It is primarily used for child welfare information, such as maltreatment reports, out of home placement plans and adoption information. However, local agencies also rely on it to administer a multitude of other programs, including adult and child mental health services and waiver programs for the elderly and people with disabilities.

The $15 million for SSIS is the only child protection-related item in Walz's spending plan. The governor said he would propose funding to recruit and retain more caseworkers after a Star Tribune series last year examined child protection system failures that led to repeat abuse and deaths.

DHS worked with counties to revise Walz's initial proposal and fund the most pressing needs, Walz spokeswoman Claire Lancaster said. The governor's supplemental funding plan this year is a limited adjustment to the two-year budget state leaders passed last spring.

"This funding is a first step that will help address immediate needs within the child welfare system — allowing workers to spend less time on IT and more time with kids and families," Lancaster said. "We plan to revisit the issue in a budget year."

The cumbersome system forces child protection workers to spend about 45 minutes longer than they should have to entering data about a child, Lovgren, of Pine County, estimated. Among the time-sucking problems: workers must repeatedly type up the same parent's details for every child in a family.

"That's 45 to 50 minutes that they could be spending with that family and making sure that the children are safe and they are in a good place and the family is OK," she said.

A more efficient information system may change the number of child protection workers counties need, said Sen. Nicole Mitchell, DFL-Woodbury. With limited state dollars available this year, she said spending money on SSIS upgrades makes the most sense as it seems to impact everything else.

Mitchell is co-chair of a Legislative Task Force on Child Protection and said technology issues have come up again and again whenever lawmakers ask why something can't be done.

Some bills at the Capitol this session have been deemed "impossible to implement," because of the system's limitations, said Joanna Woolman, with the Institute to Transform Child Protection at Mitchell Hamline School of Law. She said the system is getting in the way of legislation that would ensure kids in foster care are notified of federal benefits when their parents die and is keeping ombudsperson offices from getting data they need to investigate issues.

The technology also prevents the state from figuring out what is or is not working in the child protection system, Woolman said, because they cannot easily pull trend data on adoptions, racial demographics or the speed of court process.

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