On Wednesday, an unusual thing happened at the Unalaska Office of Children’s Services: It was open.

And according OCS Director Christy Lawton, it’s going to stay that way. Only, not in the way that some Unalaska residents had hoped.

“At this point, the office is still here,” says Lawton. “The doors are still hypothetically open. We’re looking at a multitude of ways to which we can have a presence.”

At an OCS open house on Wednesday, Lawton explained that she hadn’t changed her mind about the staffing situation. The Office of Children’s Service has had a vacancy for three years, and Lawton says that OCS still doesn’t plan on bringing a full-time worker out to the Aleutians despite aggressive lobbying from local non-profit leaders.


“The workload and the demand and the number of reports that we receive simply don’t warrant a full-time state employee being staffed here,” says Lawton. “The numbers are very low, speaking just for Unalaska. You know, it’s two or less, sometimes zero, on any given month.”

Instead, OCS is considering making the office a mixed-purpose space for the Department of Health and Human Services. At present, the office is used intermittently by its Seward-based social worker. Lawton would like to get a contract worker -- most likely from the Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association -- who can take on OCS’s child welfare cases locally. She says that it’s also possible that DHSS could use the facility for its public health nurse visits to the community.

Dan Wilcox chairs the Unalaskans Against Sexual Assault and Family Violence Board, and has been an advocate for getting a full-time OCS worker back in Unalaska. He’s registered his concerns about the vacancy with both the governor and lieutenant governor, and still thinks putting an on-site state worker in the office would be the best way to keep child abuse down locally.

“It sounds like the state is trying to be creative in how they respond to the needs of this community, and I applaud them for that,” says Wilcox. “Just -- I want to know it’s going to work for the community before I jump on board.”

At five cases in the Aleutian region per month, Wilcox says that he understands that Unalaska’s caseload is lower than the 25 cases the average OCS staffer works. But he says that Unalaska is in a bit of a catch-22. Even though reports of child abuse in Unalaska are rare, the ones that do come in aren’t responded to in a timely fashion. Since 2008, less than a quarter of Unalaska’s cases have been responded to within the regulatory timeframe because of the difficulty of traveling out to the community. Wilcox thinks that discourages community members from calling OCS when their attention is needed.

“There would be a better chance that they would be able to see the cases that are essentially slipping through the cracks. It’s difficult to make a judgment as to whether there are enough cases here when there’s not somebody here to actually review the cases,” says Wilcox. “I suspect that more reporting would happen if we knew that somebody locally could respond without having to wait.”

At the open house, Lawton says that reducing wait times is a priority for her agency, and that hiring an on-site contractor should help rectify that problem. A hard timeline for getting a local social worker in the OCS office has not been established, but Lawton hopes to have someone in the position within the year. In the meantime, the Seward OCS office will continue to serve Unalaska and the rest of the Aleutian region.