Premium ContentMouse over Home then click on Premium Content for information.LINCOLN — Nebraska's 2012 legislative session looks to be the year of the child.
During the next four months, lawmakers will wrestle with key questions about the future of child welfare and juvenile justice in the state.
How they answer — or don't answer — those questions will shape the lives of abused and neglected Nebraska children and youthful troublemakers.
"I think this is going to be one of the more significant issues that we deal with," said State Sen. Steve Lathrop of Omaha. "We have a responsibility to these young people."
The debate will include whether to pull back on the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services' controversial experiment in privatizing child welfare.
Lawmakers also will look at creating a state children's agency, setting up an advisory commission on child welfare, raising pay for foster parents and shifting responsibility for juvenile delinquents away from HHS.
Children's issues have risen to the surface because of the turmoil created by a two-year-old privatization initiative.
Starting in November 2009, the state turned over to private contractors the bulk of duties for ensuring the safety and well-being of abused and neglected children in the state.
The state initially contracted with five private agencies, but three have lost or dropped their contracts because of financial and management issues.
A legislative committee concluded last month that the contracts had been "ill-advised" from the beginning and had produced "neither the outcomes nor the cost savings for which the state contracted."
The committee recommended sweeping changes aimed at creating better outcomes for children and better financial oversight for the state.
Sen. Kathy Campbell of Lincoln, who led the Health and Human Services Committee's investigation, is working on translating the recommendations into one or more legislative bills.
"Now the real work begins in terms of how you put these pieces together and how you pay for them," she said.
Campbell said she doesn't know yet how many recommendations will find support among her colleagues or how many can be accomplished this year.
Speaker of the Legislature Mike Flood would not predict how the Legislature might end up on the specific issues. But he and others said the committee's recommendations will carry great weight in the debate.
"I don't know that it will be as controversial as it is complex," he said. "There are many moving parts."
The recommendation to return management of child welfare cases to the state appears to have strong initial appeal among senators.
Sen. Tom Hansen of North Platte argued that state workers should take back case management duties because the care of children in the system is a state responsibility.
"These are wards of the state, not wards of a corporation," he said.
Not all senators are convinced, though. Sen. Colby Coash of Lincoln said he is weighing several factors on both sides.
"My guiding principle is first, do no harm," he said. "The last thing I want to do is make another change that lets more kids fall through the cracks."
Lobbyists for the state's two private contractors are at work trying to persuade senators to oppose the change.
The contractors are the Kansas-based KVC, which handles all cases in southeast Nebraska and one-third of those in the Omaha area, and the Omaha-based Nebraska Families Collaborative, which handles the rest of the Omaha-area cases.
The idea of creating a separate children's agency faces more skepticism from senators.
Sen. John Harms of Scottsbluff likes the idea because, he said, children's needs get lost within HHS.
"It's just a big bureaucracy that we have today," he said. "Then we can truly focus on the issue that we have at hand."
Coash said he would need to be satisfied that a new agency represents real change rather than simply moving things around in government.
The proposal for a commission bringing together all three branches of government with outside interests also prompted some concern.
Flood has long been leery about groups that intermingle the three branches of government because, he said, they blur the separation of powers.
Finding funding could prove a stumbling block as well.
Rehiring case managers, especially in sufficient numbers to keep caseloads low, likely would carry a price tag. So would a recommendation to increase the pay for foster parents.
Some senators said lawmakers would be willing to put more into reform. They noted that privatization had not saved money and, in fact, increased state child welfare spending by 27 percent last year.
"We'll fund what we think is a priority, and I would certainly think this issue has bubbled up to a priority," Coash said. "If we're going to do it, let's do it right."
But the potential for additional cost would make it more difficult to win the governor's support.
Gov. Dave Heineman sounded skeptical in his initial comments about the committee recommendations but said he planned to reread the report and talk with interested parties.
Campbell said she plans to talk with the governor once he has reviewed the report. "I want to know if he has any alternate thoughts to those," she said.
Adding to the complexity of the debate will be proposals for changing how the state deals with juvenile offenders.
Nebraska now handles those children through its child welfare system.
Sen. Brad Ashford of Omaha, the Judiciary Committee chairman, is looking at making them the responsibility of the State Probation Administration, which is administered by the courts.
Ashford also will introduce a bill on behalf of the governor to move the youth treatment and rehabilitation centers from HHS to the Department of Correctional Services.
Contact the writer:
402-473-9583, martha.stoddard@owh.com
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