Episode: Guest:
00:00:00
Pryce
How the Assessment Response Team Can Improve Efficiency and Effectiveness in Case Management Ms. Miranda Slaughter
Welcome to the second season of the Florida Institute for Child Welfare Podcast. I am Jessica Pryce, your host. In this season, we are focused on reimagining child welfare through technology and innovation. We will hear from visionary leaders on how they are working intentionally and collaboratively to enhance and innovate child welfare. Today on the Florida Institute for Child Welfare Podcast, we are talking about the Assessment Response Team, also known as ART. ART came into play when our state was hit by a Category 4 hurricane, and our child welfare professionals had to strategize on how to respond to cases. Now, this strategy is common practice. Let’s get started.
00:00:53
We are here today with Miranda Slaughter, who leads the ART initiative, and we’re excited to hear from her how the program is going. So Miranda, thank you for being with us. We’re excited to hear about the work that you do in your agency. Will you tell our listeners what brought you into child welfare?
00:01:11
Slaughter Absolutely, my path to child welfare has been a little different from most of my coworkers. And I so admire them for having that social-work heart and knowing what they wanted to do so early in life. The bulk of my earlier career, I actually was a forensic death investigator. I did that for several years, and I really enjoyed helping families and-and solving problems, and-and putting puzzles together. And then, I moved to child welfare, and in about 2017, I really was seeking a career that would be a little more proactive instead of reactive. Death investigations, as you can imagine, are-are sad, and there’s not anything you can really do to prevent it. So, I was excited to get into child welfare to try to prevent these maltreatments and to kind of better families and be more proactive.
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00:02:02
Pryce
Thank you so much, Miranda. And today, we’re excited to learn about a strategy that you and your team are using for your child welfare practice. I understand that it’s called the Assessment Response Team. Can you talk about what influenced your agency wanting to create the ART team?
00:02:20
Slaughter Yes, it actually was born out of crisis. You know, here in Florida, most of us are used to hurricane season. Hurricane Irma really is what influenced the ART team to kind of come about. That was 2017. ART has officially been around since probably about 2018. It started out as kind of a triaging response to, “We’re in crisis; we’ve been hit by a hurricane, but we still need to be able to assess children and their safety. And be able to do so with our employees and our investigators being safe.” So, the process initially began with doing these kind of short assessments to see, “Is this an immediate response? Do we need to get a field investigator out there as quickly as possible? Is it something that can wait until we get the roads cleared? Or is it something that we can handle with a service referral? Or something that we can do remotely?” And there’s a team of ten of us. We started off just doing Circuit One, and we’ve expanded to the whole Northwest region now. So that’s exciting; we’re happy to grow! You know, we really are enthusiastic about it.
00:03:30
Pryce
Got it, thank you. I’m interested to hear more about the ART team, but my next question is going to focus on, “How does the team provide case managers more time to provide direct service to children and families in need?”
00:03:46
Slaughter Our child protective investigators, you know they are our frontline workers, and they are the ones in the field with our families. And I think that we, as the ART team, have been able to, thankfully, give them a little more time to spend with these families and assess for the safety of the children. We primarily do that by just lightening their load. We do their pre-commencement activities. So, we will assess their prior history the criminal history. We’ll look and see what kind of dynamics have changed in the household. Any sort of information that we can give them before they walk into that family to kind of give them an overview of what they’re going to be dealing with helps. It-you know, takes away from some tasks that they would be completing. We also will go ahead and request records, if it’s medical records for like a medical neglect case or out-of-state records, let’s say we have a new family in the area. We’ll go ahead and handle reaching out to the other states. We also will upload any sort of supporting
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documents we can find, whether it’s arrest reports or injunctions, just so they have a good overview of the family. And then we also really work for data integrity in our database. Our team will complete a lot of merges. We’ll make sure that one person or one family isn’t duplicated in multiple areas in our database because then you may be in one, what we call a “case shell,” and not see that they have other case shells or other histories. So, we spend a lot of time merging all of that and correcting that. That way, everyone has a really clear overview of the families that they are getting to work with.
00:05:24
Pryce
So is my understanding correct that there is a team, you know, the ART Team, and they don’t go out in the field like they used to? They are at the office, doing this upfront work on behalf of the caseworkers, is that correct?
