Charlie Johns

The director of Butler County Children and Youth Services reacted Thursday to the state's annual report on child abuse, saying it shows how the office's workload has increased since the state revised its child protective services law in 2015.

The number of substantiated cases of child abuse and total reports of child abuse in Butler County both went up last year, according to an annual state report on the incidents.

Charlie Johns, the director of the county's CYS office, said the upticks continue a trend of increased workloads for county-level child protective services, and highlight a statewide struggle to deal with drug and alcohol abuse, which are present in most child abuse cases.

During 2016, Butler County had 502 reports of child abuse and 38 substantiated cases, according to the state Department of Health's Child Protective Services Report, which was released Wednesday afternoon.

Those totals were both increases from 2015, when the county had 422 total reports and 30 substantiated cases of child abuse.

Johns also responded to public criticism of the county's CYS office in the wake of the report. Some pointed to the county's substantiation rate of 1 per 1,000 children as evidence that the office was failing to adequately investigate reports of suspected abuse. Butler's reporting rate is 12.8 per 1,000 children.

The county's substantiation rate is lower than the statewide average of 1.7 substantiated reports per 1,000 children, but Johns said using the rates to evaluate an office's performance is wrong-headed. He pointed to Cambria County, which had a reporting rate of 18 per 1,000 and a substantiation rate of 1 per 1,000, as an example.

“I don't know that you could ever use that statistic to indicate that we're not doing our job,” Johns said. “Every situation, every family, every county is different. I think we do a more than adequate job, despite what some of the public believes.”

Johns said the burden of proof for CYS workers investigating suspected abuse is high, and the state also mandates that the county-level systems do everything they can to keep from having to remove a child from their home.

In 2016 the county also had six substantiated cases and 25 suspected cases of repeat abuse, and one substantiated case of child abuse involving agents of a county agency, according to the report.

The report also tracks general protective services, or GPS, reports, which are slightly different from child protective services, or CPS, reports in that they do not rise to the level of suspected child abuse, but “allege a need for intervention to prevent serious harm to children.”

In 2016 Butler County had 1,304 GPS reports, and investigations determined that 264 reports involving 311 children were valid.

Johns said that increases to both CPS and GPS reports had a meaningful impact on the county's CYS office, which has 10 full-time caseworkers and one part-time caseworker.

“They've both meaningful increases,” Johns said, “and we've been on the increase since the new laws went into effect in 2015.”

The department did not break down the specific concerns behind the county-level GPS report totals, but said that statewide the leading factor in GPS reports was parental substance abuse.

Johns said drugs and alcohol are an overarching concern in both GPS and CPS reporting for most counties. About 70 percent of children in CYS care have some connection with drug and alcohol abuse, he said.

That's a trend that's true for Butler County as well.

On one day in January, Johns said, CYS took 11 children into care. Of those cases, seven involved drugs and/or alcohol, he said.

“What we're dealing with is quite common statewide,” Johns said. “Many of the cases that we investigate are dealt with in a multidisciplinary investigative team. We're the decision maker, but we take the advice of law enforcement, medical and the district attorney's office in making those decisions.”

The steady increases in reporting have meant rising expenditures as well. According to the report, more than $2.4 million was spent in 2016 on CPS and GPS investigations and assessments in Butler County. Johns said that's low relative to Beaver County, which has an under-18 population comparable to Butler's but spent more than $5.8 million last year investigating child abuse reports.

Statewide last year, 46 children died as a result of abuse, up from 36 in 2015. There were no child abuse-related fatalities or near fatalities in Butler County in 2015, according to the report.