County closing health department, redirecting resources to better serve children and families

JEFF HORVATH, The Times-Tribune, Scranton, Pa.
·4 min read

SCRANTON — Lackawanna County is shuttering its fledgling health department and redirecting resources to reinvent the way it serves vulnerable children and families.

Commissioners Bill Gaughan and Matt McGloin announced Thursday sweeping changes designed to keep more families out of the child welfare system and relieve pressure on the county’s embattled and understaffed Office of Youth and Family Services. The new, “groundbreaking” approach should also save taxpayers tens of millions of dollars in the long run, they said.

The county won’t pursue full state certification for the health department, a pandemic-era creation that ultimately proved financially unfeasible. Health department employees, about 26 in total, will have an opportunity to express interest in serving the county in other capacities. Those laid off and not retained will be paid through May 21 and maintain benefits through the end of the month.

Instead of a freestanding health department, the county will create an Office of Public Health within its Department of Human Services, which includes OYFS. That public health office will work to funnel more families away from the child welfare system when appropriate, a proactive rather than reactive approach that will rely partly on community-based social service providers assisting with housing, violence prevention, health care and other needs.

OYFS would become involved only when those efforts prove inadequate and in cases of serious abuse and neglect, officials said.

“We will create a public health model of prevention for at-risk families and children,” McGloin said. “Lackawanna County will become the first county in Pennsylvania to operate its Office of Youth and Family Services under a family-first prevention plan in partnership with the state Department of Human Services.”

Gaughan and McGloin described the new “Family First Community Pathways” program as an innovative initiative addressing numerous problems they inherited when they took office in January, including the health department’s financial issues and legal and staffing challenges that beset OYFS.

The child protection agency’s problems came into public view last year, when the state downgraded its license from full to provisional and Scranton police and county detectives arrested five current or former OYFS workers on child endangerment charges.

County Judge James Gibbons dismissed those charges in January, ruling the caseworkers and supervisors were immune from prosecution under state law — a ruling that’s being appealed.

Former county Department of Health and Human Services Director William Browning, who oversaw OYFS before the new commissioners fired him in January, had blamed many of the agency’s problems on staffing shortages exacerbated by the criminal investigations. Efforts to bolster OYFS staffing are ongoing.

Despite some progress on that front, Gaughan and McGloin said there remains a backlog of more than 700 cases referred to OYFS with more than 100 new referrals coming in per week. To help reduce the backlog, the state Department of Human Services approved a county proposal to provide overtime to OYFS assessment staff, hire former OYFS staffers to help with screening, train staff from other county agencies and pay overtime to OYFS staff from other counties “in an all hands on deck effort,” McGloin said.

The county also asked the state to approve new funding for its Family First Community Pathways model, where “community-based providers rather than the county government alone will work with families to provide the help that they need to safely keep children outside of the child welfare system,” Gaughan said.

Some resources will be redirected from the health department, which when fully staffed has an annual budget of about $4.7 million. But Gaughan and McGloin said the actual state reimbursement rate for the department would be far below the 80% officials expected, leaving taxpayers responsible for millions of dollars in annual funding.

The county offered many health department employees the opportunity to work within the Family First Community Pathways project, Gaughan said. It will also keep the former PennFed Credit Union building on Franklin Ave. the county acquired for the health department and use it for other purposes.

Not present at Thursday’s announcement was Minority Commissioner Chris Chermak, who said he wasn’t involved in the decisions and was still reviewing all the details when reached by phone.

“This was sprung on me this morning,” Chermak said. “I’m very disappointed in the way things are going and that I’m not included in these ultimately extremely important decisions.”

The majority commissioners said Gov. Josh Shapiro strongly supports the new program, noting they submitted the Family First Community Pathways proposal to the state Thursday morning.

“We have become convinced that the answer to these problems does not lie in wrestling endlessly with the system as it currently exists,” Gaughan said. “The scope of the problem ... left no doubt that a new approach was necessary.”