Lawmakers have proposed a bill packed with modest but meaningful changes to the state Department of Children and Families, some of them intended to address issues raised by tragedies involving children who had a history of interaction with the child welfare agency.

House Bill 5004, authored by Committee on Children co-Chair Rep. Corey Paris, D-Stamford, includes around two dozen provisions, ranging from codifying the practice of making emergency placements of children with relatives or fictive kin if certain conditions are met to the creation of a 28-person committee that would monitor the state’s child welfare efforts.

The bill has more than a dozen co-sponsors.

Connecticut already has a watchdog entity — the Office of the Child Advocate —intended to keep an eye on DCF. The attempt to create a new oversight committee, along with a slew of other provisions, serves as an acknowledgement by lawmakers that more must be done to reform the state’s child welfare agency, following several recent cases of abuse and deaths that captured headlines.

Paris said the bill attempts to strike a balance between providing support for DCF staff and acknowledging that there are problems at the agency that require not just funding but reform.

“We need to support everyone that’s working at DCF, but I think part of the challenges is who we really need to support are families and children,” Paris said. “I think that we can do all of those things at once, but there are a lot of challenges that the agency still faces that need answers and that needs course correcting, and the only way we can do that is by putting in some standards and revisions now and continuing to do that in future sessions so it doesn’t fall off our radar.”

Some provisions seek to codify into law practices that are already common at DCF, such as efforts to place children with a relative or fictive kin in emergency situations. The bill would require such placements in most situations. If a child is not placed with kin, DCF would be required to document the reason why.

The bill would also prohibit the agency from using a caregiver’s mental health treatment as either the sole or primary reason for taking an action such as removing a child. Paris said the provision is in part the result of feedback from parents impacted by such situations in the past.

The bill also aims to give DCF more resources to better support families. Grant programs would pay caregivers for necessities like food, clothing and safety related items, and for the cost of after school programs. Those programs would cost the state about $128,000 a year in new funding.

Worker safety is also addressed. Under the new legislation, DCF would provide its workers who make home visits with GPS-enabled, wearable emergency communication devices that they can use to call police if they are in danger. Paris said that workers who make home visits often feel unsafe. The agency has struggled to retain workers.

“We are acknowledging that our case workers have an impossible job to do, and we want to make sure that our case workers are safe, just as we would want to make sure that our EMTs, our police officers and state troopers are safe,” he said. “This is a safety mechanism that we think is a low-level allocation financially, but is one that’s going to be really important and provide a lot of supports to folks in need.”

The bill requires DCF to create a public awareness campaign to let people know about the ways the department can help families with housing or how to reach its 24-hour hotline. It would also create a new public-facing website.

H.B. 5004 does not attempt to address homeschooling questions that have roiled the legislature since the recent deaths of Jacqueline “Mimi” Torres-García, an 11-year-old who was found dead in New Britain last year, and Eve Rogers, a 12-year-old who died in her home in March and whose stepfather has been charged with sexual assault in connection with her death. In both cases, parents had withdrawn their children from public schools and said they were being homeschooled.

Lawmakers are considering homeschooling legislation separately, in Senate Bill 6 and in House Bill 5468, bills that each include a version of a provision that would require DCF to be notified when children are withdrawn from public school so the agency can check to see if those caregivers are the subject of a protective order or on the department’s abuse and neglect registry.

S.B. 6, in its current version, would simply require that the reason for the withdrawal be noted in a child’s case file, while H.B. 5468 would deny such caregivers permission to homeschool children if that’s the reason a parent was seeking to withdraw the child.

But S.B. 6 also has another provision impacting child welfare — it would prohibit many people convicted of crimes from living with minor children and alert DCF when the incarcerated individual is released from a correctional facility. Those crimes include aggravated sexual assault of a minor and possession or creation of child pornography.

Paris said that he sees the issues as separate but related. While the homeschooling issue has been controversial and opposed by many Republican lawmakers and families that homeschool, Paris said he expects H.B. 5004 to receive broad support.

“There is Republican support for 5004 certainly. And we’ll see that on the floor of the House. We’ll see it before the Senate,” Paris said. “I think that this is a bill that the governor can be proud to sign. I think that this will even get the support of homeschooling families.”

Diane Connors, an advocate with the Connecticut Homeschool Network, said that while her organization does not have an official position on the bill, she agrees with the principle that DCF needs reform.

“Exactly what that looks like would be up for conversation which would be supported by having an oversight committee,” she said. “So I’d say it’s a step in the right direction.”

DCF Interim Commissioner Susan Hamilton submitted written testimony on the bill, expressing concerns about the potential cost implications of certain provisions, such as the grant programs, new website and emergency communication devices.

In a public hearing, she told lawmakers that the department already participates in multiple boards and has many monitoring agencies. But she said DCF would cooperate with a new oversight board if the provision were to pass.

“I think our opposition was more that in some respects is duplicative of other things that are already happening,” she said. “But I certainly understand the intent behind it.”

Acting Child Advocate Christina Ghio said that of everything in H.B. 5004, she was especially glad to see the oversight committee. Though it might appear from the outside as though DCF has plenty of layers of oversight, Ghio said that such a committee has an important purpose to drive change by creating a structure and getting stakeholders together at one table.

For many years, Connecticut was under the watch of a federal monitor. When that ended, Ghio said the oversight wasn’t adequately replaced. “The reality is, we do need to be looking deeply at the quality of the work at the Department of Children and Families,” she said. “This is an opportunity to bring people together and try to dig in and figure out what the issues are, and then address them on a policy level.”