Policy and Procedure Manual

January 7, 2011 permalink

After the provincial takeover of Huron-Perth children's aid by the ministry in October, the internal documents of the agency became accessible to freedom of information requests. John Dunn applied for a copy of the policy and procedure manual, and got results. His original file is available as HPCASPP (zip). When expanded, it has hundreds of MS-word (doc) files.

Since this is an important disclosure, it is worth converting into a form easily read on the internet. Technically, the document is a mess. It contains two to four copies of each file, it is riddled with technical errors, for example, some document numbers in the files don't match the file names, some page numbers are non-consecutive many paragraph numbers have duplicates or missing numbers. As a rule, a product this sloppy indicates lack of pride in the work product, not surprising from the CAS culture. Html needs a perfect document to keep the original paragraph numbers, requiring a week of effort developing a conversion of a thousand lines of Python. The final product fills in or removes sections by inserting the words elision or epenthesis, terms beyond the vocabulary of social workers.

Here is the link, Huron-Perth Children's Aid Society, Policy and Procedure Manual The version posted today is preliminary. Adding a few lines to the conversion program should allow the cross-references to show up as html links, easing the study effort.

So far there has not been enough time to study the content of the manual. A random stab is section 5.1 - 002.030, Public Criticism of the Society.

When the services of the Society are publicly criticized, the caseworker will:

1. inform his/her manager immediately;
2. review the casefile to determine the particulars of the issue(s) being criticized;
3. prepare a case summary for the manager; and
4. if requested, prepare a serious occurrence report (5.9 - 002);
5. the manager will inform the Executive Director.

Children's aid societies across Ontario must have workers engaged in daily monitoring of the websites of Canada Court Watch, Foster Care News, bill131.ca and fixcas.