Please see attachment for assignment instructions.

Engaging Differing Perspectives (PowerPoint)

Public administrators are often called upon to present to colleagues or outside groups. To give you practice with your presentation skills, you are required to create a PowerPoint presentation for your post to this discussion.

Create a PowerPoint presentation with a detailed presentation notes section completed. This approach uses a PowerPoint presentation with detailed notes in the notes area at the bottom of each slide. The presentation notes are a transcript of the presentation you would make if showing the presentation to an audience.

For your initial post, explore differing perspectives on the problem you are addressing and potential solutions to it. The problems being addressed are below under Information from Discussion 1 and Information from Discussion 2. In your PowerPoint presentation:

Identify at least three groups external to both the organization (the public agency) and the legislative body that oversees the Indiana Department of Child Services (for example, city council, state legislature, et cetera.). You should consider civic groups, professional groups, or other external groups in your community.

Provide examples of how you might gain insight into the perceptions of each of the identified groups. Provide insights into what the perceptions of these groups toward the identified problem might be and any potential solution that might be suggested.

o Note: It is very important that you try to consider this from the perspective of these groups as it is, not in terms of what you believe it should be. For example, don’t just say they should be in support of it. Provide insights into what they may or may not like about any proposed solution, or indeed about the clarity of the problem to begin with. An effective policy analysis requires that we have some insight into the needs of the community. Having this insight will provide clarity into whether or not we are identifying a real problem, managing our resources well, and developing solutions and policies that meet the needs of the community in an ethical manner.

Your PowerPoint presentation must include the following:

Each slide should have speakers notes.

A minimum of seven slides. You are free to include more at your discretion if you believe it would be helpful to your presentation. The slides must include

o Cover slide.

o Introduction slide.

o One slide for each of the identified groups (should be at least 3 slides), identifying the group, how you would collect information from them, and what you believe might be their perceptions of the problem and any identifiable solutions.

o Closing slide.

o References.

Information from Discussion 1

The agency I intend to focus my efforts on is the Indiana Department of Child Services (DCS). Their mission is to engage with families and collaborate with state, local and community partners to protect children from abuse and neglect and to provide child support services (DCS Mission, Vision, and Values). I want to address the overspending that Indianas DCS does every year. They are 100s of millions of dollars over budget every year. I know this is not just a problem for Indiana, but every state.

One thing that I learned working with this agency is that they want to keep referring services to clients and keep them in the system. If they keep their numbers high on active clients in their system every year and overspend the budgeted money, they will and expect to receive more funds the following fiscal year. DCS is by far the largest department with the greatest budget and amount of employees than any other department in the state of Indiana. As of 2017, Indianas rate of children in out-of-home care was about 13 children for every 1,000 in the state and is over twice the national average. In addition to Indiana having a higher number of children in out-of-home care, Indiana also has a higher-than-average number of children being referred to child protection. In 2016, Indianas rate of referral to child protection, calculated as the number of referrals for every 1,000 children in the states population, was 108.2 compared to a national average of 55.6 (Evaluation of the Indiana Department of Child Services).

References

DCS Mission, Vision, and Values. (n.d.). Retrieved January 22, 2020, from https://www.in.gov/dcs/2370.htm

Evaluation of the Indiana Department of Child Services. (2018, June 18). Retrieved January 22, 2020, from https://www.in.gov/dcs/files/IndianaEvaluationReportCWGFinal.pdf

Information from Discussion 2

What is the specific problem that your organization will be trying to address? Try to be as specific as possible.

My organization will be trying to reduce the spending by the Indiana Department of Child Services to combat child abuse and neglect. There are a number of issues that create this situation that need addressed. One major that needs to be considered is what is causing the high caseloads in the first place and can these things be spearheaded from the front end to help reduce the number of children entering into the system in the first place. Here are a number of things that need evaluated and are cause for concern (Evaluation of the Indiana Department of Child Services.):

Only three states have a higher rate of abuse and neglect referrals than Indiana.

Indiana accepts more abuse and neglect reports than the national average.

Only two states had a higher rate of completed child protection assessments than Indiana.

Despite completing more assessments than almost any state, Indiana substantiated only 15 percent of those assessments.

The rate of abuse and neglect reports grew by almost 63 percent from SFY 13 to SFY 17.

55 percent of removals in 2017 were related to parental substance abuse.

DCS barely misses the federal standard for repeat maltreatment

Indianas rate of children in care is 13.0 (per 1,000 children) compared with the national average of 5.6.

Indianas rate of children entering care is 8 (per 1,000 children) compared with the national rate of 3.6. Nearly 45 percent of family case managers have caseloads above the state standard.

DCS supervision standard is 1 to 7+ compared to the national standard of 1 to 5.

There are 530 children in care on the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) wait list for childcare vouchers.

In SFY 2017, DCS spent $24,933,487 on drug testing/supplies and $4,538,182 on drug treatment.

The number of court-involved cases in DCS is more than double the national average.

How is the specific problem you mentioned tied to the organizational mission?

The problem is tied to DCS mission statement, because they job is to provide services to and protect children from abuse and neglect. If we can reduce the amount of reports by ensuring parents have resources and tools to properly parent their children and deal with everyday life. This can potentially reduce the number of reports and cases DCS receives in the first place and eventually reduce the amount of spending and employees needed to make DCS function as it has. Cases that do need DCS attention after this would be handled in a manner to help put them in a place where they will be no more recurring incidences and remove the cases from the DCS system. It is a complicated and very involve process, but it can be done with the proper training, tools, resources, and policies in place.

How might you frame the problem for the policy analysis to make the scope of it more realistic in a real-world setting?

Problems such as the opioid epidemic have contributed to the increased number of families and children in the DCS case management system. If we were to focus and attack the opioid problem from the doctor prescribing the opioid, to the manufacturers, and finally to the patient taking the opioids we can come up with a solution to combat this and thus reduce the numbers that increased the caseloads of DCS due to this problem. Over reliance on a reactive system that uses child removal as the primary approach to address parental addiction will not serve Indiana or its citizens well over time (Evaluation of the Indiana Department of Child Services.). The idea is to take a proactive approach instead of a reactive approach to these problems.

References

Evaluation of the Indiana Department of Child Services. (2018, June 18). Retrieved January 22, 2020, from https://www.in.gov/dcs/files/IndianaEvaluationReportCWGFinal.pdf