Four years after closing, it’s looking less and less likely that Unalaska’s child welfare office will be reopening.

Community leaders have repeatedly asked the Office of Children’s Services to restaff the position, but field supervisor Travis Erickson says the numbers just don’t pencil out.

“Right now, I think we’ve had three reports in the last six months or so. So a very, very low workload," Erickson says. "So we’re exploring how best to service the area, but right now we’re not planning on having staff full-time in Unalaska.”

That’s been the agency’s stance for several years, but last summer, OCS Director Christy Lawton told KUCB that she was working on a partnership with the Aleutian Pribilof Island Association to fill the position part-time. Now, that deal has fallen through.

“There were both legal barriers to contracting specific services and then trying to figure out what we could parcel out and whether or not it would work," Erickson says.

One of the potential advantages of the partnership with APIA would have been faster response time to reports of child abuse. Since the OCS office shut down, there have been delays of up to several weeks between OCS receiving a report and starting an investigation. But it turns out APIA wouldn’t have been able to take over that part of the process anyways. A legal analysis showed that an OCS employee would still have to do the initial evaluation. So, Erickson says they’ve put the APIA plan on hold, and are now working on a different approach to improve response time.

“We have looked at housing a southcentral regional employee in the Anchorage area, where they can get on flights anywhere in the state very rapidly," Erickson says.

Currently, the Aleutian and Pribilof Islands are served out of Homer. Having someone in Anchorage would mean one flight, instead of two. But Erickson says there’s no definitive timeline for making that happen.

That means that while there’s still a sign on the door, and a number in the phone book, Unalaska’s OCS office will stay dark for the foreseeable future.