This story originally appeared in the Oct. 15, 1996 edition of The Boston Globe.
The head of the state social workers union yesterday blasted Gov. William F. Weld for hiring only a fraction of the new employees approved for child abuse and neglect cases.
Edward J. Malloy Jr. said that only 18 of 127 new positions approved last year in a $5.1 million supplemental budget request have been filled, and that $1.7 million of the allocation has been returned to the state’s general fund.
“It’s one thing not to have the money; it’s another thing to have the money and not use it,” Malloy said. “There’s a reason that the governor did this, and it’s political. He didn’t want any more state employees, and he didn’t care who got hurt.”
Weld countered that the state Department of Social Services has made a major hiring effort since the supplemental budget was approved in November, but the need to fill 150 to 200 vacancies created by attrition, in addition to the new positions, has prevented the department from reaching its desired staffing level.
“We’re hiring social workers as fast as we can,” Weld said.
Malloy said that, as a result of the hiring shortfall, DSS staffers remain burdened with caseloads as high as 28 families per caseworker.
Malloy said his union has asked state Auditor Joseph DeNucci to examine why DSS did not use all the funds it requested.
When DSS asked for the $5.1 million last year, the department was reeling from the deaths of several children in its care. At the time, DSS had 1,340 staff members working on child abuse and neglect cases. The figure now stands at 1,358, Malloy said, which is 109 short of the 1,467 requested in the supplemental budget.
US Sen. John F. Kerry, who is locked in a tough reelection campaign against Weld, said at a campaign stop that the condition of the DSS is Weld’s responsibility.
“The Department of Social Services is one of 21 in the nation that is under a consent decree by the federal government because it’s been so badly run,” Kerry said.
“The governor should be ashamed that he had to put the department under a consent decree to live up to certain standards. And that tells the story of a governor who has not paid attention to the job,” Kerry added.
DSS officials said that the hiring shortfall is due partly to the difficulty of finding large numbers of qualified applicants.
“It’s not everyone who wants to do child-protection work at DSS,” said department spokeswoman Lorraine Carli. “We’re extremely aggressive about our hiring efforts.”
Carli said DSS has reduced the average caseload to 17.7 per social worker, which is below the 18-case maximum stipulated in the union’s contract. However, Malloy countered, 60 percent of social workers still carry more cases than the contracted limit.
“If DSS today had 1,467 social workers on board to carry child-abuse cases,” Malloy said, “we could almost guarantee that almost no social-worker caseload would be over the maximum.”
Kerry also took aim at the return of DSS money to the general fund, where surplus revenue is being returned to taxpayers in the form of an income-tax cut. “The governor is really using children and using abused children to run for office,” he said.
Carli said returning a total of $7.4 million to the general fund was a routine procedure for DSS. It represents 1.5 percent of the department’s $450 million budget.
Thomas C. Palmer Jr. of the Globe Staff contributed to this report.