HOLLIDAYSBURG — Blair County’s Children, Youth & Families office is again operating under a provisional license, six months after state and county personnel came up with a settlement plan restoring the office’s regular license with conditions.

“I expected this because the state identified issues that weren’t going to be fixed overnight,” Commissioners Chairman Dave Kessling said recently when asked about the county office returning to a provisional operating license.

“But I do think we’ve made a lot of progress and while it might be enough for a full license, I think the state recognizes that we’ve made progress,” Kessling added.

Commissioner Laura Burke, who has been working with the CYF office and state supervisory personnel, also said she wasn’t surprised by the state’s decision to issue the latest provisional license.

“There was no way we were going to be able to fix everything in six months,” she said. “And I don’t think the state expected that because it would have been unrealistic.”

In May, commissioners negotiated a settlement agreement with state personnel outlining goals and tasks for an understaffed office that manages about 1,000 child welfare cases. That agreement paved the way for the state, in May, to issue a regular operating license to the county agency.

But the regular license, valid through Nov. 23, has since been replaced with another provisional license in effect through May 23, 2025.

Prior to receiving a regular operating license in May, the county CYF agency operated under four provisional licenses spanning over two years.

The state’s latest review of CYF operations — as reported in its license inspection summary — identified procedural shortcomings and missed deadlines by the CYF personnel during the handling of child welfare cases.

The state, in a letter accompanying the county’s provisional license, reported its intent to keep working with the county and to provide supportive services and follow through with recommendations in the settlement agreement.

Those efforts are occasionally referenced, such as in August when commissioners assigned Casework Manager Shannon Tucker to be interim CYF administrator, a role she took on after commissioners fired former administrator Tiffany Treese.

At a Dec. 11 salary board meeting, commissioners followed through with plans to abolish a CYF clerical supervisor position and use the money saved toward the creation of a manager for the support staff and a supervisor for the social services personnel.

Burke also spoke of developing plans to create a quality assurance unit with a supervisor and two staff members who will focus solely on reviewing cases and pinpointing what wasn’t done or done timely. That’s an effort, she said, aimed at preventing citations like the ones the state is issuing when it reviews CYF operations.

She said the CYF office currently has 14 full-time and two part-time caseworkers, and it gets help from six caseworkers provided by the JusticeWorks agency and six out-of-county caseworkers available on weekends.

“That’s about half of what we need,” Burke said. “But the last time we had 14 caseworkers was before June 2022 and at that point, I think we had 12.”

The county salary board also took action in November to raise salaries by about $10,000 each for four CYF caseworker managers, a casework supervisor and a program specialist.

Burke said the raises reflected the county’s in-house pay study and a desire to do more to recruit and retain CYF employees.

Based on the salary board’s action, the pay for current nonunion CYF casework supervisors went from about $45,000 to $55,000 annually. The pay for a casework manager went from $54,526 to $66,395. And the program specialist’s pay increased from $49,118 to $59,809.

About 80% of those salaries, Burke said, are reimbursed by the state.

Plans are in the works to revise pay scales for nonunion personnel in other county departments, Burke said, probably in mid-January.

Mirror Staff Writer Kay Stephens is at 814-946-7456.