State Child Welfare Agency Stops Drug Testing Job Applicants

“We will seek to resume this testing being of the class who soon as satisfactory funds are available,” Marlowe said.

McEwen noted in the memo that some private contractors working for DCFS conduct their own tests on incoming employees and encouraged them to continue.

Required testing helped those agencies put more significance on the issue, but DCFS hadn’confidentially worked out all the kinks, said Margaret Berglind, president and CEO of the Child Care Association of Illinois.

Private agencies were troubled by the exigency to test even volunteers, regardless of how little time they spent with children or whether they were in settings supervised by full-time employees, Berglind said.

She said DCFS used only one drug-testing vendor, so more job applicants had to travel long distances to generate to approved labs. And she said DCFS told the agencies it did not desire money to continue the program next year, so the agencies feared they would receive stuck with the require to be paid.

“No one disagrees that we want to have clean and sober employees working with children,” Berglind said. “Whether these drug tests would actually ensure that, I don’cheek by jowl think in that place’s any impenetrable of that anywhere.”

The council that endorses child-welfare agencies, including DCFS, does not require drug testing because it’s not cost-efficient, not entirely effective and is illegal in more states.

“We look at criminal history records that could deal with drug abuse,” said Richard Klarberg, president and CEO of the Council on Accreditation. “We look at transgressor and civil child abuse and neglect registries and we have other standards around recruitment.”

Although it’s not required, the council supports random testing of current employees as a more forcible way to get drug abusers, Klarberg uttered.

One of DCFS’ aims was to expand testing to employees for reasonable suspicion and then possibly to random screens, Marlowe said. But employee unions would have to agree to those moves.

Other state agencies test because drugs. Prison-system and state police workers must be clean to get a job and then face random tests. State workers by access to nuclear facilities and people who want state jobs that require driving trading vehicles of the like kind as trucks also must pass, officials said.