Governor Inslee signed HB 1661 on July 6, 2017 creating the Department of Children, Youth, and Families. The DCYF will restructure how the state serves at-risk children with the goal of producing better outcomes for at-risk kids. As the governor said Thursday, “We want to prevent harm to children and youth rather than just react to it.” You can read more about the vision for the department here. In short, we hope to be able to use data and research in new ways to do a better job of prevention, as well as reacting well to any harm that does occur.
As part of the rollout Governor Inslee appointed me as Secretary of the new agency, a singular honor and a responsibility I take very seriously.
The bill creates a very small agency for the first year, with the task of planning for the full restructure that will happen a year later, in July of 2018. The DCYF combines the current functions of the Department of Early Learning, and the Children’s Administration and Juvenile Rehabilitation from the Department of Social and Health Services. Juvenile Rehabilitation joins the new agency a year later, in July of 2019. There will be some back-office, administrative efforts as well as we work through the design phase of the new agency.
Coming into this work, I see several high-level outcome goals that this new agency will be striving for:
- Education on track for all Washington kids. That means they’re ready for kindergarten when they get there, they are at grade level for things like third-grade reading and fifth-grade math, and they graduate high-school on time with a plan for their future.
- Children and youth are mentally and physically healthy, and are developmentally on-track.
- Prevent as much future harm to children and youth as we can. We will focus on the continued, collaborative delivery of robust and effective child welfare interventions and services designed to promote the well-being of children by ensuring their safety, achieving timely permanence, and strengthening their families.
What you’re going to see over the next year is an intensive project to stand up a new agency without the flaws we’ve seen in other restructurings over the past few decades. While we’re working through this design effort it’s important to remember that the Department of Early Learning, the Children’s Administration, and Juvenile Rehabilitation have real work to do, and that work needs to continue without pause. Our top goal is continuity of effort during this first year — we will continue to provide childcare and pre-school, take child abuse calls, provide rehabilitation services to youth, etc.
There are three big pieces that we’ll need to accomplish in the next year:
- A listening tour of how the current system works. The goal here is for me to learn the details of our current operations and to hear the hopes and dreams of current employees, foster families, birth families, children currently in the system, tribes, judges, prosecutors, volunteers, community groups, and anyone else that has an opinion about how our system of supporting at-risk kids could be made better. I intend to visit agency facilities and communities across the state over the next year, and I look forward to meeting as many of you as possible.
- Start the work of creating an integrated plan for the child-facing services the DCYF will offer. We’re calling this the “practice model” as a way of thinking about the interactions of our prevention and response services — we want to build a design based on data that tells us what works and how we can support families. Thinking about racial and socio-economic equity in everything we do will be the cornerstone of this effort.
- Design the infrastructure of the new agency. We need a budget, an organizational chart, a facilities plan, a vision for how IT will actually support, rather than hinder, the new agency and lots of other details. We have an intensive process under way with our partners at the Office of Financial Management and DSHS to work these details out. There are very early deadlines, including making sure that our budget is done in time for the supplemental submission to the Legislature in November.
The last of these will get a lot of attention for the first several months as there are incredible deadlines we have to meet that require a lot of detailed work, including preparing a supplemental budget submission for the next legislative session.
Transparency and community engagement will be central to accomplishing our goals — if we can’t build a system that communities trust, we can’t build a system that works. Watch this space for more detail about our plans as we get our feet under us and how you can be involved in this monumental undertaking.
Ross Hunter, Secretary