Mayors call on province for help amid children's aid funding crisis

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The regional government voted this week to advocate for “urgent action” from the province on the financial crisis plaguing the local children’s aid society.

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Family and Children’s Services of Lanark, Leeds and Grenville asked the county’s joint services committee for support in asking the province to change its funding formula for the child welfare sector.

Mike Andrews, president of the agency’s board of directors, said despite a requirement to operate with a balanced budget, the current funding model has left the agency in deficit for the last two years.

This has led to significant staffing cuts, higher workloads for those who remain, and risks of an overall negative impact on the quality of the service the agency provides.

“Our staff does amazing work in continuing to deliver high quality service, but certainly the board is concerned about increasing risks as our staff is spread thinner and thinner. The chances a child falls through the cracks somewhere with devastating consequences, those risks just keep increasing,” Andrews told the committee on Tuesday.

“There’s insufficient funding for the sector overall.”

Provincial child welfare funding has been declining for years, he said. The agency received nearly $21 million in funding in 2016-2017. It has dropped every year since then, and this year it received just shy of $18 million. This represents a 14-per-cent funding drop, which the agency says has led to a series of challenges.

They’ve had to cut costs because of this, including to staffing levels, but most “large line items” are service related, they said, and they don’t have room for any more cuts.

In 2016, they had around 150 full-time staffers. In the years that followed, they’ve had to reduce their headcount to account for lower funding. Now, despite a growing workload, the agency has just under 110 full-time staffers – about 27 per cent fewer than when funding cuts began.

“The board has taken the difficult decision to approve a deficit budget, because we’re concerned that we’ve already cut too deeply,” said Andrews.

It’s possible to operate for short periods of time with a deficit, he said, since they have access to an operating line of credit – but that won’t work in the long term.

“We don’t believe we can cut any further without creating an unacceptable risk to children in our community, but we don’t have the money to continue to pay our staff and pay our other bills. This is a very difficult position we find ourselves in today,” Andrews said.

Erin Lee Marcotte, executive director of the agency, said the funding formula used by the province provides inadequate funding for the work the agency is mandated to do.

Part of the funding model, she said, is based on certain socioeconomic factors, which the province has miscalculated for the area.

These socioeconomic factors include unemployment, housing stress, household incomes of less than $40,000, kids under the age of six living in poverty, the criminal severity index, and parents with mental health issues. In Leeds and Grenville, particularly in Brockville and Prescott, most of these metrics measure higher than the provincial average, she said.

“We do have a higher demand for child welfare services than the ministry funding formula, in particular the socioeconomic factors that they design our funding from,” she said.

“The funding in (Lanark, Leeds and Grenville) is not adequate enough for us to actually deliver the services.”

Andrews said the province promised reform of the funding formula in 2020, but that they’ve “seen no meaningful progress to date.”

Beyond its mandate of helping children and families in situations of abuse and neglect, Marcotte said the agency has seen an uptick in families coming to it for help with children with complex mental health struggles.

“The pandemic really impacted children and youth well-being, not surprisingly. With the number of stay-at-home orders that occurred, the number of times that children were asked not to be in classrooms but to actually be at home and doing online learning. I think we’re now, a couple of years later, seeing the effects of that.”

They unofficially work with local mental health agencies to provide support to children when it’s needed, but that support is not always available.

“If those treatment options are not available elsewhere in the community, unfortunately some of these children end up in the child welfare system,” said Andrews.

The agency has had trouble finding enough foster families to support the growing number of children in its care, so children are often put into for-profit group care, and they’re sent out of the community to be cared for at “exorbitant costs,” Marcotte said.

This goes against the agency’s mandate of keeping kids with their families and in their home communities, she said.

“We’re trying to do all this work with continuing cuts to our funding envelope,” she said.

The committee agreed to send a letter to Michael Parsa, the provincial minister of children, community and social services, to advocate for a change to the funding formula to become “more equitable and sustainable.”

The mayors went a step further to request a joint delegation at the upcoming Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO) conference between Leeds and Grenville, Lanark, and the separated municipalities to “further advocate for urgent action” on the matter.

“I certainly believe we have a moral obligation to do our absolute best to ensure your agency has the resources to provide the best possible chance, not just for children to succeed, but for children to survive and make it out of extremely difficult situations,” said Nancy Peckford, mayor of North Grenville and the United Counties warden.  

The AMO conference is scheduled for August in Ottawa.

sbedford@postmedia.com

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