Tennessee’s Department of Children’s Services is failing the state’s most vulnerable kids, a new audit warns

The Tennessee Comptroller’s Office has found that the Department of Children’s Services is struggling to provide for the state’s most vulnerable kids. The new audit is just the latest evidence of increased scrutiny of the Department’s performance.

The report spans the last two years and highlights failures to address long-standing issues inside DCS. Those include a high turnover of case managers, which auditors say has led to high caseloads for remaining workers.

“Case manager turnover and employee vacancies at DCS have reached crisis levels,” the audit says, “while the number of children going into DCS custody continues to rise.”

DCS has had an average of 8,000 kids in its custody each month.

“Top leadership must take more aggressive action to hire and retain case managers or risk the safety of vulnerable children who slip through the cracks because there is no one to help them,” auditors write.

The audit also says DCS has not done enough to secure adequate long-term and temporary housing. Some kids have been documented sleeping on the floor of state office buildings.

And the report says the department has not done enough to investigate allegations of sexual abuse while minors were in state-run facilities. One example of that came earlier this year, when another report found that teenage boys inside a state-run detention facility called Wilder Youth Development Center were experiencing physical and sexual abuse by staffers.

The Comptroller’s Office recommends that the legislature address these problems by establishing caseload limits, and amending state law so DCS can investigate allegations of child-on-child sexual abuse.

DCS says in the audit that it concurs with the findings. Moving forward, the department says it plans to conduct more frequent risk assessments, and incorporate findings from the audit into their strategic plan for 2023.