The COVID-19 pandemic upended the state’s Division for Children Youth and Families, according to a report from the division’s overseer, with remote-learning making it harder to detect abuse and institutions struggling to quarantine children.
At the pandemic’s outset, Moira O’Neill, the state’s child advocate, worried that abuse and neglect would go unreported with children away from schools — and the teachers and counselors who might be able to spot those in need. DCYF has received fewer reports of abuse and neglect this year, the division’s data show, and fewer of those calls are coming from teachers.
In its annual report released last week, the Office of the Child Advocate — the state body that has oversight authority over the Division for Children Youth and Families and other state programs for children — said the pandemic brought to the surface other concerns for children already in state care.
Of the children in residential facilities around the state, O’Neill said 29 have had COVID-19.
The virus has spread through New Hampshire’s nursing homes and other congregate-living settings, and while O’Neill said her office understands children are at lower risk of death and complications from the virus, the adults who work in state facilities could be at risk, as well as children with other medical conditions.
When residents of larger long-term care facilities have become infected, O’Neill said, the infected people can be separated. The state’s residential facilities for children do not have enough space to quarantine children.
The Office of the Child Advocate brought up the problem in July. Over the summer, the state considered opening a wing of the Sununu Youth Service Center in Manchester, but the child advocate recommended a home or home-like setting over the juvenile detention facility.
In a survey over the summer, the Office of the Child Advocate surveyed foster families and found many were willing to consider two-week foster care placements for children who needed to be quarantined outside a residential facility.
But the state still has not found a place to quarantine sick children in its care.
Residential facilities have shut their doors to visitors, O’Neill said, in an effort to keep children and the staff who care for them safer.
But O’Neill pointed out this can slow down the process of placing a child with a family. Children in residential facilities get to know potential foster families through visits and by spending time in their homes.
When visits are cut off, those visits are not possible.
O’Neill said it is not clear how the pandemic and its attendant disruptions to life will affect children in the long-term. But right now, she said, more children are in mental and emotional crisis.
“Children are just developing,” O’Neill said. “They have experienced what is essentially a trauma.”