Child Welfare Spending – Nebraska

Child welfare spending to stay high, By Martha Stoddard, April 1, 2012, Omaha World-Herald: “Nebraska’s 2½-year experiment in privatizing child welfare services has yielded one clear result: It forced the state to put more resources into the care of abused and neglected children. Spending shot up when the State Department of Health and Human Services began contracting with private agencies to coordinate child welfare cases. Now, although four of the five contractors are gone and the state has resumed oversight of most cases, child welfare spending is budgeted to remain at a level $35 million higher than before privatization began. State Sen. Bob Krist of Omaha and others said more funding has long been needed for Nebraska’s child welfare system. ‘As an unintended consequence of our journey, we will do what we should have done from the beginning,’ he said, ‘but I think it’s been a too-expensive trip to get there.’ Nebraska officials went into privatization saying they would do it within existing resources. Instead, spending took a $20 million unplanned jump in the first year of the private contracts and grew another $10 million in the second year…”