Louisiana DCFS takes steps to improve child safety, response times

BATON ROUGE, La. (Louisiana First) — The Department of Children and Family Services says it is taking actions to strengthen its frontline workforce.

According to a release, the department is taking strategic action to improve child safety, response times, and family support after a yearlong operational review.

“Louisiana’s children deserve our very best response, every time,” said DCFS Secretary Rebecca Harris. “We are making the necessary adjustments to ensure we have skilled, supported staff where children and families need us most — on the frontlines in their communities.”

The action that the department plans to take includes:

• Over 100 child welfare staff members are being reassigned closer to their expertise
• Centralized Intake (CI) operations are being modified to reinforce child safety and accountability in how reports of abuse are handled
• Expanding to evening and weekend coverage, with 53 new child welfare professionals for after-hours reports

“Child welfare work is intensely human work,” Harris said. “It requires collaboration, supervision, and real-time decision-making. Being together as teams, especially in intake and investigations, allows us to provide faster, higher-quality responses that keep children safer.”

DCFS’s hiring efforts and changes are supposed to produce improvements in response time and workload balance.

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