00:05:40
Slaughter That is correct. There is a team of ten of us, and we cover the Northwest region, so about fifteen counties, Escambia through Leon. And we all pretty much work remotely or in an office. We will go out if there is a crisis. We are absolutely down to go out and help our counties and our PIs when they need us; we’ve done it before. But for the most part, all of our work is on a computer. We do have shifts that start at about 3 AM, and our last person gets off at about 10 PM. So, we’re available, and then we also are on-call overnight. If they need us, they can always reach us. So, we try to make ourselves very, very available to our sweet little field investigators.
00:06:23
Pryce
00:06:31
Slaughter Sure. One of the biggest things that has worked really well with us is, you know, we’ve developed alternative responses for our families. And that, in turn, has kind of decreased the burden to our field investigators because they do carry such heavy loads. We want them to be able to really focus on the families they have and assess them, and provide them with the right services or the right answer, whatever it is that they may need. And it’s-it’s gone really well, as far as developing our relationship on the ART team with our field staff. They’re not scared at all to reach out to us and ask us stuff, or ask for our opinion or help with something. Or if there’s a problem, “can we fix it?” So that has been one of the things that I think has gone really well.
Understood. That makes a lot of sense. So, can you tell the listeners what has gone really well with ART, but also what challenges you’ve had?
I think one of the challenges is just the sheer volume. I mean, we have a high number of intakes. We have a lot of counties that we cover, and we have a lot of PIs. So, we as a team, luckily, are the type that we really enjoy our work. We want to help people. We love what we do. So, to us, you know, it’s long hours, but we don’t mind at all, but it’s just I think we feel pressure from a team to make sure that we get to everybody or that we can help everyone; you know, we don’t like to tell people “no.” So that’s probably been-been 3
one of our challenges, is working around that and how we can make it smooth for everybody.
00:07:51
Pryce
So, one thing that we do at the Institute, Miranda, is we do research and evaluation, and a part of our job is ascertaining the effectiveness of different strategies. So, my next question is around-do you all evaluate ART? How do you measure the success of the strategy?
00:08:07
Slaughter Our motto is, “We want to provide the right response for the right family at the right time.” So, a simple success would be that we help the family appropriately, whether that was with an intrusive investigation or not. And then measures, of course, we always have data points. We know how many cases we are looking at and sending back to the hotline for correction because this doesn’t meet jurisdictional maltreatment criteria, like, “We don’t have the right to investigate this allegation.” So that, obviously, alleviates a little bit of the caseload. And then developing those alternative responses and being able to handle some things at the ART level, like our Special Conditions reports—something that doesn’t really rise to the level of abuse and neglect but it’s just something occurring in a family dynamic that, maybe, they need to talk to somebody, maybe they need a service referral. A Special Condition report for us would be something like a child-on-child sexual abuse concern, or if we have a parent that needs assistance like an overwhelmed mom just needs a supportive service or some help getting daycare lined up—those things we will handle at our level. So, I think that just the numbers of those we were able to complete and, “Can it be beneficial to not only the families but to the field?” are how we kind of measure our success rate.
00:09:24
Pryce
00:09:48
Slaughter I think that being a field investigator and being a field supervisor are absolutely the toughest jobs in social work; they just have to be. And I do think there’s a really high correlation between retention and support, so I would hope, and I feel like us, at the ART team, have been able to be really supportive, and hopefully, that level of support helps with retention numbers; I haven’t seen any actual data. But I do know we’ve got some investigators who have stuck around for a really long time, and I think it’s going really well. And they’ve also started where, in our training hours, like in pre-service, when we’ve 4
Got it. And I imagine it might also be important to see, like you talked about, how it’s helping the caseworkers. So, the next question kind of goes into, you know, there’s always this conversation around turnover in child welfare. I’m curious to hear if you think the ART team is enhancing satisfaction among workers? Or, you know, are you still seeing turnover, but it’s still making an impact?
hired a new person to be an investigator, we actually will go and talk to them about ART. And so, they get to know us from the very beginning. It’s not something that they learn about later on. So, I think the added support to the field, and even to the supervisors, has hopefully helped with the decrease in turnover. And I think that it’s some-sometimes when you’re in the field and you’re overwhelmed, you just need that extra person, you know, encouraging you saying, “Yes! Like, you’re doing it right. I believe in you!” You know, and-and we’re able to pull things up and look at them and give guidance rather rapidly. And I-I do think that has really been a positive impact to our field.
