Maine has spent nearly $1.6M reviewing its embattled child welfare system

Maine has spent nearly $1.6 million in recent years on reviews of its embattled child welfare system, while lawmakers, caseworkers and advocates have continued to sound the alarm on lingering issues and the deaths of dozens of kids.

Those assessments stretch back to then-Republican Gov. Paul LePage’s administration and a $825,000 contract given to the Boston-based Public Consulting Group for work in 2018 and 2019, after lawmakers approved a review of case loads for child welfare caseworkers.

Under Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, the Department of Health and Human Services, which houses the Office of Child and Family Services, has paid PCG for additional support that has brought the total cost of child welfare-related reviews to nearly $1.6 million, according to data provided Tuesday by the department.

That number does not include all of the public money used to look at the long-embattled system. The Legislature’s Government Oversight Committee has examined the system for years, but its investigative arm does not track how much staff time is used on each review it does.

The most recent use of nearly $241,000 for a management audit requested by the child welfare office’s new leader, Bobbi Johnson, led a Republican on the Legislature’s oversight committee to send her a letter in June calling the spending “wasteful, redundant and somewhat dismissive of the far-reaching efforts” already put forward by various groups.

Sen. Jeff Timberlake of Turner, who has unsuccessfully sought to separate the child welfare office from the health department, told Johnson in his June 18 letter that similar themes have already popped up in previous reviews.

They include staff turnover leading to overburdened caseworkers, burnout, a perceived lack of support from upper management and a “growing risk of physical harm” to caseworkers due to getting sent into unsafe environments with support, his letter said.

Johnson has not yet responded to Timberlake, but DHHS has been “implementing many of the resulting recommendations” from the various child welfare assessments, a spokesperson said.

Maine’s child welfare office has faced scrutiny during the Mills and LePage administrations following the high-profile deaths of numerous children and caseworkers repeatedly sharing concerns over burnout, high turnover and a lack of support while lawmakers have also struggled to fix long-running problems.

Revised state data indicated at least 34 kids, a Maine record, died in 2021 in incidents that were associated with abuse or neglect or had occurred after family involvement with the child welfare system. The state’s latest child fatality data showed 31 deaths in 2022 and 25 deaths in 2023, with nine reported so far this year.

Todd Landry, who became the child welfare office’s leader in 2019, stepped down while citing personal reasons in November. He was replaced by Johnson, an associate child welfare services director who started her DHHS career as a caseworker in the 1990s.

The Boston-based consulting group released its latest report in March after Johnson, who became the welfare office’s permanent director in January, requested a “rapid management audit” and recommendations “for improvements that could better support management and staff and ultimately improve outcomes for children and families served by OCFS.”

For its assessment, Public Consulting Group reviewed documents, interviewed more than 110 child welfare staffers and leaders and collected 413 survey responses from employees. The 64-page report included 19 high-priority recommendations covering management structure, communication, professional development and “retention, engagement and culture.”

The PCG report also found child welfare staff at all levels trust Johnson as the new director and “feel that she genuinely wants to hear what they have to say and cares about their well-being.”

In February, the Legislature’s Government Oversight Committee also produced its own report after hearing for several months from caseworkers, guardians, foster families, parents, mandated reporters and others.

Among the recommendations that did not receive unanimous agreement from Democrats and Republicans on the committee was the long-sought plan from Timberlake to separate the child welfare office from DHHS.

The state did not need to pay for a 2021 review it requested from Casey Family Programs, a national foundation focused on foster care and child welfare, after five kids died in June 2021. The Casey report found familiar problems with turnover, communication and supervisors struggling to support, and it made numerous recommendations for improvement.

While the one headline-grabbing metric of child fatalities has improved since 2021, numerous caseworkers came to Augusta last year to share a continued sense of feeling overburdened while juggling dozens of cases, and they said the situation was “deteriorating.”

A December report from, Walk A Mile In Their Shoes, a nonprofit run by former state Sen. Bill Diamond, D-Windham, also reported similar problems and accused Maine of focusing too much on family reunification.

The Office of Program Evaluation and Government Accountability, the Legislature’s investigative arm, has also conducted numerous reviews of Maine’s child welfare system and investigated child fatalities. Director Peter Schleck said his office “wants to remain focused, within the limits of our defined resources, on qualitative results. ”

“This is critical given how vital child protection is, indeed, and is also impacted by how so many of the challenges in this realm require sustained effort over a longer horizon, and are subject to so many complexities,” he said.