In Colorado, Making Smarter Decisions About Child Welfare Investigations

Work­ing with the Annie E. Casey Foun­da­tion, Jef­fer­son County’s Divi­sion of Chil­dren, Youth, Fam­i­lies and Adult Pro­tec­tive Ser­vices has enhanced deci­sion mak­ing at its ear­li­est pos­si­ble point: When chil­dren are referred to author­i­ties because of sus­pect­ed abuse or neglect.

In 2010, 51% of chil­dren who were referred to author­i­ties in Jef­fer­son Coun­ty, Col­orado, required an inves­ti­ga­tion. In 2018, this same deci­sion point result­ed in an inves­ti­ga­tion just 37% of the time.

Real­iz­ing this change requires staff and sys­tems to change, accord­ing to Jef­fer­son Coun­ty Intake Pro­gram Man­ag­er Alysse Neme­cek. In Col­orado, staff devel­oped new skills and process­es that enhanced their abil­i­ty make crit­i­cal child pro­tec­tion deci­sions. This evo­lu­tion included:

• Cre­at­ing RED teams (RED stands for Review, Eval­u­ate and Direct), which are groups of three to five social work­ers, super­vi­sors and man­agers who con­sid­er each refer­ral together.
• Posi­tion­ing data as a crit­i­cal tool for RED teams and sig­nif­i­cant­ly increas­ing the data resources that these teams uti­lize in their deci­sion-mak­ing processes.
• Lever­ag­ing the pow­er of data analy­sis. Track­ing and ana­lyz­ing cur­rent cas­es and inves­ti­ga­tions enables the agency to spot pat­terns, anom­alies and lessons that can help improve indi­vid­ual deci­sions, poli­cies and practices.

The new data-enriched approach ​“allows us to have a dia­logue that wasn’t hap­pen­ing before,” says Nemecek.

Staff are also using the data to iden­ti­fy and devel­op new solu­tions. For instance: The coun­ty exam­ined a vari­ety of fac­tors — sub­stance use, home­less­ness, lack of super­vi­sion, men­tal health sta­tus and more — to bet­ter under­stand what divid­ed chil­dren and fam­i­lies who returned to the agency’s atten­tion from those who did not.

One way to reduce repeat refer­rals, accord­ing to the data, is to require two face-to-face con­tacts month­ly, includ­ing a vis­it to the fam­i­ly home. Cross-sec­tor col­lab­o­ra­tion is also get­ting eas­i­er, with RED teams often includ­ing mem­bers from oth­er areas, such as edu­ca­tion and health care.

The keys to the approach, says Neme­cek, are shared respon­si­bil­i­ty and a sense of con­tin­u­ous learn­ing. ​“It brings the entire agency into the con­ver­sa­tion so that we can make the very impor­tant deci­sion of whether we have the right and the author­i­ty to inter­vene in a family’s life.”

Read more about Jef­fer­son County’s approach