The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
‘It’s who I am, not what I do’
Her parents were 16 and 17 when she was born, so her grandmother “kind of took care of me” until they could get their lives together. Her mom went to college, her dad into the Navy. When she was 9 years old, they married.
She didn’t see anything all that unusual about her upbringing, she was loved.
Now Vannessa Dorantes, a 50-year-old dynamo of steely compassion, is about to become the guardian of at-risk children in Connecticut. On Tuesday, the Executive and Legislative Nominations Committee confirmed her nomination by Gov. Ned Lamont as the new commissioner for the Connecticut Department of Children and Families. A full House vote is likely later this month.
“I never really thought of how my life is different,” she told us in a Hearst Connecticut Media Editorial Board meeting at the New Haven Register last week. “It’s just who I am.”
Vannessa, with her easy outgoing style, didn’t come to talk with us about her childhood. It came up as we were putting away notebooks (but not an iPhone recorder), almost an afterthought in an hourlong discussion about the state agency that has been her life for 27 years.
“I think about the fact that if I didn’t have my grandmother and I didn’t have paternal family members and people who kind of leaned in with our church to try to help when these young parents were faced with having a baby — we weren’t involved with DCF — but look how easily that could have changed if I didn’t have that kind of support.
“So I think my value base of really keeping kids with families comes from that kind of experience,” she said. Her mother had a 30-year teaching career; her father worked for a cable company as she grew up in Waterbury.
“They were able to raise their family OK because some those early moments of ‘Jeez, what are we going to do, you’re 16 with a baby?’ And now I’m she said, her voice rising in wonderment. “That should be more of the story for everybody else, but I think what happens is you get a 16-year-old who has a baby and they say ‘Look what you just did with your life. You’re not going to evolve to anything, and neither is your baby.’ ”
It’s not that a challenging childhood is, along with a college degree, a requisite to successfully lead a state agency the likes of DCF. But empathy and understanding go a long way when linking policy to people.
Vannessa’s story makes me think of Jahana Hayes, a teenage mother who rose to become, at 45, the congresswoman representing the 5th District, and it’s not just because both came from the same industrial city.
When I met with Jahana last fall at an editorial board meeting at The News-Times in Danbury, her passion for helping others reach their potential shone through her policy positions.
Her smile is as natural as Vannessa’s, their underlying grit a common trait. These women inspire.
Vannessa was 22, fresh from college, when she came to DCF with the wave of social workers hired in response to a lawsuit that put the agency under federal review. That was 1992, and the agency is still under federal monitoring. The most recent “Exit Plan Status Report,” issued in August, shows (through the jargon) an agency making steady progress on meeting “outcome measures,” yet understaffed with the crucial social workers who maintain the caseloads.
When she began, a new social worker would walk into the office and find a stack of 50 cases. Now they are trained, with simulation exercises through a family advocacy organization. Think about the various scenarios that could unfold when a social worker knocks on the door of a family in crisis and harbors, perhaps, a suspicion of state agencies.
The soon-to-be commissioner, who has held virtually every social worker position in the department, such as program supervisor, criminal investigator, and Northwest corner administrator, will focus on keeping the momentum gained by the last commissioner, Joette Katz, a former associate justice of the state Supreme Court.
For example, a goal has been to keep children with family members, if at all possible, instead of removing them to institutional care.
Now “44 percent of kids are with relatives, up from 20 percent,” Vannessa said.
Yet, there’s a glaring disparity to address: Minorities are two-thirds of the child welfare cases, but 40 percent of the population. “We need to hone in on a strategy,” she said. Yes.
That’s one part of leading an agency with a 15,376 caseload, as of Feb. 6, and a budget this year of $776,263,469.
DCF comes under the microscope, as it should, any time there’s a death of a child in their care. Vannessa had to tell Lamont the truth: It is near impossible to prevent every tragic death, but she will do everything in her power to instill “a safety culture in child welfare and reduce the likelihood of a misstep.”
Most of the fatalities for children younger than 2, I was surprised to learn, are from unsafe sleeping. A social worker can talk to a mother about the dangers of co-sleeping, but how to make sure every adult who might come in contact with that child — father, grandparent, aunt — knows that?
Vannessa Dorantes wants to bring a respect to social work.
“It’s who I am, not what I do,” she said. I told her journalists feel the same way about what we do, it’s a calling.
Childhood upbringing, our backgrounds, experiences and training all inform the essence of what we do.
“We all bring our story to why we’re here,” she said, “And why we do this work.”
Jacqueline Smith is a columnist and editorial page editor with Hearst Connecticut newspapers. Look for her column in this spot on Fridays. Email her at jsmith@hearstmediact.com, follow on Facebook: Jacqueline Smith, on Twitter: @JackyNT