$30 Million Child Welfare Database Debacle
Maine spent $30 million in software for its child welfare system, and staffers now say the upgrade made things worse than before. Here’s the story from the Maine Morning Star:
A similar situation is brewing in Maine with the rollout of its child welfare system, called Katahdin — named after a mountain in Baxter State Park.
The state sought to overhaul its child welfare database used by the Office of Child and Family Services back in 2019 when its older system began losing functionality, the Maine Morning Star reported. It aimed to “modernize and improve” technical support for staff that work with families, and the department received eight proposals from software companies in 2021, but only three met eligibility criteria.
The state ultimately chose Deloitte, and spent nearly $30 million on the project, which went live in January 2022. But employees say their workflow hasn’t been as effective since.
Caseworkers have described it as cumbersome, saying they need to use dozens of steps and duplicative actions just to complete a single task, and that files saved in the system later go missing. It’s additional stress on a department that faces staff vacancies and long waitlists to connect families with resources, the Maine Morning Star reported in March.
In her annual report in 2023, Christine Alberi, the state’s child welfare ombudsman, wrote “Katahdin is negatively affecting the ability of child welfare staff to effectively do their work, and therefore keep children safe.”
Katahdin, too, received recommendations from a bipartisan oversight committee to improve the system earlier this year. Recommendations included factors beyond just the software, like improvements to the court system, recruiting more staff and addressing burnout.
States Newsroom sought to determine if any of the recommendations had been implemented, and to confirm that the department was still using Katahdin, but the department did not return a request for comment.