In wake of Thomas Valva's death, CPS caseworkers' loads still too high, data shows

Dec 21, 2023

Thomas Valva in a snapshot taken the day before he died on Jan. 17, 2020. Credit: Suffolk District Attorney

Suffolk County officials vowed after 8-year-old Thomas Valva's death to reduce the number of cases that Child Protective Services caseworkers carry, following revelations that CPS received dozens of accusations of serious abuse committed against him over several years, including from his teachers, but did not remove Thomas from his family's home in Center Moriches.

Suffolk CPS caseworkers continue to have considerably more cases than experts recommend, a Newsday review of state and county statistics reveal. Data shows that in the past two years, many Suffolk caseworkers had far more than the maximum 12 open cases per month that a national child-welfare organization and a state-commissioned report recommend, although Suffolk's caseload ratio has improved significantly over the last several months as the number of caseworkers has risen.

Suffolk officials said enough money is budgeted to hire more caseworkers, but that the chief problem is finding and attracting qualified candidates. Experts said lower caseloads give caseworkers more time to investigate allegations of abuse and neglect, and make mistakes and misjudgments less likely.

Thomas died of hypothermia on Jan. 17, 2020, after his father, Michael Valva, and the father's fiancee, Angela Pollina, ordered him to spend the night in their unheated garage as temperatures outside fell to 19 degrees. Prosecutors called the home a "house of horrors." Both were convicted of second-degree murder and endangering the welfare of a child.

Pollina was sentenced Tuesday to 25 years to life in prison. Valva is in an upstate prison serving the same sentence.

In response to Thomas’ death, the Suffolk legislature in 2020 passed the CPS Transformation Act, which included reforms to increase oversight and supervision and reduce caseloads.

"What we did do was to adopt a series of reforms that are significantly, and in many cases, really fundamentally changing the way that CPS operates," said County Executive Steve Bellone, adding that "this is not a static thing — you have to constantly be working to improve, and make adjustments and changes as things happen."

One key change limits the number of cases per caseworker. Under the new law, the average caseload for all caseworkers should not exceed 12 per month, and no caseworker should have more than 15 cases, unless approved by a senior supervisor, with notification of Frances Pierre, the social services commissioner.

The Child Welfare League of America currently recommends a maximum of 10 to 12 cases per investigative caseworker, said Julie Collins, the Washington, D.C.-based organization's vice president for practice excellence.

And a state-commissioned report released in 2006 said, "We recommend that New York State achieve the goal of 12 active investigations per caseworker per month."

Yet state Office of Children and Family Services data shows that during 2021 and 2022, as many as 51% of Suffolk CPS caseworkers had more than 15 cases.

For half of 2021 and the first five months of 2022, a higher percentage of Suffolk caseworkers had more than 15 cases than the statewide median for all counties, state records show.

Pierre and Sandra Davidson, chief deputy commissioner of Suffolk's social services department, said illnesses among caseworkers during COVID-19 surges and employees leaving the agency during the pandemic added to the number of cases remaining employees had.

In addition, Pierre said, "The pandemic was a significant contributing factor to a rise in cases." But department reports show there were fewer CPS cases during the pandemic than before.

Since June, Suffolk consistently has been below the state median in high caseloads, as new caseworkers were hired. The county had 116 caseworkers as of late March, up from 92 in March 2022, county records show.

As of March 29, fewer than 17% of Suffolk caseworkers had more than 15 cases, by far the lowest percentage for March in at least seven years, county records show.

There also has been a drop in the percentage of caseworkers with more than 12 cases, although in March nearly two-thirds still had at least 13 cases, according to county data.

And average caseloads have fallen significantly since when CPS was investigating allegations of abuse against Thomas and his brother Anthony, who was 10 when Thomas died. Caseworkers last year had an average of 11.5 cases, down from an average of 18.1 cases in 2017, state records show.

"We all know this is not where we want to be," Davidson said March 28 during an annual presentation on CPS before a Suffolk legislative committee. "But we have done tremendous work over the past four years to get to this place."

Nick De Bello, a vice president of the Suffolk County Association of Municipal Employees, which represents CPS employees, said the union has been advocating for more hiring for years.

"The best practice to be able to prevent this [child fatalities] is having reasonable caseloads," he said.

De Bello said Suffolk's numbers on average and high caseloads can be "misleading" because they include supervisors and assistant directors who have relatively few cases, which brings down the average.

The number of cases that caseworkers carry has a significant impact on their ability to detect potential abuse and neglect, experts said.

"They don't have the time, they don't have the attention to do this well when they have 20 caseloads or even 15 caseloads …," said Patricia Logan-Greene, an associate professor of social work at the University at Buffalo. "If you have caseworkers who are that overloaded, we can expect them to make mistakes."

Suffolk officials said the biggest reason caseload levels are suboptimal is because they can't find enough people to take caseworker jobs, in part because of low pay, which last year was increased, and the high-stress nature of the job.

Suffolk requires caseworker applicants to have a bachelor's degree and a working knowledge of social work and related laws.

Jeffrey Reynolds, president and CEO of the Garden City-based Family & Children's Association, which works with abused children, said even at his nonprofit, it is difficult to hire enough social workers. It's harder at CPS, he said, because of greater stress.

"You make the wrong call, and you have a fatality," Reynolds said. "You make the wrong call and you’ve got the guilt, but also the public eye for making that wrong call."

