CS for CS for SB 96 - Child Welfare

• Establishes central abuse hotline as first step in child safety assessment, operating 24/7 through phone, written, or electronic reporting with requirements to track calls, accept reports based on reasonable cause of abuse/neglect, and determine investigation timeframes (immediate or within 24 hours).

• Expands mandatory reporting requirements for child abuse, requiring animal control officers and certain professionals to provide names to hotline counselors and mandating reports of sexual abuse, child-on-child sexual abuse, and inappropriate sexual behavior within specific timeframes.

• Creates cross-reporting protocols requiring child protective investigators to report suspected animal cruelty within 72 hours and animal control officers to report suspected child abuse immediately, with criminal penalties for failures to report.

• Requires department to conduct investigations of sexual abuse of children in out-of-home care, establish kinship navigator and family-finding programs (no longer subject to available resources limitation), and develop multidisciplinary legal representation model programs pairing attorneys with social workers and parent-peer specialists.

• Implements conflict of interest disclosure requirements for board members and officers of community-based care lead agencies and behavioral health managing entities, with rebuttable presumption of conflict if acted upon without prior notice and provisions for board approval by two-thirds vote.