Louisiana’s beleaguered child welfare agency continues to struggle to recruit and retain the front-line caseworkers charged with protecting children who suffer from abuse or neglect. The Times-Picayune | Baton Rouge Advocate’s Claire Grunewald reports on a Legislative Auditor’s analysis showing that vacancies at the Department of Children and Family Services jumped from 118 in 2023 to 140 in February.
Wendi LeMoine, director of the nonprofit Brave Heart Louisiana Children in Need, who previously worked for DCFS’ child abuse and neglect investigations, said the audit is on par with historical staff numbers. “High turnover, high burnout … makes it very hard to keep a full staff,” LeMoine said. LeMoine said she remembers only one time during her tenure in the early 2000s when the DCFS investigations team was fully staffed, and “it didn’t last long.”
Auditors found that staff caseloads have increased, but that the overall number of child protective cases has decreased in recent years.
Rick Wheat, president of Louisiana United Methodist Children and Family Services, said the audit continues a long history of DCFS needing additional help, mainly in the form of additional state funds. “It does contain measures of progress,” Wheat wrote in an email. “I also believe there is more unreported progress, even qualitative progress, an accumulating energy and direction.”
Deduct redux?
The Louisiana Legislature is wrapping up its annual session on Thursday, with a package of budget bills headlining the last-minute items that are expected to pass. The session’s final hours can also be a time for political chicanery, when bad legislation can find its way to the governor’s desk (or the voters). The inimitable Jim Beam of the Lake Charles American-Press cites Senate Bill 8, a constitutional amendment that makes it easier for elected officials to fire state employees who had been protected by the state Civil Service.
“Our present system must be retained to ensure the most qualified applicants are hired and promoted, protected from political influence, and the incompetent or nonperforming are removed,” (Daniel) Sullivan (retired CEO of the Louisiana Civil Service League) said. “Stop this political ploy before it returns us to the days of Huey Long and the deduct box.” The deduct box was a system where state employees, particularly those appointed by Long, were required to give 5% to 10% of their salary to Long himself.
Academic freedom at Tulane
A Tulane University researcher whose work focuses on the disproportionate harm to Black communities from petrochemical manufacturing in Louisiana’s “cancer alley” resigned from her job this week. In her letter resigning from the university’s Environmental Law Clinic, Kimberly Terrell accuses school leaders of silencing her as it sought support from Gov. Jeff Landry’s administration and private donors for a redevelopment project in downtown New Orleans. The AP’s Jack Brook broke the story:
Marcilynn Burke, dean of Tulane’s law school, wrote in a May 4 email to clinic staff that Tulane University President Michael Fitts worried the clinic’s work threatened to tank support for the university’s long-sought efforts to redevelop New Orleans’ historic Charity Hospital as part of a downtown expansion. “Elected officials and major donors have cited the clinic as an impediment to them lending their support to the university generally and this project specifically,” Burke wrote.
Terrell’s work has focused on higher cancer rates in Black or impoverished communities in the state’s petrochemical corridor, linked toxic air pollution to premature births and lower birth weights, and showed that Black people received significantly fewer jobs in the petrochemical industry than whites despite having similar levels of education and experience.
A Tulane spokesman said the university is “fully committed” to academic freedom, and a spokeswoman for Landry denied that the governor threatened to withhold funding.
Tariffs and tax revenue
Supporters of the budget reconciliation bill that’s being considered by the U.S. Senate have said that President Donald Trump’s tariffs on goods entering the country would generate enough revenue to offset the massive tax cuts contained in the bill. As The New York Times’ Lydia DePillis and Christine Zhang report, independent researchers from across the ideological spectrum have reached a different conclusion.
They all find that U.S. coffers would sustain heavy losses until 2029, when many of the tax cuts in the House bill — including the elimination of taxes on tips and overtime, and expansions of the child tax credit and the standard deduction — would expire. At that point, tariffs would theoretically start to fully compensate for the cost of the bill. …
Number of the Day
8.27% – Percentage of Louisiana families headed by single fathers in 2022. Caldwell Parish had the state’s highest percentage of single-father households at 14.14% (Source: The Advocate via U.S. Census Bureau)