Indiana Department of Child Services Director Adam Krupp has served in multiple roles in state government over the past 15 years. And since taking over DCS, he’s sought to change some of the ways the department operates.
Indiana Public Broadcasting’s Brandon Smith sat down with Krupp to discuss the child welfare agency’s work and his first six months in the job.
IPB News Statehouse Bureau Chief Brandon Smith: This is not your first stop in state government. But what was it that drew you to — I mean, this is not an easy job?
Indiana Department of Child Services Director Adam Krupp: (laughs) I would say none of them are easy generally, when you're in charge of an agency, one that impacts millions of people. But to your point, right, so I've been with FSSA and BMV and the Department of Revenue before. But I would say candidly, as a father of three small children and someone who has really spent the majority of my adult life working with families and children, there's really a special draw to the Department of Child Services. Just if you think about the Hoosiers that we interact with, right? Children who have been abused, neglected, forgotten, families that are in crisis, families that need support and help.
Smith: What is, in your view as the head of this agency, the balance between family reunification being the top goal — or, if not the top goal, the second goal — versus not putting them back in homes where they might not be safe?
Krupp: As a foundational piece, I would respond to that by saying, we want to keep families together unless it's unsafe to do so. And I think that simple sentence, which has really profound impacts, should guide everything we do at this agency. We can always improve but we need to be so thoughtful and mindful about the experience itself of removal, which begins the process of navigating through the child welfare system. Reunification is a goal. It's not always going to be the outcome. And our staff work hard to work with parents to make sure that services are available. People do need to be aware — I wasn't as intimately aware before I took on this role — that there is a true partnership here with courts and DCS. DCS does not unilaterally decide to show up and remove children from the home without approval from a court. DCS does not unilaterally just send kids back to live with their parents or be in their home without court involvement. This is a process.
READ MORE: Indiana Department of Child Services Director Adam Krupp discusses agency reorganization
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Smith: The sad reality of this work is that it's not always going to go perfectly. When something like that happens, what's the process in the agency to go, 'How did this happen and does something need to change, beyond the individual facts of this case, to make sure something like it doesn't happen again?'
Krupp: We do quality assurance, first of all. We randomly sample cases, outcomes, decisions every day. But when situations do occur, especially when we have the really unfortunate tragedies, we take a look at that. We say, 'Was there anything we could have done differently?' Let's do a full chronology of how many touch points did this child or this family have with DCS. What about the criminal system?
Smith: Trust between the community and the government is always important. And at the same time, you're always one tragedy in the headlines away from kind of losing a lot of that trust. How do you rebuild it?
Krupp: You know the headlines often are not positive whenever DCS is mentioned. There's a lot of good that happens here every day. I do understand, and I'm not naive to think, though, that what grabs people's attention and the headlines are when, unfortunately, there is a tragedy. But unfortunately also is, people jump immediately to what did DCS do wrong? I think that's unfair; I think it's unfounded. I would say when there is a tragedy, we have to actually go above and beyond to communicate, within the boundaries of the law, what it is we're doing, what we're going to do, and how we're going to make sure that something like this doesn't happen again — to the extent we can prevent it.
Brandon is our Statehouse bureau chief. Contact him at bsmith@ipbs.org or follow him on Twitter at @brandonjsmith5.