HARRISBURG - The Pennsylvania auditor general says "tremendous improvement" has been made to Pennsylvania's child-abuse hotline after an earlier report found many callers had hung up or been disconnected before reaching a caseworker.
In May, the Auditor General's Office said it had found that 22 percent of ChildLine calls in 2015 - or nearly 42,000 - were unanswered, up from just 4 percent the year before.
In the first six months of 2016, by contrast, that rate had been halved, with 11 percent of calls - more than 9,000 - going unanswered, Auditor General Eugene DePasquale said Wednesday.
"They have made tremendous improvement, but there's still work to be done," DePasqale said.
Pennsylvania's child-protective services laws underwent significant changes in 2014 and 2015, adding new groups of people as mandated reporters of child abuse and requiring additional training.
At a __news conference, DePasquale said the Department of Human Services has improved staffing levels, as well as the tracking and monitoring of calls. But he said the department needs to improve in other areas, such as transmitting all ChildLine reports to county and law enforcement agencies within two hours.
In a statement, Department of Human Services Secretary Ted Dallas said that the Wolf administration inherited significant challenges when it took office in January 2015. The department was flooded with more calls and clearance applications than it had the employees or money to handle, he said.
He said the department added staff and improved training. The time it took to process child abuse clearances had peaked in February 2015 at 26 days - and are required to be processed in 14 days - but they are now processed in an average of 1.27 days, he said. And where 43 percent of January 2015 calls to ChildLine were abandoned or disconnected, that rate is now below 2 percent.
"We have addressed the AG's concerns with ChildLine and, as we have been doing since day one, will continue to improve processes and practices," Dallas said in the statement.
klangley@post-gazette.com 717-787-2141 @karen_langley
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