00:11:02
Pryce
Yes, I love the conversation around how it impacts the field, especially because we do hear discussions about cases that come to our investigators that probably should not have ever, you know, made it to their desks. So, I think that that impact alone is essential. You and your ART team are able to review cases and say, “This really hasn’t risen to the level where we need to give it to an investigator for 45 days, or 60 days, for that matter.” So, I also want to hear about the scaling of this strategy? Do you have any knowledge or any understanding of other places piloting something similar to the ART team?
00:11:42
Slaughter I know it is our goal to, eventually, go statewide. And that-that would be a dream. I think that the whole state would be really benefitted by it. I know some of the areas have the BRAIN, which do similar activities, and they do pre-commencement, and they stay with their investigations for the life of the case. They’re a little different than us. But again, that extra support I think is absolutely beneficial. It’s not quite the same thing as what we do, but I can’t imagine, as a field PI, how invaluable it would be to have someone else staying with a case with you from start to finish. So, I think that us going statewide and helping with the BRAIN would be awesome for our-for our families and for our investigators.
00:12:24
Pryce
So yeah, I was sitting here thinking, as you were just talking, the idea that the ART team, they’re people. You all are people that are doing that first review of the case and then giving it to caseworkers. And I’m curious, what other technology or other innovation, I-I tell people if we had all of the resources, we needed to have technology and innovation, could that enhance the ART team? What else could you imagine bringing into the ART strategy that would enhance the practice even more?
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00:12:57
Slaughter So, we heavily rely on our databases. You know we’ll do, what we consider, a “relative search” or a “means to locate” search now. So, a relative search, if we are having to take a child into custody, we’re sheltering a child, w-we on the ART team will complete a relative search and use all of our known resources to identify any family member or relative that could take that child to try to keep that poor baby out of foster care. Not that we don’t have wonderful foster homes, we just try to keep family units together as much as we can. So, any increase in technology would absolutely be wonderful. I think that an integrated system would be super beneficial because we do work so well with our community service providers, or DJJ, or law enforcement; and it’s like, there’s sometimes where information is just missed because a new investigator gets assigned, or a new service provider, and it’s not all there. We may not know that this family didn’t follow-up with their referrals or that this person had an issue with them. And I think thatthat the lack of communication and availability of that shared information does impact us. We’ve got really good relationships; we can pick up the phone but having it available in an integrated system would be amazing. And we’ve also started using SAS Virtual Investigator, which looks at the chronicity of a family so we can have a little bit, kind of a numeric understanding of where they fall, like, “How likely are they to reenter the child welfare system. Are they chronic with us? How many times have they been the alleged perpetrator on a case?” And it pulls it all together in a really streamlined way for us. So that’s been a-a new system that we’ve used.
00:14:39
Pryce
00:14:58
Slaughter Absolutely! You know, they always can reach out to any of us. Our fearless leader, Kim Hobbs, is always available, and she is very enthusiastic about the work we do and sharing her strategies with others. I think that-the kind of highlight is just providing the right response for the right family at the right time. Not every family warrants an intrusive investigation. And being open-minded to alternative responses and kind of thinking outside the box to help families and realize that it may not rise to abuse or neglect. Maybe it’s just a family that’s in crisis. Maybe there’s a dynamic shift. Maybe there’s something, from a state perspective, we can help out with and alleviate it. And I think just being really focused on the families is probably where I would always start. That’s where we always view, like, “Does this family need us to be intrusive or what’s the underlying issue? What can I actually help them with?” And change the conversation with the families.
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And before we wrap up Miranda, what should someone who might be listening or someone in agencies around the state of Florida, if they were interested in starting this, you know what would your advice be? How should they get started? Is there someone they can call and talk to? Just curious how somebody who’s interested in this should go about getting plugged in?
And it’s-it’s been a really positive experience, and I would love to see other states or programs pick it up.
00:16:03
Pryce
Wow, thank you so much. I know, as a previous investigator in the state of Florida, I would have greatly benefitted from ART. So, I am really excited to be able to get this podcast out to our stakeholders and our child welfare professionals. Just to give them a glimpse of, again, your enthusiasm but also some components of ART.
00:16:25
Pryce
I want to give a huge thanks to our guests, and we are so appreciative of their commitment to improving our child welfare system. If you want to learn more about this topic or contact these speakers, please visit www.ficw.fsu.edu. Stay safe and well.
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