The Ontario government has yet to address ‘overspending’ on services for troubled teens. According to the most recent auditor general’s report, spending by the Ministry of Children and Youth Services has increased by 30 per cent in the past five years, but the number of youth helped has only gone up by 5 per cent.
Unjust distribution of funds
The Ministry of Children and Youth Services aims to help youth integrate into their communities and turn away from crime. They offer a variety of services from summer job search workshops to drug counseling to detention centers for youth in trouble with the law. The programs are offered at several different centers across the province. Some of the centers are directly operated by the ministry while others are given government funding but operated independently, the latter are called transfer-payment centers.
Both the government centers and those that are independent are authorized to offer the same programming. The programs requiring the most staff are the secure residential programs. The staff working in these programs take care of teens who are in trouble with the law and need to be watched 24 hours a day. The secure services are operated in the same way in both government and independent centers. However the ministry directly operates two thirds of the secure residential beds, yet it receives three-quarters of the government funding in this area. This means that the transfer-payment centers are working with less money to provide the same services
That isn’t the only area where there is a discrepancy in funds. There are no standard procedures for how funding for a program is decided. If there were, it would be easy to decide how much money to give a center, they would know how much it cost per youth per day per program, and then they would multiply this number by the number of youth in a program to show how much money they need form the ministry. Instead, the ministry decides funding on a case by case basis. This leaves funds being divided unjustly. For example, the ministry approved $107,000 in funding for a program at one center and gave another center $165,000 for running to exact same program for the same number of youth.
Facilities are underused and overstaffed
The report also found that only 60 per cent of the secure beds available are being used. Staff levels should reflect this, but instead all facilities are staffed as if they are at capacity. The centers actually now spend 50 per cent more on staff than they did five years ago. The auditor general attempted to find a reason for this by inspecting the workload of the staff. The auditor discovered that staff were actually taking on fewer cases. This means that while the amount spent on staff and the number of staff increased, the amount of work each person does has decreased.
In its plans for 2011/12, the Ontario government stated that it would continue to fund thousands of secure beds in the residential programs. There is no mention of the successes or shortcomings of the program in the previous year(s). Shortly after this briefing was released, the auditor general found that the number of beds, staff, and even centers, were potentially unnecessary.
Recommendations received, no changes yet
The ministry of youth services is divided into four regions. Randy Sandvick is the regional manager of youth services in the northern region. He explained that it is a positive sign that fewer youth are using the programs because it means they are committing fewer crimes. When asked about the reason for the staff increase, he said that the ministry is offering more programs. He emphasized that the ministry is using innovative programs to help youth. This still does not address the need for extra staff, as the existing surplus staff were not transferred to these programs, instead new staff were hired. Sandvick refused to comment on whether there was too much or too little work for staff, instead he said that legislation requires each center to have a specific number of staff and that centers in his region follow this protocol. There has been no downsizing of staff or centers in Sandvick’s region in the past year.
The ministry accepted some of the auditor general’s suggestions. Primarily, the ministry agreed to perform a three-year study on the effectiveness of programs and to adjust funding accordingly. This report came out over six months ago and so far, the ministry has not made any changes. No facilities have been closed or downsized and rather than changing or eliminating some programs, the ministry has instead added more programs and staff. Taxpayer dollars are still being spent on half-empty facilities and employees that aren’t fulfilling minimum workload expectations.