Oklahoma Commission on Children and Youth seeks staff additions and pay adjustments to reduce oversight backlog
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Summary
The Oklahoma Commission on Children and Youth told the committee that added staff over the past year reduced the child-death-review backlog and that it is requesting additional oversight specialists, a director for juvenile systems oversight and targeted pay adjustments to sustain timely reviews and investigations.
The Director, Oklahoma Commission on Children and Youth, presented the agency’s FY26 budget priorities to the Appropriations and Budget committee and requested funding to boost oversight capacity and align staff pay with comparable agencies.
Why it matters: OCCY is charged with system oversight, child-death reviews, multidisciplinary medical reviews and post-adjudication foster-care reviews; timely reviews produce data used to recommend prevention actions and policy changes affecting child welfare and related systems.
What OCCY told the committee: The agency described its statutory history and core units — child death review board, multidisciplinary child abuse/neglect review teams, foster-care grievance lines and an office of juvenile systems oversight. OCCY reported improvements in child-death-review processing following prior staffing increases; staff additions allowed the agency to close its 2022 child-death cases and produce cleaner, analyzable data for trend work, the director said.
Budget request specifics: OCCY sought three additional positions in the Office of Juvenile System Oversight (two oversight specialists and a director) to increase investigative and analytic capacity, and requested a funded coordinator position for the parent partnership board (previously supported by a different agency’s grant). OCCY also requested targeted salary adjustments across the agency to help recruit experienced staff; the total ask presented was roughly $651,550 to cover positions and strategic pay raises.
Committee discussion: Members asked how foster-parent grievance and oversight complaints are publicized and how many calls the agency receives; OCCY said foster-parent grievance calls vary by month (roughly teens to twenties) and that foster‑parent grievance information is supposed to be provided to foster parents by DHS when they onboard. Representatives urged OCCY to supply district-level call data to show geographic footprints. Members also questioned the child-death-review backlog and timeliness; OCCY said the backlog has decreased markedly after staffing increases and that completion of 2022 cases was a recent milestone, though some lag remains by cases older than a year depending on records and complexity.
Recommendations and follow-up: OCCY commissioners and staff pledged to provide detailed charts and proposals showing how one-time or recurring funds would reduce backlog and speed investigations; several lawmakers encouraged a one-time funding plan to bring the office fully current for analysis and prevention work.
No formal votes: The committee did not vote on OCCY requests at the hearing; OCCY agreed to return with more detailed financial and workload proposals for committee consideration.