The Director of the Iowa Department of Human Services put his stamp of approval on the new plan for the state’s child welfare programs. Kevin Concannon says the goal is to get state employees more time with families. He says they want to elevate and emphasize family-centered practice and they want to increase the amount of face-to-face contact with workers and families.Concannon says the state will apply for federal waivers to skip some of the required reporting. He says the review across Iowa universally showed they’ve been buried by the review requirements that pose severe time demands on case workers and others, while not helping kids.Concannon hopes to free up workers’ time by shifting some of the low risk cases to private agencies. They would be cases where no abuse has been found, but the family is on the margin.He says the state would still do the assessment, but if it found the family struggling, but they care about their children, they would try to help them with a homemaker or someone to help them organize. Concannon says that would cover about 23-hundred families. Concannon says he eventually wants a system that rewards agencies for results, not for the number of kids they serve.
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