Child Protective Services seeks safe county workspaces as funding needs mount

• “We’re dealing with children in the worst possible day of their lives,” said a CPS spokesperson. “We cannot take them to an unsafe office.”

Legislation to ensure a safe workspace for Child Protective Service (CPS) workers has been on the Senate calendar for action but has yet to be taken up. Senators said Tuesday they do not know when the measure be up for a floor vote.

HB 1424 would require county supervisors to provide “adequate and habitable office space” for CPS workers.

According to Samantha Kalahar, Director of Legislative and External Affairs for CPS, some offices are in deplorable condition. Recently, one CPS office was condemned for safety reasons. Others are infested with mold and rodents.

“We’re dealing with children in the worst possible day of their lives,” she said. “We cannot take them to an unsafe office.”

The legislation comes as the agency requested more funding, with more 450 children in state custody than in mid-2023.

“My budget’s being eaten up very rapidly now by kids who have huge, demanding needs,” CPS Commissioner Andrea Sanders said, noting that caring for the additional children has caused CPS to run up a nearly $33 million deficit.

Sanders told legislators earlier in the session that there is a lack of foster care homes in the Magnolia State, meaning children are placed in hotels until a foster home is found.

In January, Mississippi had 1,667 licensed foster homes, including 940 regular foster homes and 727 relative foster homes to house more than 4,100 children in CPS care.

“We do lack the specialty areas of care, and I think that we lack facilities that have adapted their medical model for kids who’ve had repeat trauma,” the Commissioner testified in January. “This is a kid, generally, who has either been in multiple placements or been in a very hard home life.”

For next year, the agency requested $201,333,173, up from $169,083,402 in the current year’s budget. The Legislature is still debating CPS’s appropriation request.

Kalahar said Sanders was in New York last week dealing with the Olivia Y case, a lawsuit filed in 2004 against the state alleging that Mississippi’s foster care system was failing to adequately protect children in its custody and was not providing necessary services in violation of their federal constitutional rights.

CPS could not go into details about her visit, but Kalahar said the state has made “great strides” in improving its foster care system.

“We are in the best shape we’ve been in in the last 20 years in terms of being in compliance [with the Olivia Y case],” Kalahar said.

The matter of counties providing safe workspaces for CPS passed the House 111 to 1 in early February. It was referred to the Senate County Affairs Committee and passed out to the floor last week.