Child Welfare Department Benefits

With The Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), the timelines for permanency are clearly shortened.  To comply with ASFA, and to best serve its children, the DSS provides a proactive vehicle to enhance the progress of a child’s case through the court system. The DSS is designed to be sensitive to the child’s sense of time, to the needs of a troubled family, and to the requirements of state and federal law.

Legislation in most states regarding protective services for children and foster care and specifically requires diligent search of parents and making relative placement preferential. The DSSC will assist your state come into compliance with the diligent search requirements. Often, a Child Welfare Review by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration of Children and Families will find a state to be not in substantial conformity with the systemic factor of Case Review System.  The Review has in the past, found several issues that support implementing a state-wide diligent search program:

A comprehensive diligent search program provided by the DSS will free up caseworkers with heavy case loads, allowing them to focus on assisting children and families, prepare for permanency hearings and remove the burden of performing time consuming diligent searches.

KingTech will design, implement and operate a Diligent Search Service for your state that is customized to perform searches to locate parents, relatives and/or other significant individuals of children in the state care.  The capacity of the DSSC will be designed to serve the number of children in state care as well as the estimated new cases brought into the DSS system annually.

The DSSC for your state will include two major components:

• Technical staff who oversee the operation and hosting of a large multifaceted website containing custom applications and databases with specific protocols for submitting complete search requests, and for performing searches in eighteen databases to archive 60 fields of case information for children in foster care
• DSSC will be staffed by Search Operators who consult directly with caseworkers and access the national and state and federal databases electronically to search and cross match data regarding missing persons.  The DSS will work to secure inter-agency agreements to access highly confidential State and Federal Databases.  Securing access to the highly confidential databases testifies to the level of security the KingTech maintains over the operating system and databases
• The DSS for your state will also include a Project Manager who will work closely with the designated agency  Social Services Executive Management, Legal, Policy, Training and Program Departments  as indicated, to develop policies and procedures for the operation of the DSS and for the provision of ad hoc reports to the Department.  Regional maps and geographic tracking of cases will be also provided upon request.

The custom designed DSS can provide the following:

• Software developed for the specific needs of your state to  significantly reduce cost and time required to implementation the diligent search program.
• Assisting the Contract Administrator and other Department Executives to develop the infrastructure needed to implement a diligent search program, such as policy and procedures, training, agreement with juvenile court officials, reporting requirements, and Memorandums of Understanding with the State and Federal databases.
• Customizing any existing database applications to meet your states’s specific requirements and creating a secure website caseworkers can access to initiate searches and obtain results.
•  Purchasing and installing hardware and telecommunications equipment Staffing the DSS with a Project Manager, Caseworker Consultants, Staffing the DSS with a Project Manager, Caseworker Consultants, Search Operators and technical and administrative support staff.

Web-Based Application

KingTech will develop and host a web-based application to centralize the search process with access to a limited number of staff .Your agency intranet may be used to provide the infrastructure and capacity to expand access to the search application, statewide.

The application KingTech has designed will be simple to use and not require training.  Turnaround time is twenty four hours with an option for emergency expedition of the search effort..  The web application is described in greater detail below and will be designed to look similar to that of your agency