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HomeMy WebLinkAbout04 SOCIAL SERVICES BOARD MINUTES 04-07-2021 AMENDED SOCIAL SERVICES BOARD MINUTES April 7, 2021 The Grant County Department of Social Services Board meeting was held via Zoom due to COVID, with some board members appearing via zoom (z). The meeting was called to order by Chairperson John Beinborn at 9:00 AM. Roll Call was taken with Dale Hood, Don Splinter, Lester Jantzen, Dwight Nelson (z) and John Beinborn. Robert Scallon was present change was approved at the May DSS Board Meeting. Greg Fry was excused from the meeting. Also present was Fred Naatz, Director, Bob Keeney County Board Chairman (z), Garry Pluemer Maintenance Supervisor (z), LeaAnne Smith, Office & Financial Coordinator (z). The meeting was found to be in compliance with the open meeting laws. Dale Hood made a motion to approve the agenda. Don Splinter seconded, the motion carried. Minutes of March 3, 2021 meeting: Dwight Nelson made a motion to approve the March 3rd, minutes. Lester Jantzen seconded the motion, the motion carried. COMMUNITY SERVICES BUILDING MAINTENACE UPDATE: Garry sent an email out to all the Department Heads at the Community Services Building. Johnson Controls will be coming in and doing a fire alarm inspection. FINANCIAL REPORTS: The board reviewed the vouchers Accounts Payable Reports, printed 03.30.2021. Still a lot of placements, a couple new ones, LAD Lake where two kids are placed. Don Splinter made a motion to approve the report, seconded by Dwight. The vouchers were approved. The 2021 DSS Management report was reviewed. The Workman’s Comp insurance had an impact as it was paid. Out- of-home care expenses again being the driving expenses. One of the biggest challenges is the child placement administration can be good and bad. When kids are placed in Foster Care or Treatment Foster Care Agencies can charge an administrative fee, which is a big impact on the budget. In Residential treatment there is not a separate administrative fee. The administrative fee is around $75- $80 per day. Looking at last year the administration fee was low. Dustin, who is one of the workers who does the case management for the CLTS program, was talking with Shelly of Unified and she said the amount of case management hours was higher this year than last year, which reflects the workers were able to make contact and support their families really well during the pandemic. CORRESPONDENCE: None ADMINISTRATION – GENERAL: Voluntary Kinship Waitlist Policy – State says we have to have a policy on how we take people off of the waiting list for kinship care payments. The first part is reiterating what the administrative code is under 58.08. Page 2 talks about the Grant County policy we put into effect, which are we take off as they are on the waiting list. If it makes sense we can do some retroactive payments. This year we are limiting to; for example, if we take someone off of the wait list June 1st, potentially if we had the funding we could go back to January 1st, but our policy is we would not go back to any previous time before that calendar year as we don’t have funding for it. Splinter made a motion to approve the Voluntary Kinship Waitlist Policy. Hood seconded the motion, the motion carried. Kinship Appeal Director Designee Policy – If someone wanted to have Kinship Care payments you have to be licensed as a foster home in order to receive Kinship Care payments. If someone is found to have criminal charges and wanted to become licensed foster home and receive Kinship Care payments but could not due to the criminal charges they could appeal this and the appeal would go to the Director. The policy says if the Director is not available the department needs to designate someone to do this. The policy says we would designate Krystle Lorenz, Social Work Supervisor to do this. Lester made a motion to approve the Kinship Appeal Director Designee Policy. Nelson seconded the motion, the motion carried. Human Services Day at the Capital – Every 2 years there is a Human Services Day. Usually we would go to the Capital for this, but due to COVID there is going to be a zoom meeting on April 13th. We will be meeting with the Wisconsin Counties Association, Tranel’s office and Marklien’s office. The topics were handed out at a previous board meeting. Social Services Department COVID Plan Update – the Department is checking weekly to see where the risk level is at. Hoping we would be at a medium risk level by April 1st, but Grant County still is at the high level. A calendar was set up for staff to put their names on when they will be in the office. About 35% of staff is working in the office now. We will continue to look at the risk level for Grant County and once we are down to the medium level we will bring more staff back. Volunteer Recognition 2021 – It is that time of year where we recognize our volunteers. This year we are going to send out individualized thank you notes to each of the volunteers. Next year we were thinking we could send something out from the County or DSS board such as draft a resolution, another way to recognize volunteers. Coordinated Service Team Grant – There was another opportunity for the CST team to apply for a grant. It has