discounted child care could be provided, along with counseling on risky behavior.

Launched in 2015, Safe@Home’s aim was to decrease repeat maltreatment by improving parenting skills and related avenues to permanency. Preventing entry and re-entry into foster care was a key focus, as the county’s rate of re-entry after 12 months was then 13 percent, exceeding the federal standard of 9.9 percent. (The county won’t have 2016 re-entry data until the end of 2017, because 12 months haven’t passed since the last child would have exited the system. However, the 13 percent in 2015 showed a drop in re-entry from the previous year, when the rate was 16 percent.)

The program has so far served 792 children in 282 families, successfully closing cases for 111 families. Of the remaining 171 with open cases, 22 had children removed, though they have a chance at reunification if they continue working on problem areas.

“As that program continues to evolve and develop, I think it’s going to be key to maintaining more children at home,” Earhart said. “But I think it’s already having a definite effect on them.”

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Similar to community policing models that build trust in officers by stationing them in certain neighborhoods, CPS investigators are divided into geographic zones throughout the valley: west, east, north, south and central. While Clark County has employed this system for decades, the zones were redistributed in 2014 “to create more balanced case assignments and rotations” after the county saw an increase in need for services.

By focusing on a specific area, agents are more in tune with that community’s unique problems and how to address them. “Allowing the children to remain in the home is beneficial to the whole community. It reduces the trauma of the whole community,” Earhart said. “It’s not taking the child away from their friends at school with no explanation. It’s not taking them away from their church.”

Making that decision begins with a CPS investigator sitting down with a family to talk through allegations.

“Some things might be true, all of it might be true, none of it could be true; you just don’t know,” Earhart said. “So the whole point initially is just to get to know the family. ... If a child is unsafe, what could we put in place to keep the child in the home? What dynamics are present? What resources does the family have?”

One resource offered by Safe@Home is the opportunity for parents to form a “present danger plan” that allows DFS-vetted relatives or friends to stay in the home and act on the child’s behalf.

If removal is unavoidable, the first goal is to place the child with a family friend or extended family member while his or her parents work on a case plan with the goal of reunification. The county runs a background check and completes a home visit before determining whether the placement is viable. If it isn’t, Earhart said, then DFS depends on the Child Haven emergency shelter to keep kids safe until an appropriate home can be found.

In 2016, 2,099 children were placed in Child Haven, including those who were there for only a few hours. Over the past five months, the average stay was a little over a week.

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Even if a child is removed, the family still has access to Safe@Home services. That’s where Steele’s unit comes in, working in tandem with Earhart’s.

Steele oversees a lot of reunifications, but she also coordinates adoption, guardianship, emancipation and extended social services for youths who age out of foster care. “Our first priority is keeping children safe, so you have to make that very tough decision to remove,” Steele said. “But again, we try to put them back at home as soon as the parents are able to provide that safe environment again.”

In the wake of Safe@Home's implementation, 1,720 children who were removed from their homes were reunified with their families in 2016, an increase over the previous two years: 1,686 in 2015 and 1,515 in 2014.

Steele noted that the complicated court process is smoother if the family cooperates with caseworkers. “People perceive it as an adversarial process, where it’s us against the family, and it’s not that. If we work together, the children are generally able to go home quicker.”

Such partnerships come slowly. Caseworkers must invest time with families to understand their issues, building trust within that dynamic that extends to other caseworkers and arms of the system.

“Families begin to trust us the more we’re there and the more we get to know them and the more we show genuine interest in their family and in their children and in their situation,” said Steele, who watches family visitations to observe progress.

“It’s always encouraging for me to see later on, a family that Malou has helped piece back together once we’ve identified the issues,” Earhart said. “The children are thriving in the home and the parents understand what the issue is, and they’re able to safely address it and make sure the child’s needs are met. You can really see kids thrive in a family setting with their parents, and you see the parents also thrive.”