The Vermont Department for Children and Families was unable to track children in its custody after an information technology failure crippled the department’s core data systems in December, raising questions about how the state protects some of its most vulnerable residents.
The breakdown, triggered when a system was updated on December 15, resulted in a multi-day outage of DCF’s central data system. During that time, caseworkers lacked access to information showing which children were in state care and where they were living.
It also meant workers could not check whether whether adults seeking to work with children had histories of child abuse, according to Matthew Bernstein, who leads the Office of the Child, Youth and Family Advocate, an independent office that closely monitors DCF.
The outage also temporarily halted DCF’s ability to generate reports tracking children who are missing or have run away, Bernstein said.
DCF did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“If it’s more than an instant, that is hugely problematic,” Bernstein said.
It was unclear whether the outage caused data loss that could affect the department’s ability to monitor children and outcomes, said Lauren Higbee, deputy advocate with the office.
The breakdown renews concerns about Vermont’s technology. DCF relies on some of the oldest child welfare data systems in the nation. The primary system, SSMIS, was developed in the 1980s and is used to assign cases and track adoptions, placements, and basic child and family information. A second system, FSDnet, built in the 1990s, handles investigations, case notes, and child abuse reports but was never designed for full case management. That means staff rely heavily on paper files kept in district offices.
The systems have been plagued with problems for more than a decade. In May 2016, a system outage forced DCF to lean on duplicative processes and paper documentation for roughly a week while it addressed the IT failure. The data systems have regularly failed to track foster children’s allergies and basic custody information.
Higbee said she saw no evidence that DCF had a backup plan when the outage occurred. She became aware of the outage on December 15, when a banner appeared on SSMIS informing users that DCF was experiencing IT problems. Higbee and Bernstein have read-only access to DCF systems to inform their work.
Bernstein applauded the work of ADS and DCF staff to get the data systems repaired as quickly as possible, but he remained skeptical about their long-term functionality without greater intervention.
“The systems may be functioning, but that doesn’t mean they’re usable,” Bernstein said.
In November, Aryka Radke, deputy commissioner of DCF’s Family Services Division, told legislators that the department’s antiquated systems are unable to track some of the division’s most critical information, such as serious physical injuries of children and the fingerprint records of foster parents.
The department has also been unable to fulfill requests made by the legislature, including one last year for data on the use of mechanical restraints such as handcuffs by sheriffs on children in the state’s custody.
On Tuesday, several state legislators said they were not aware of DCF’s system outage.
“If this is true, it’s deeply concerning,” Sen. Rob Plunkett (D-Bennington) said. Plunkett chairs the Joint Information Technology Oversight Committee.
Rep. Laura Sibilia (I-West Dover) expressed concern that the Scott administration did not appear to have disclosed the breakdown to the legislature. “The communication between the administration and the legislature is a big problem,” Sibilia said.
Higbee said that the agency also did not seem to have notified other stakeholders, such as foster parents, about the outage.
Children in state custody have little power to push for changes, and technology problems can persist for years without public pressure to fix them, Bernstein said.
“This outage is just the tip of the iceberg for a whole deep, decades-long problem that just hasn’t been addressed,” Bernstein said.
DCF is currently reviewing vendor proposals to develop a new child welfare information system that is estimated to cost between $30 million and $50 million and be completed in spring 2028, though agency officials have cautioned the timeline may shift.
Bernstein urged DCF to make incremental changes to its existing data systems now rather than wait until a new system is developed to address longstanding issues.
“We are sounding the alarm on these systemic issues because they need to be addressed right away,” Bernstein said. “Not in a couple years down the road, as is the current plan.”
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