The troubled state agency charged with the protection of abused and neglected children will have new leadership in the new year.
Gov. JB Pritzker announced Jan. 3 that Department of Juvenile Justice Director Heidi Mueller will take over the embattled Department of Children and Family Services starting Feb. 1.
"The work Director Mueller has done at the Department of Juvenile Justice over the last several years has been transformative for the juvenile justice system in Illinois, and I am thrilled that she will bring her unique experience and talents to DCFS," Pritzker stated in a news release.
Mueller will be the 15th director to head DCFS in the past two decades.
"As someone who has devoted my career to supporting children and families, I am honored and humbled to be entrusted by Governor Pritzker with the responsibility of leading DCFS," Mueller stated in a news release.
Mueller has served as IDJJ director since 2016, overseeing youth adjudicated as juvenile offenders. Mueller developed a close-to-home model for youth offenders and built a system of community care, according to the release.
"The DCFS director has arguably the hardest, and most important, job in state government," said Cook County Public Guardian Charles Golbert, who has been one of the agency's critics. "Heidi Mueller has an outstanding reputation as a reform-minded manager and brings substantial child welfare experience to the task."
Heidi Dahlenberg, legal director of the ACLU of Illinois and the lead attorney in a lawsuit against DCFS that has been ongoing since 1988, said Mueller takes over at a "crucial moment" marked by a need for placing youth in proper settings.
"DCFS also must provide services to meet children's individual needs and turn away from the use of large impersonal, institutional settings. This is a challenging job that requires a leader with vision and a commitment to transformational change," Dahlenberg said.
ACLU's lawsuit, known as B.H. v. Smith, resulted in a consent decree that mandates reductions in caseloads, protection of agency funding, implementation of better training for caseworkers and private agency staff, and a reorganization of DCFS systems of supervision and accountability. Three decades after the consent decree, many problems, including understaffing, persist.
The news of Smith's replacement came within hours of an email sent to DCFS employees on the afternoon of Jan. 2, letting them know that Director Marc Smith would stick around past his stated Dec. 31 resignation date. He announced in October that he would step down at the end of 2023, but he will now stay on until the end of January "to provide ongoing continuity" to the agency, according to a statement from the agency.
Smith has headed the agency since 2019. For years, critics had called for Smith's ouster, amid legislative hearings, contempt citations, a murdered child protection investigator and the highest number of children who died after contact with the agency in 20 years.
Last month, DCFS and its watchdog released two reports detailing failures of the agency to properly place children in appropriate settings and how failures to follow the law and the department's own policies compromised child safety.
DCFS released its annual Youth in Care Awaiting Placement Report to the General Assembly on Dec. 29. The report showed 1,009 state wards were in emergency placements for more than 30 days, housed in psychiatric units beyond medical necessity, stayed in hospital emergency rooms for more than 24 hours, held in juvenile detention facilities after their scheduled release dates, or placed in out-of-state treatment facilities.
In 330 cases, involving 296 children, DCFS forced children in state care, some as young as 4 years old, to remain in a locked psychiatric hospital after they were cleared for discharge. The report stated that more than 40% of these children were held in locked psychiatric hospitals for more than three months.
Last year, a Cook County judge cited Smith personally a dozen times for contempt of court for failing to put abused children in appropriate placements.
An appellate court vacated the contempt citations because Smith was not willfully disobeying the order but could not comply with the court order because DCFS did not have enough beds in group homes, shelters or specialized foster placements. Some of the contempt citations were purged when the agency found the children appropriate placements.
The Office of the Inspector General, the agency's internal watchdog, also released its annual report for fiscal year 2024 last month. The report detailed the deaths of 160 children who had been under the care of DCFS within a year of their deaths. The OIG investigated the deaths of 171 children in fiscal year 2023 – the highest number of deaths in two decades.
