Gov. Kate Brown and Oregon child welfare leaders want to remove college degree requirements for caseworkers to increase workforce diversity and the candidate pool for openings the agency has struggled to fill.

Under Oregon law, employees who investigate reports of child abuse and make decisions about whether to remove children from their families must have at least a bachelor’s degree.

House Bill 2033, which was introduced at the request of Brown and the Department of Human Services, would repeal that mandate and instead give the agency the authority to set minimum academic degree requirements.

The outlook for the proposal is unclear, ahead of a Tuesday deadline for lawmakers to vote bills out of most committees. It did not get a vote during a House Human Services and Housing Committee meeting Wednesday but is scheduled for another possible vote on Monday.

During testimony before lawmakers in February, child welfare director Marilyn Jones said that eliminating the degree requirement would benefit children and families by opening up a more diverse pool of job candidates.

“I am not here today because we are desperate in our hiring,” Jones said. “Rather we want to honor life experience and continue to build a diverse workforce that is inclusive across language, race, class and culture.”

At the same time, Jones said her agency has struggled during the last year to hire and retain child welfare workers.

The state can already hire caseworkers who are on track to earn a bachelor’s degree if managers have difficulty filling a job. However, Jones told lawmakers that this exception penalizes those workers including an employee she referred to only as “Ashley.” The single mother is paid less than caseworkers with bachelor’s degrees and “she must attend all required trainings, work full-time plus take care of her little one and get her degree within two years, or she loses the position,” Jones told lawmakers.

Committee chair Rep. Alissa Keny-Guyer, D-Portland, told Jones at the February hearing that increasing diversity among caseworkers is an important goal. However, Keny-Guyer said she had heard from people who were worried about eliminating the degree requirement.

Some people already see a need for state caseworkers to demonstrate more analytical thinking “and some states are actually going in the other direction and requiring (bachelor’s degrees in social work) or a variety of things,” Keny-Guyer said.

Reviews of Oregon’s child welfare system have highlighted persistent problems, including inconsistencies in how workers screen reports of abuse going back to at least 2002. Children who were interviewed as part of a 2016 report told a consultant that the child welfare system “treats them as 'bad' kids who did something wrong to end up in foster care, and, as a result, doesn't trust them."

Brown has testified in support of other child welfare legislation this session but has not weighed in on House Bill 2033. Through her spokeswoman Lisa Morawski, Brown declined to comment on the proposal to remove degree requirements, saying it was an “agency bill” and questions would be better answered by the Department of Human Services.

— Hillary Borrud | hborrud@oregonian.com | 503-294-4034 | @hborrud

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