Tom Morton New director of Clark County's Department of Family Services

Clark County already has its hands full addressing problems with the Department of Family Services, its troubled child welfare agency.

There's a shortage of foster families and overcrowding at the shelter for maltreated children.

Police are probing the August deaths of four children who had had contact with the welfare system.

Federal regulators recently ratcheted up their criticism of the agency.

A children's welfare advocacy group filed a class-action lawsuit Wednesday demanding wide-ranging system reform.

And now, the Review-Journal has learned that two senior managers recently exited the agency.

New Department of Family Services Director Tom Morton fired the manager in charge of the county's problem-plagued foster care program on Aug. 17.

Former Caregiver Services Manager Renee Swain, who oversaw about 80 employees, has retained an attorney and claims she was wrongly dismissed while on county-approved medical leave.

She maintains Morton forced her out because she was close to his predecessor, spoke candidly about agency problems and did not kowtow to him.

"If you're not a yes man, you're out," Swain said last week.

Morton also is preparing to launch a national search to replace Family Services Assistant Director Julie Salmon, who resigned after nine years with the county. Salmon, whose last day was Friday, declined to comment on her reasons for leaving her $119,000-a-year job.

Morton, brought in two months ago to turn around the struggling child welfare agency, said he was restricted from discussing the departures of two key employees in any detail because of legal restrictions regarding personnel issues.

He would say that Swain's employment was at will and could be terminated without disclosure of a reason.

"She served at the discretion of the director," he said.

Of Salmon, who was one of two second-in-commands at the agency, Morton said, "Joy had been on leave for a while and elected not to return."

Their exits follow the resignation of Susan Klein-Rothschild, the former family services director who suddenly stepped down May 3 after learning county management was in talks with Morton, a consultant credited with turning Alabama's child welfare system into a national model.

Family Services faced intense public criticism during the final months of Klein-Rothschild's tenure, much of it fueled by an April report that detailed local child deaths and identified problems in how authorities mishandled probes of them.

However, the agency's problems did not end with Klein-Rothschild's departure.

August in particular was a trying month for Clark County's child welfare agency.

In the first two weeks of the month, four children who had contact with the child welfare system or who had been in county custody died.

In an Aug. 11 letter to the state, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services's Administration for Children and Families said conditions at Child Haven, the county's home for abused, neglected and abandoned children, have worsened since federal officials examined it in 2004 and "should be a grave concern."

Last week, the California-based Youth Law Center filed suit against Family Services, seeking a host of institutional changes for the children under the county's supervision.

Meanwhile, Morton is hatching ambitious plans for rehabilitating the agency.

His first priority is stanching overcrowding at Child Haven, which was filled to twice its capacity just three months ago.

That number had dipped by Wednesday to 123, only 18 more than its capacity, due to the county's expansion of its number of licensed foster families and other temporary placement options for children expected to eventually be reunited with their parents.

The lull at Child Haven isn't expected to last.

"We always see a dip this time of year before school starts," county spokeswoman Gina Olivares said. "Teachers are among our primary reporters of abuse, and that will bring more kids there."

During the short-term dip, Morton is focusing on long-term solutions for reducing the numbers of abused and neglected children at Child Haven and placing them with foster families.

Swain's position, overseeing recruiting and licensing of foster families, will be converted into a public relations and information officer position, an employee who will answer media inquiries and develop foster recruitment initiatives.

"This person would be establishing an ongoing set of relationships with community groups and faith-based groups, the business community and the medical community through which we could communicate our needs for foster families," Morton said.

Morton agrees with child advocates that infants and toddlers should not be housed at Child Haven. But he says the current pool of about 270 foster homes will have to be tripled to end overcrowding and meet the county's goal of keeping children under 6 out of the facility.

"We need to recruit and retain at least 200 to 250 families a year over each of the next two years to get where we need to be," he said.

Such an expansion would also help the county significantly reduce the number of homes where multiple unrelated foster children live together. Licensing standards limit the number of foster children in one home to six.

"I'm estimating that we might have as many as 300 or 400 kids living in families in which there are four or more unrelated children living there," he said. "When you get above three children in the home, the risks increase for all kinds of problems (such as) abuse of the children to other kinds of placement disruptions caused by stress on the foster family.

"We're forcing the situation to ask a family to take yet another child that they might not be readily prepared to support."

Morton also is preparing to go before county commissioners later this month to seek funding for more staffers to strengthen foster family recruiting and training efforts.

The staffing to handle the county's massive load of foster care cases pales in comparison to Nevada's second most populous county.

"Washoe (County) has three recruitment staff and we have two, but we have three to four times the caseload Washoe has," Morton said. "They are more successful than we are for a variety of reasons, but more staffing is one reason."