Loading...
HomeMy WebLinkAbout08 SOCIAL SERVICES BOARD MINUTES 08-04-2021SOCIAL SERVICES BOARD MINUTES August 4th, 2021 The Grant County Department of Social Services Board meeting was held, 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, Robert Scallon, Greg Fry (z), Dwight Nelson (z) present. Also present was Joyce Roling, Personnel Director, Lori Reed, ADRC Director, Fred Naatz, Director, Bob Keeney County Board Chairman, Tonya White, County Clerk (z), Garry Pluemer, Maintenance Supervisor (z), LeaAnne Smith, Office & Financial Coordinator (z), Shane Drinkwater, Director of IT. The meeting was found to be in compliance with the open meeting laws. Don Splinter made a motion to approve the agenda. Dale Hood seconded, the motion carried. Minutes of July 7th, 2021 meeting: Dwight Nelson made a motion to approve the July 7th, minutes. Greg Fry seconded the motion, the motion carried. COMMUNITY SERVICES BUILDING MAINTENACE UPDATE: Fred stated Epic was going to come in and reseal the Lobby tiles in the main lobby once they were done with the new hotel. As of today the tiles have not been resurfaced. Fred asked if Garry or Bob K had an update on this. Garry stated he has been in touch with Brad from Epic and no date has been set yet. Garry stated there was an unexpected water shut down yesterday due to a water leak they had to fix. FINANCIAL REPORTS: Summary of Vouchers: The board reviewed the vouchers Accounts Payable Reports, printed 07.27.2021. Fred went over the pool passes we have paid for. Fred stated these are for families who need help if they cannot afford to pay for the whole pass. The money comes from money the Thrift Shop donates to Social Services. Fred stated the person we are paying unemployment if it was a confidentiality issue or not because the person’s name was listed. Fred checked with Ben Wood and it is not. Don Splinter made a motion to approve the summary of vouchers. Lester Jantzen seconded, the motion carried. Administrative Report 2021: Fred stated the year is half way done. We are ahead on revenues at 56% we are usually at 50%. This is related to the out of home care costs. The extra revenue is generated by the CLTS program. We budgeted $8,000 for case management and we have billed over $10,000 in 6 months. This is due to getting more cases. We received notice from Department of Health Services because of the amount of money in the next budget there will no longer be a waiting list for the children on the CLTS waiver program. Anyone who now applies for this program will immediately start receiving services. Fred explained Unified is the contracted agency who provides the CLTS waiver program. In Iowa and Grant county they contract with us to provide the mental health services and kids with physical disabilities. This seemed to be a better fit due to our youth programs as a lot of times the kids in these programs end up in the child protective services and delinquency program. The CLTS waiver program can pay for and has some of the kids out of home and foster care costs, which has been a significant amount. Due the number of cases growing in talking with Patti Heer of Unified, they are struggling and are getting to the point where they may need to add another case manager. Fred stated we are getting to that point if a lot more cases come in. Right now we have Dustin and Ben who are the CLTS case managers and have other job duties as well. Ben is half time Juvenile Court Intake worker and works with the APS, elder abuse and Alzheimer’s program. Dustin is a full time CLTS case manager, but also does APS, elder abuse, supportive home care program and Alzheimer’s program. With the numbers getting high we will monitor this. With the CCS program Unified started up, one of the discussions we had is when someone is in the CCS program they are also eligible for the CLTS program as well, but only one of the programs can fund case management. If they are in CCS and getting CLTS Unified would be the only one who can bill for it. Right now our staff is in training to become CCS coordinator and we would continue to get the revenue for it. With the cases growing we may have to look for a half time worker. Fred stated the out of home care costs are our biggest challenge. A big factor is the Residential Care Centers, we budgeted $350,000 and we are at 70% of that. A positive note is there were four kids placed in Residential Care Centers at the beginning of the year who had been in foster care one of them is back home and another one will be going home before school starts. We have been able to solidify a contract with Orion, which means we now have an in home family therapy team to work with some of the families. These are some alternatives we have not had in the past years. Our biggest challenge is we have a couple younger kids that their behavior is concerning. There are 8 year old’s who are doing homicidal behaviors who are in placement and are putting pieces of glass in other people’s drinks. They are doing pretty outlandish high end dangerous things. Jeff Lockhart, Director of Unified has gone out of his way by working very well with Social Services. We have a lot of mutual clients and he offered on this specific case to do an assessment for sexual abuse and treatment, Fred will keep the board updated on this. Fred stated the higher one is the 81% for foster care. We are getting more families that we are involved with that are involved in meth usage and we cannot find the parents, so the kids are ending up in foster care longer. Bob asked how Social Services handle reports of child abuse. Fred stated anyone can call social services if they have suspicion of child abuse. We have two workers on intake daily who take referrals when someone is reporting child abuse and neglect. The intake worker writes up the referral and then it goes to the Social Work Supervisor who screens it and at times will pull some of the other initial assessors in. The referral is looked over and it will either be screened in or out. If there is a case where there is enough suspicion where a child is not safe it will be screened in and the supervisor and the team will make a decision as to how quickly they need to respond to it. There are three categories, respond in 2-5 days, respond in 24 hours and, then there are some cases we have to respond immediately. Greg asked “what is the process we use to get in the house to see if there is neglect” Fred stated if there is physical abuse we team up with the Sheriffs Department or local police department whoever has the jurisdiction and do a joint visit. Most times though the social worker goes to the house and states who they are and we have some concerns and would like to talk to you about it. 90% of the people let the worker in. Don Splinter made a motion to