ROCHESTER, N.Y. -- The New York State Office of Child and Family Services has ranked Monroe County as one of the lowest performing counties for Child Protective Services. The report indicates the need for change in CPS, but for others the finding has been an issue for some time.

“That's not a surprise because we have been advising the community for the last two years or so about the case load sizes in child protective investigations being too high,” said John Rabish, Federation of Social Workers spokesperson. “The county in response to having us point this out in the past has said that the workers are resilient and I agree. They're resilient, they're dedicated, they're committed, but they can only do as much as a human being can do.”

According to the recent report, Monroe County is number 54 out of 64 counties in New York with overdue investigations. The survey also indicated Monroe County was ranked 40th in percentage of Workers with more than 15 CPS Investigations and Timely Safety Assessments.

In response to the report, Monroe County Commissioner of Human Services, Corrinda Crossdale said, “Attracting caseworkers for the field of child protective services is a challenge in many counties across NYS and to address this challenge we have hired an employment coordinator and we are currently at work to redesign our recruitment efforts.”

“We're so far behind in terms of vacant spots we're playing catch up and we're pretty much treading water,” said Rabish.

Rabish says this is not the first time the Monroe County CPS has reached out to the county for help. The lack of staffing has been pinpointed as the reason why performance levels have suffered and are below state average. Although the county has launched a new training class to add more people CPS reps say it's still not enough.

“Having done the job for 27 years, I know that if you have a lower case load, you could be more aggressive, more proactive, and more vigilant in dealing with the family and the children,” said Rabish.

According to a release by CPS, the number of new reports of child abuse and neglect in the county has increased by 11 percent. CPS reps hope the newly released report will spark the necessary turnaround to give the beneficiaries of the services what they need.

“Children are being damaged. Children that aren’t subjected to fatal injury are being damaged emotionally. There is a lot of trauma that kids are exposed to and CPS can do a much better job of preventing that kind of thing from happening if they have enough people there to do the job”

The state report ranking Monroe CPS significantly below state average used data collected through the end of February 2017.