Alabama’s Department of Youth Services Board has approved a temporary change that would allow the agency to make discretionary hires when considering individuals who have faced child neglect findings in the past.

Child neglect involves failure to provide a child necessities.

DYS, which oversees juvenile justice and service programs, screens for child abuse and child neglect charges when hiring a person. Steve Lafreniere, the director of the Department of Youth Services, said in an interview Monday the change was meant to address rare cases that did not involve direct abuse.

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“They always are able to kind of try to explain it but essentially, if they have anything on that for physical or sexual abuse, they’re going to be gone,” Lafreniere said in a phone interview Monday.

Lafreniere said that when the agency hires people, they undergo a background check and a child abuse and neglect check. Due to the volume of people screened, he said that sometimes the child abuse or neglect finding does not come back until after a person has been hired.

The federal Prison Rape Elimination Act, enacted in 2003, prevents anyone with a charge or finding of a child abuse or neglect from being hired. Lafreniere, with consultation from others, said that one employee would continue to be employed after a charge.

As a teenager, the employee had been driving her family in a car and a child was in “grandma’s lap.” The child died in an accident and the employee, as the driver, was found with child neglect.

Lafreniere said they’re currently looking at another applicant who has a neglect finding from a time in her life when she was poor and was deemed to not have enough food in her house.

“We’re asking the board to continue to allow me to make that discretionary call on these very rare cases, that we could keep somebody in place even though it doesn’t follow the letter of the law of the policy,” he said.

The two cases were not aligned with the intent of the policy, he said. Without the change, he said, the employees would have been fired. The change is temporary until the next meeting in June when the policy committee can meet and consider a permanent change.

At the meeting, the change had been introduced as a way to combat staffing shortages, but Lafreniere said that that introduction caused confusion and not how he would have phrased it.

“To me, these are just two cases,” he said.

The change, he said, is for “exceptions,” and will not make a significant difference in their staffing shortages nor is it evidence of them “cutting corners” in their hiring.

“These are just two exceptions that came to the front door,” he said.