approve the Administrative reports. Bob Scallon seconded, the motion carried. Training Costs: This will be looked at next month’s meeting. ADMINISTRATION – GENERAL: DSS 2022 Draft Budget: Fred stated they are pushing this back. The Department heads have met with Amanda. We are looking at the Social Services budget for next year being approved in September. Fred stated he did not send a detailed budget out as there are no numbers from the state of what the revenues will be for next year. Hoping in August we will have some final numbers. Fred stated he did put in some extra money for smart phones for social workers as right now they are using flip phones. Workers are using text more as a way to communicate with their families. Fred stated he also put in an extra $100,000 more for alternate care. United Way 21 Week Equity Challenge: Fred stated there has been a lot of focus on equity and racism. It has come more apparent to him since he supervises three social workers who are working on their certification. Fred stated this is a program a lot of places have gone through and there have been a lot of positive reviews for it. Naatz explained for 21 weeks staff will get an email from them on different topics such as racism, micro aggressions, etc. Each unit will discuss the topic. Fred asked the board if they would be interested in doing this. The board members will take a look at it. Alternate Care Placements update: Fred stated most of this was covered earlier in the meeting. Again, there is a fairly significant increase of kids being placed in foster care due to their parent’s meth usage and not being around. Proposal to change the administration of the Alzheimer’s Family and Caregiver Support Program to the ADRC effective January 2022: Fred stated Social Services were appointed being the administrator for the ADRC for the Alzheimer's Family and Caregiver Support Program. In talking with Dustin and Nicole who have attended some meetings, the state is saying to make this more efficient it would work better if the same agency operates both programs. In talking with Lori Reed and Nicole they are open to taking it over. It is $24,000 in the Social Services budget, since we don’t charge case management for this it won’t cause a huge impact with ADRC taking it over. Lori stated it would work better if one agency ran both programs and she believes if ADRC ran both programs it could be matched. Nicole does a lot of referrals right now to Dustin. It would be easier for consumers as Nicole could assess and determine what program works better rather than assess and make a referral to Dustin and someone has to go somewhere else. ADRC likes to keep consumers from having to make too many different changes. John asked if the match program would be coming from ADRC or Social Services. Lori stated their caregiver program requires a match, and if they have the Alzheimer’s program as well she doesn’t think they will have to match it. That will only work if they don’t need the county levy in it. Lori will look at the numbers. ADRC will bill some case management out of it. Fred stated the max a family can get is $4,000 a year. John asked what is needed to do for this to go forward. Fred stated we need a motion from the DSS board to approve it. The statue reads the County Board appoints which Department administers the program. Fred will put it on the County Board agenda. Bob Keeney stated that is the correct way to go about it. Fred will get a hold of Bob to put on the County Board Agenda. Greg Fry made a motion to move the program to ADRC in January of 2022 as long as Lori is willing to take it. Dwight Nelson seconded, the motion carried. Director’s Report – Fred stated we have been talking about finding a database to replace CSMS, which is and older database used for CLTS, APS, Elder Abuse programs. Has started to meet with the IT Department to discuss what we are looking for. In talking with Unified they are doing an electronic health record database. Jeff Lockhart contacted Fred if Social Services wanted to go in on this together. The database is called ECHO. Social Services had a couple grants so was able to pull money out of those to pay for this. Initially we had $20,000 to get this set up, but with talking to Jeff it will cost us $7,000 to get into the system, will get final numbers from Jeff. It will cost $1,000 a year for each user. John asked how many users, Fred stated the most 5. Fred stated Social Services is working with Unified, they have the substance abuse grant. This was the one where the state approved a change Jeff had done which allowed Social Services to contract with Orion to do the In home Intensive Family Therapy. Unfortunately it took the state 3 months to approve it and now we have until the end of September to use up $71,000. There will be another round so after September there should be funding available again. The only change we agreed to, Iowa County wants to be a part of it now, which means we would end up sharing the therapist with them. In talking with Jeff we want to keep it to the 1/3 Iowa County and 2/3 in Grant County. This grant is to deal with drug and alcohol abuse in the families. Fred stated as people are coming back to the office there is some change workers are getting used to. Fred is figuring out how to handle the Delta variant as it grows. Grant County is at a medium, but surrounding counties is at a high risk level. We do have a sign on the doors “if you are not vaccinated please wear a face mask”. Fred thought about when families are meeting with staff is there an implication that if I am meeting with you and do not wear a face mask they are implying they are vaccinated. Should workers ask families if they would be more comfortable if they wore a face mask? A staff member asked if they should be wearing a face mask when they meet with families again. Right now it is up to each worker. Some staff expressed concern that there is some staff not vaccinated and not wearing a face mask. Right now we are not requiring people to get vaccinated. Joyce did send out an email stating places can require staff to be vaccinated. Grant County has not changed anything as of right now. John brought up a homeless situation of a person on Hwy 80/81 between Platteville and Cuba City. John has received several communications from people asking what there can be done. It was discussed at the Social Services/Unified Public Participation Hearing. Basically there is nothing that can be done from a legal stand point since he is causing no issues. This person has been interviewed on TV and is living the way he wants to. CITIZEN COMMENT- None ADJOURMENT- At 10:21 AM, Dwight made a motion to adjourn until September 1st, 2021, which was seconded by Bob S. The motion carried, the meeting was adjourned .