Caseworker turnover is high, in part because of burnout and the "secondary trauma" of handling cases involving severe abuse of children, said Emily Putnam-Hornstein, a professor for children in need at the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

John Imhof said when he headed Nassau County's Department of Social Services between 2006 and 2019, it often was tough to find enough caseworkers to fill positions, because of low salaries.

"I frankly find it disrespectful to the integrity of CPS caseworkers that they are paid so little given the truly lifesaving responsibilities that are placed on them," he said.

Suffolk last year increased starting annual salaries, by nearly 20%, from $43,404 to $51,913, Pierre said. Salaries after a year on the job rise to $54,680, she said.

Bellone said the county is looking at raising salaries further.

But many caseworker positions remain unfilled. In Suffolk, there is enough money in the budget for 138 caseworkers, but only 116 positions are filled, records provided by the county show.

If Suffolk reaches 138 caseworkers, every CPS caseworker could stay below 12 cases, Pierre said.

The number of Suffolk caseworkers has risen to its highest level in years. The average number of caseworkers in 2022 was 95.7, compared with 88.5 in 2021 and 85.3 in 2017, a Newsday analysis of county data found.

The county also hired more supervisors, to increase oversight, Pierre said.

In addition, Suffolk is working more aggressively to retain caseworkers, including trainees, some of whom leave for other types of social-work jobs "where the level of work is not as intense," Davidson said. The county has reduced the number of cases each trainee has, offered more coaching and mentoring and reconfigured the curriculum, she said. That led to a sharp decrease in people leaving within their one-year probation period, Davidson said.

Daniel Levler, president of the Suffolk municipal employees’ union, said although these strategies have helped, a shortage of office assistants means that caseworkers are being diverted from their regular responsibilities to doing more clerical tasks.

The union and county last year reached an agreement to increase starting annual salaries for office assistants by 17%, to $37,140, county spokeswoman Marykate Guilfoyle said. But nearly half the departmentwide office assistant positions remain unfilled, Pierre said.

Suffolk's CPS Transformation Act, which the legislature passed in 2020, requires more reviews and oversight of cases by supervisors and, in some instances — such as when there are four or more reports of unique incidents related to one case — an "immediate review" by a team that includes two supervisors and a caseworker.

Pierre said the agency is following those provisions of the law, something Levler, from the union, confirmed.

The law also required the establishment of a specialized team to handle cases involving children with special needs, including autism.

A lawsuit that Thomas’ mother, Justyna Zubko-Valva, filed against Suffolk and others says the county failed to train its caseworkers adequately, including on how to handle cases involving children on the autism spectrum, like Thomas. Suffolk officials cannot comment on the lawsuit because of the pending litigation, Guilfoyle said.

Zynovia Hetherington, director of the Child Welfare Training and Advancement Program in the School of Social Work at the University of Washington and a professor there, said specially trained caseworkers are crucial in helping children with special needs.

"If you don't know what the autism spectrum looks like, then how do you critically assess the safety of a child?" she said. "How do you critically assess the ability of the parents to keep that child safe?"

Suffolk CPS established a specialized unit shortly after the act was passed, but has not always been able to keep it fully staffed with six caseworkers, a supervisor and a psychiatric social worker, because caseworkers with such expertise are highly sought-after and have left for other positions, Davidson said.

The Suffolk Transformation Act also requires that a "corrective action plan" be submitted to the legislature's presiding officer and to the county executive after four consecutive months of caseloads exceeding the guidelines of an average of 12 cases and of no caseworker with more than 15 — something that happened repeatedly, records show.

Pierre said monthly and quarterly CPS reports the department sent to the legislature are considered corrective action plans — even though they were not labeled as such.

But Legis. Kara Hahn (D-Setauket), who co-sponsored the Transformation Act as well as the 2019 legislation requiring regular reports to the legislature, said, "I do not believe a monthly report is a corrective action plan. If we need to clarify that with a piece of follow-up legislation, we will do that."

Among the requirements of corrective action plans are that the plans include the number of CPS caseworkers needed to come into compliance with the caseload limits and how much time it would take to comply. Neither is in the monthly and quarterly reports, a Newsday review of the reports shows.

Pierre said those points were discussed verbally with county executive staff. "Everybody was well aware of what we needed to have," she said.

But Hahn said the legislation specifically required written reports to the legislature, and verbal conversations with the county executive's office did not suffice.

Although experts believe Suffolk CPS did not do enough to protect Thomas, his death occurred amid a national discussion over whether child protection services are sometimes too quick to act against parents after abuse and neglect allegations. As a sign of that yearslong debate, New York legislators in 2020 voted to raise the bar for evidence that can be used against parents.

Jorge Rosario, former chief supervising attorney for the Children's Law Bureau of the Legal Aid Society of Suffolk County, said that starting in 2017, he expressed concern in letters and meetings with top Department of Social Services officials that CPS was less often citing parents for what he said were clear instances of abuse or maltreatment. He said that could have been what happened with the Valva case.

Davidson said that, before the 2022 enactment of the state law, the department did not change its criteria for citing parents.

No matter what, Rosario believes Thomas' case wasn't the only one in which CPS did not take strong enough action to protect children.

"It's not an isolated incident that things were missed," he said.

Pollina was sentenced Tuesday to 25 years to life in prison. Valva is in an upstate prison serving the same sentence.

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In response to Thomas’ death, the Suffolk legislature in 2020 passed the CPS Transformation Act, which included reforms to increase oversight and supervision and reduce caseloads.

Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone in Hauppauge on Jan. 3. Credit: Howard Schnapp