On August 18, 005, advocates and board members met with DCSS management to discuss a pilot to shift the NRPS-IN process from Child Support Officers (CSO) to Office Specialists (OS) on the Case Opening Team. The goal is to minimize the lag between multiple parties processing it and completing it at the front; however, we were concerned with the increase in workload for the OS's. We raised the concern that they could be disciplined for backlogs, but management agreed not to penalize them if they could not complete other tasks due to something additional being added to their duties. What prompted this is that the department is cutting CSO positions and shifting this work to OS because they believe it is a clerical function. The department's goal is to begin the pilot on October 1. After 60 days, we will meet to assess further impacts and how it went. A training plan will be shared with the team to review, and there will be a revisit to PCAS training. Two OS will be trained to generate NRPS-IN Documents. One establishment OA will be trained to process NRPS-IN for POS and court filing.
OS already have a heavy workload, so we are not done with this conversation. We will be revisiting the table to discuss this process at the 60-day mark.
We thank advocates Patricia Edwards, Tina Kimmel, Chris Almanza, and Sylvia Garcia for their advocacy.
