BATON ROUGE - The Department of Children and Family Services will soon be required to implement new changes to how the agency functions due to a state law set to go into effect on Jan. 1.

The law requires a law enforcement liaison for the entire state to be housed within the department.

During Monday afternoons Senate Select Committee on Women and Children, officials with DCFS explained he has already begun to interact with the staff.

"Where you might have a situation that occurred, but you don't know what parish it occurred in, so if you call one law enforcement agency, they might say, well, we're not going to handle it, or the other one, so he has help with that, those kinds of situations," one DCFS staff member said.

But Senate President Pro Tempore Regina Barrow says some of the responses she received Monday evening were not necessarily what she was looking to hear.

"It wasn't tying together the issues that we brought up during the session, and it was not connecting the dots that I wanted law enforcement to actually play the role of," Barrow said.

Barrow has been pushing for reformation at DCFS for years, authoring this legislation that would also make it mandatory that once a child's death is confirmed by DCFS as a result of abuse or neglect, the case will be sent off to a critical incident review team.

"They are looking to convene, before the end of the year, and this will bring together all of the partners in the continuum to make sure we are making system-wide improvements," another DCFS staff member said.

Senator Barrow says what gives her comfort is a conversation she's had with the attorney general and how she plans to also address some of these issues.

"At this point, while I know the bill has not gone into effect yet. I don't know what pieces are being in place to actually address these concerns, cause at the rate that we are going now, we are going to double that number by the end of the year, if there is no other intervention," Barrow said.

Lawmakers say they plan to continue to check in with DCFS for updates throughout this process.