Child-protection staff, chief at odds

But as workers voiced complaints about high caseloads, McClain seemed to grow ill at ease. When union steward Khrystian King stood in an aisle asking persistent questions, the commissioner bristled, asking: Are you shouting me down?

The room fell silent. McClain walked the perimeter of the room, forcing King to move aside, before returning to the front and resuming his talk.

The awkward encounter, critics have said, is emblematic of McClain’s tenure over the past two years, a top-down style of management they say has alienated staff - and worse yet, may be undermining their high-stakes work protecting the state’s most vulnerable children. McClain’s relations with staff have become so strained that workers from several local agency offices are circulating a petition of “no confidence’’ in his leadership. At a recent rally in Worcester, workers shouted, “Heigh, Ho! Angelo’s got to go!’’

McClain, 52, has defended his stewardship, saying his experience in the trenches of social work informs his decisions every day and his agency has helped thousands of needy children. The low staff morale at the Department of Children and Families, he said, is due primarily to the recent layoffs of 100 workers and the stress of an agency in the midst of reforms.

“Their anxiety is up,’’ he said in a recent interview in his Boston office.

But many staffers at the agency, formerly called the Department of Social Services, say McClain seems fixated on statistics and has failed to live up to their hope that he was, deep down, one of them. Senior union officials, used to sparring with past commissioners, say their relationship with McClain is unusually poor. Union chapter president Zevorah Ortega-Bagni also complained that McClain’s decision this summer to roll out several controversial initiatives, in the midst of layoffs, will lead to “drive-by social work.’’

“Our office is miserable,’’ said Jason Franklin, a social worker in Springfield who resigned last week after 16 years, issuing a protest letter to the commissioner that says the agency is going “backwards.’’

Specifically, social workers complain that McClain’s new point system for assessing a child’s risk of harm within a family unfairly stigmatizes some families. Parents, for instance, get strikes against them for having, among other things, a special-needs child or a past diagnosis of mental illness.

Workers also question his new method for investigations, which diverts many allegations of neglect into a less serious category, which may not be counted in federal studies of child maltreatment. Critics say McClain simply wants Massachusetts to stop having the dubious distinction of logging the nation’s highest rate of confirmed cases, and has unveiled these initiatives without adequate training.

“He wants to implement these proposals just by throwing them on the table,’’ said Brett Cabral, an investigator for three decades in Cambridge.

McClain said he took the job with an understanding there was a mandate to change the system and create more accountability, and he sees no reason to stall the momentum. Governor Deval Patrick appointed McClain to the $136,000-a-year position in May 2007, when Lewis “Harry’’ Spence was at the helm, after several high-profile tragedies prompted sweeping reviews of an agency that oversees some 40,000 children, including 10,000 in foster homes.

“I felt a sense of urgency,’’ McClain said in measured tones during the interview.

McClain said he has been summoned to appear before a panel on Beacon Hill next month to address his agency’s performance. He insisted his “Integrated Casework Practice Model’’ - versions of which have been in place in other states - will help staff keep children safer. He said social workers’ judgment is always paramount, but they will now be forced to look at a broad range of factors in assessing a child’s safety and use a more efficient system of investigating complaints.

He said the agency, which gets more than 70,000 complaints about child maltreatment a year, needs measurable goals. He knows one of his next challenges is sparing social workers from being overburdened during this year’s layoffs, keeping the caseloads below 18 per social worker.

He pointed to his office whiteboard, filled with numbers and percentages. Among his goals: calling on social workers to increase its “closing rate’’ of cases from 6.5 to 7 percent a month.

McClain came with populist credentials. From age 13 to 18, he lived at Cal Farley’s ranch in Texas for troubled youth, saying his mother chose this residential program because he was heading in the wrong direction. After getting his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in social work in Texas, he spent the next two decades as a social worker and supervisor, working for organizations such as Roxbury Children’s Services and the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health.

While pursuing his doctorate in social work at Boston College, he took on more high-level management roles in private agencies with government contracts. In 2002, he took on the job of executive director of ValueOptions New Jersey, which was hired by the state to help administer more than $340 million in behavioral health services to children.

When McClain, who is married with a grown daughter, took over Massachusetts’ child-protection agency, he projected a very different image from his predecessor. Spence, a Harvard-educated lawyer, was a charismatic, articulate troubleshooter who had spent decades in public service jobs in Massachusetts.

McClain came off as introverted and quiet, sometimes even socially awkward. Some child advocates said he has the capacity to tolerate long silences in conversation and is not one to partake in chit-hat. Andrew Pond, president of Justice Resource Institute, a human services firm, described McClain as an honorable straight shooter who prefers facts and figures and “doesn’t have a ton of patience for process.’’

“He has a solid grounding in who he is,’’ said Pond, a friend of McClain’s for about two decades.

Brian Condron, policy director for the Home for Little Wanderers, said he has warmed to McClain over time, and views low morale among social workers as largely due to cutbacks and adjusting to McClain’s no-nonsense style. He commended McClain for his hard work and for focusing on important issues, such as the fate of foster children when they become too old for the agency’s services.

“It’s the toughest job in state government, bar none,’’ said Condron.

King, the social worker who had the run-in with the commissioner in Worcester last year, said he was initially delighted when McClain, an African-American social worker like himself, was picked to lead the agency. But King said he has since come to believe that McClain is more interested in impressing his State House bosses than grass-roots workers. “All I can say, he’s not what we hoped for,’’ he said.

When asked about that Worcester meeting involving King, McClain immediately recalled when it happened: the end of May 2008.

McClain said he remembered thinking King was monopolizing the discussion that day, and accused King of “shouting him down.’’ Looking back, he attributes the tensions to an unusually difficult period last year, when the agency had a spike in cases with a trimmed staff.

He said his job as commissioner requires his “full skill set,’’ and he believes he must work harder to convey his initiatives to social workers, lawmakers, and others who care deeply about the needs of children.

“Communication has been a big challenge,’’ he said.

Patricia Wen can be reached at wen@globe.com.