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A buffet of social services Mail Tribune / Jim Craven Esther Johnson picks up her 5-year-old daughter, Ebony, from day care a few blocks from where Johnson works. Johnson used Jackson County�s integrated social services to recover from drug addiction and poverty. A statewide reorganization of the Department of Human Services hopes to build on Jackson County�s model. State aims to overhaul agency, put benefits at central sites By Jonel Aleccia If she was going to wind up poor, pregnant and addicted to drugs, at least Esther Johnson had the good fortune to do it in Jackson County. Here, in the region praised for innovation and collaboration among social service agencies, the 41-year-old Medford woman has spent five years accessing nearly every benefit in town. Today, Johnson has a job, a home, sobriety and custody of her daughter, all thanks to a web of interlocking services that state and local officials now aim to make even better. "It should be like Hometown Buffet, where you can have every little thing right out where you need it," said Johnson, who works as a receptionist at the Jackson County Housing Authority. Creating cafeteria-style social services, integrated sites where clients can get what they need in a single place, is the goal of a sweeping overhaul of the state Department of Human Services. Agency directors across Jackson County have spent this week presenting their staffs with the first details of a plan that collapses the nine divisions and program offices of the $7.5 billion agency into a leaner, more flexible structure. The new plan, given a thumbs-up by Gov. John Kitzhaber, creates six new divisions with three primary program and policy groups, flattens management structure and forms a single field operation that serves clients across the board. Project architect Rex Miller, the Southern Oregon integration manager based in Medford, said the plan should save $4 million and trim about 60 positions from 9,500 statewide. Locally, it will redefine jobs for many of the nearly 400 workers who staff programs that provide welfare, drug treatment, child protective care, vocational rehabilitation and services to seniors and the disabled. "We don�t know yet what it means, we really don�t," said Kathy Garrett Canape, a worker with the state�s Community Partnership Program. "They expect to maintain people, but your job could change. We�re all up in the air." But for Johnson and the estimated 40,000 local clients served by DHS programs, the reorganization should be nothing less than seamless, said Miller. "The goal is to make it, if anything, invisible," he said. If Johnson were admitted to the system under the new plan, she and her 5-year-old daughter, Ebony, would have been offered a range of services right from the start. Food stamps, health care, drug treatment, child-abuse intervention, day-care referrals and job training all would be part of a single benefit buffet spread before clients. Statewide, more than a quarter of some 720,000 DHS clients require services from at least two agencies, Miller said. Offering that range might be easier in Jackson County, where the reorganization is likely to be piloted this spring before a state rollout come summer. Here, creating collaborative services has been a goal since the early 1990s. The Rogue Family Center in White City has been hailed widely as a model for the state and the nation. "It�s getting embarrassing," said Hank Collins, county health director. "Our colleagues across the state are getting tired of hearing about Jackson County." But the fame is warranted, said Miller. Elsewhere in the state, the 30-year-old DHS system has become divided and, in some cases, inefficient. That was the impetus for the move, which came at the behest of Kitzhaber and recently departed DHS Director Gary Weeks. "We�ve created redundancies up there," Miller acknowledged. "This will bring Salem and elsewhere more in line with what we�ve been trying to do." And the collaboration that exists between directors of agencies including the county, Adult and Family Services, Services to Children and Families and others is rare, Miller said. "There are places, and I�m not going to tell you where they are, where the health department manager and the AFS manager won�t sit in the same room," he said. "And if they do, they certainly don�t talk to each other." But even in Jackson County, the reorganization of a multitiered agency serving clients with pressing needs won�t be simple. Many agency workers worry that streamlining programs to make access easier will eliminate the specialization that makes them effective. One caseworker for Services to Children and Families called the plan "goofy" and said it would lead to inefficiencies. "An SCF caseworker who is very experienced in doing child abuse investigations and is stationed in the Rogue Family Center now finds herself occasionally helping people fill out food stamp applications, of all things," he wrote in an e-mail. "This is not exactly an efficient use of her time." This worker and several others asked not to be identified for fear of employment repercussions. Some workers, both line staff and managers, will be forced to assume more general duties, Miller acknowledged. But most will be able to retain the specialization they�ve developed. "The most significant change is that everyone will work for the department and not for the program, and that�s a good thing," he said. In fact, managers will bear the brunt of the changes, said Miller, who assumed his new post last summer. Under the reorganization plan, it has been eliminated, along with three other midlevel managers in the district. "I worked myself out of a job," Miller said. There likely will be positions in the new structure for the people affected. Under the new plan, the two-county Jackson and Josephine region will be run by a single manager with the help of one or perhaps two assistants. Many details of the reorganization remain unclear. A more generalized staff will require additional training. A merging of agencies will leave open the question of who will work in the several office buildings scattered across the county. In one scenario, Miller envisions an "integration team" based at the county health department to screen most of the region�s referrals. Ida Saito, district manager for Adult and Human Services, will have to compete for a new post and find a new office. Still, she said the reorganization will lead to a better bottom line. "We�re going to focus on our point of entry," she said. "Instead of saying, �That�s not done here, it�s done on the next corner,� the client will leave with an appointment and a contact person." Improved services will make scenarios like Esther Johnson�s even more common in Southern Oregon, Miller said. "This has to be about better services to clients," he said, "or why bother?" Reach reporter JoNel Aleccia at 776-4465, or e-mail [email protected] Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.