DSS boards gets good news on support rating

Published 12:00 am Wednesday, December 2, 2009

By Kathy Chaffin
kchaffin@salisburypost.com
The program administrator over the Child Support Program had good news for the Rowan County Board of Social Services last week.
“We have met 100 percent of our self-assessment goals that are set by the state for the last three months,” Nancy Brandt said. This comes after Brandt, who was promoted to the new service support program administrator for child support, day care and Work First on May 5, headed up an initiative to raise Rowan County’s low ratings.
The state’s 88 child support programs are rated in areas such as case establishment, enforcement, expedition and closure. When it came to the overall effectiveness of the program, Rowan ranked 73 out of 88 in the last quarterly report for the 2007-2008 fiscal year, “which was fairly pitiful,” she said.
For the first quarterly report Sept. 30, Brandt said Rowan moved up to No. 66. “I attribute the improvement to our very, very specially focused challenge of improving our child support program,” she said. “We have worked very closely with John Holcombe, our state child support consultant …
“A lot of it had to do with how we keyed stuff into the computer system.”
For example, the case count had to be put in another area of the computer system before the other data was keyed in. “It’s possible our staff had not been as cognizant of that as they needed to be in the past,” Brandt said.
Rowan County’s child support program also rose in the utilization of manpower, from 83 percent for the previous quarter to 133 percent for the quarter ending Sept. 30. This was 3 percent above the state average, she said.
When it came to individual agents’ efforts, Brandt said the program had a 98 percent improvement over the previous quarter. Three of the department’s 16 child support agents showed profound improvement, she said, with the highest one making a 567 percent turnaround in productivity.
Brandt said this child support agent did several things to improve her rating. “A lot of it had to do with how information is reported in the computer system and how that computer system computes and calculates all this stuff,” she said. “It is so sophisticated that I don’t even understand it.”
Another child support agent showed a 360 percent turnaround, Brandt said, and yet another, 312 percent. “The efforts of our agents were just really, really significant and stellar in terms of being able to accomplish these numbers,” she said. “So we did achieve the giant leap that we were hoping to see.”
Brandt said she will contine to work with the child support program’s supervisors and agents to improve state rankings even more.