When former Department of Children and Families Secretary David Wilkins resigned under fire last month, he left behind a much-ballyhooed "transformation" of the child-welfare system.
He'd planned to overhaul the way child-welfare workers evaluate the risk of leaving abused and neglected children in their homes. He'd also wanted to move more money toward prevention services, even though critics said that left at-risk children still more vulnerable.
Then a horrific string of child deaths undermined his efforts. Since April, as many as 20 children already known to DCF have died of abuse or neglect --- amid charges that better decision-making by frontline child-welfare professionals could have prevented their deaths.
Now, parts of Wilkins' revamp are going forward, but with a difference.
Wilkins' new child-protection initiative had been in the works throughout most of his tenure. It included a a methodology for making decisions used by 17 other states. But it's not fully up and running yet and wasn't a factor in the recent deaths.
Wilkins' plans for transformation also included a risk-assessment tool that has been used in Miami-Dade to classify families by the likelihood that they will maltreat their children in the future. It's called SDM, for Structured Decision Making, and was developed by the Children's Research Center at the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.
But Wilkins altered the assessment tool. The center's director, Raelene Freitag, withdrew from the collaboration with DCF after learning the department had "substantially modified" the tool without notifying her.
"The impact of this is serious," Freitag wrote. "This will result in those misclassified families not receiving intervention."