been submitted, Fred will take to the full County Board we are applying for a grant. Sarah Digman, CST Coordinator has written the grant asking for $20,000. It has to be spent by the end of September. We are focusing on this year doing a resource fair as it went very well last time. Looking at hiring an LTE to help out with this as it takes a lot of time to coordinate and develop resources and get people to come in. The CST program, volunteer program and several other programs we operate use an old database right now. We have gone through the database to see what we could put into an excel spreadsheet. For example, use this database to track how many years of service people have volunteered as this is something we recognize. This is something we can track on a spreadsheet. The CST case management notes do not go into eWisacwis and right now it is a paper system. We are asking for $10,000 to purchase some type of database so the case notes and assessments can be electronic. There would be an overlap with the elder abuse, APS programs as we also have an electronic database for these. This is included in the $20,000 we are asking for. Splinter made a motion to approve applying for the Coordinated Service Team grant. Hood seconded the motion, the motion carried. Program and Service Resource Index - Went through and updated the Program and Service Resource index to make sure it reflects the different services the Department administers and operates. We use this as a resource guide for all the different agencies we work with. Director’s Report – The work load for the Children’s Long Term Support Waiver Program we went from 10 cases to 30 in the last 6 years. The rule of thumb is 40 cases is a fulltime case load for a worker. We have always budgeted a halftime position for the CLTS program; we are 50% over that right now. We are looking at tracking the money on this and working with Unified and most likely bringing someone in to work halftime with the CLTS program. As Unified expands their CCS program, if we did not take on the case management for the CCS program, people who we have in the CLTS program we would not be able to bill for their case management. We have been discussing over the last few months about working with Unified to get a therapist team to do some in home work. As I mentioned last month this did not work out because it was very specific to the service for each individual family. We could not use this money to pay for someone’s salary until they got a caseload. The route we ended up going is we finalized a contract with Orion Family Services to contract for them to have a team come in and work with a family and we would reimburse them. We would only do this if they are not eligible for another funding service. The Steering Committee for the profession development system discussed (the state wide training system for the child welfare programs). We are still moving towards a different model of training for all of the new workers in the state. Right now if we get a new worker in child welfare they have to do 15 days of trainings in the first 2 years. It turns out the County and State is losing a lot of potential funding from the federal government to cover the new worker training. Up to 50% of their time could be reimbursed from the federal government. Right now they get reimbursed for the trainings they go to, but if we restructure how we do the trainings in the state, potentially 50% of their time could actually be reimbursed by the federal government. We have been meeting about making the switch, which probably won’t happen until about 2023. It will be more of a cohort/academy model where they will get 15 days of training done in 6 months verses 2 years. There is an advantage to this as number one potentially there will be a lot more funding available. The other part is if we can get workers trained and they can do their jobs within the 6 month window the due to the longevity of a social worker, which is 2 years now state wide, we would get a 1 ½ years more work out of them. If we can get people trained and able to do their job within the first 6 months people will feel supported and stay longer at the job. Staff has also started training on the YASI, the Youth Justice model of working with families. A group of Lancaster folks Naatz is involved in that Deb Reukauff of the Lancaster Police Department started. She wanted to focus on community development. In her job she notices a lot of people in the community are not connected to other people, but at the same time there are a lot of different organizations that people may not know about. For example, people don’t know what the Jaycee’s do or how to tap into the Jaycees. The hope is as we look at expanding community development there will be ways the community knows what the Jaycees is and feel they are invited to participate in it. Two focuses on this is where one of the members will develop a website with all the resources available. One of the members invited Jon McKnight out to speak, who is the leading community development, very strength based. CITIZEN COMMENT- None ADJOURMENT- At 10:03 AM, Beinborn made a motion to adjourn until May 5th, 2021, which was seconded by Dwight. The motion carried, the meeting was adjourned .