BATON ROUGE – A state senator sharply criticized the leadership at the Department of Children and Family Services on Wednesday for a significant backlog of cases and a lack of experience in critical areas.

The Senate Select Committee on Women and Children summoned Secretary Rebecca Harris after a WBRZ report on recent changes in the department, including how abuse allegations are assigned to case workers. 

Former centralized intake employee Melanie Mann said some reports of suspected child abuse weren’t reviewed for nearly a week.

"I want to say the highest number I saw was 370, where we had unprocessed reports going back as far as five days," Mann said during a WBRZ interview in November. "I felt that children's lives would be in danger."

Sen. Katrina Andrews, a Democrat from Monroe, said she had heard from more than 10 DCFS employees leading up to the hearing, some worried that children were left unprotected when the agency began handling complaints received by telephone before those arriving electronically.

"What has happened to the person who made a decision not to assign 300 and some cases of reported potential child abuse?" Andrews asked Harris during Wednesday’s meeting.

"I would say nothing has happened to that manager,” Harris said. 

She said the staff hadn’t been trained to handle the electronic communications and DCFS leadership extended grace to the staffer.

“But who extends grace to the children who were in dangerous situations?” Andrews asked, rhetorically.

DCFS’s centralized intake unit has 51 employees across the state, but they have been working from home. They have been asked to work from the Baton Rouge office Dec. 15 or be transferred to a local office in their region.

Centralized Intake Supervisor Lacy Sims said that of those 51, two have recently left the department and another 34 will transfer to different jobs inside the department and work from local offices across the state.

Andrews noted DCFS will soon lose skilled employees.

“You have about 15 experienced Centralized Intake workers that are going to remain with you,” Andrews said. “That is a concern.”

DCFS has introduced artificial intelligence to the workplace, and Mann told WBRZ there is a concern that the state will “replace the majority of us with AI."

Harris said that the tool transcribes calls and adds summaries into their system.

"AI will never replace our team members. What it is there for is to make them more effective,” Harris said.

The secretary said she is reorganizing the agency to shift knowledgeable people into front-line roles, but Andrews said she had heard from some workers who were shifted out of managerial roles and placed into spots with salary caps.

Sen. Regina Barrow said that even though staffers want to remain at DCFS, they feel the reorganization made them feel disrespected, taken for granted and unappreciated.

As part of the back-and-forth, Harris said she and her leadership team are working on more effective communication in the future, including visits to local offices to field questions from employees.

Harris acknowledged neither she nor her executive staff has a specific background or experience in child protective services. Harris, who was appointed by Gov. Jeff Landry in July, was a social services analyst before working her way up to undersecretary.

“This is no slight to anyone, but your staff seems not to have experience in certain fields,” Andrews said.

The senator said skilled employees who were demoted may feel slighted when upper-level management does not have a background in child protective services.

“I will say that this is not a secretarial problem right now for me, because it has happened under a number of secretarial leadership,” Andrews said. “Our primary concern is children. The second has to be who works with those children.”