Child-welfare workers swamped Online
JACKSON — Is the foster child better off with or without a visit from her father?
Kristy Carlisle cannot count on her many years of professional experience, or evena gut feeling,to yield a comfortable answer. She doesn’t see any good solutions.
“I mark off every Thursday, and he doesn’t show,” said Carlisle, an investigator and caseworker at Jackson County Children Services in southeastern Ohio.
But the girl, a victim of sexual abuse, wants the agency to keep trying. She can barely bring herself to To hear Jackson County Children Services workers talk about the stress of the job, go to Dispatch.com/videos.
speak. Sometimes she just leans against Carlisle and cries.
“He lives with the perpetrator,” Carlisle said of the father. “He doesn’t believe her — doesn’t believe his daughter. And she loves him to the moon and back.”
The case is one of many — too many, she and her supervisors know — that Carlisle strives to forget for a few hours each night. She might not have stuck with the job for the past 17 years were it not for her efforts to draw temporary, imaginary lines between work and personal worlds. “The two cannot coexist,” she said.
The 40-year-oldpreviously livedin a rural part of this Appalachian community, and she did her best to unwind on the drive home. To drift away from the images of young children being stripped, scrubbed and decontaminated after their removal from a meth house. To stop wondering how a5-year-old could know how to fill a hypodermic needle.
“I used to get solace when I hit the hill,”carlisle said. “Now thati live in town, it’s when I hit the garage door.”
Carlisle has never before had so much to detach from: Counting soon-to-be closed cases, her caseload sits at 40, or more than three times the recommended number for an Ohio child-protection worker.
Twelve- and 14-hour days are common. She and her colleagues take turns with overnight on-call “shifts” that last a week. Three of the agency’s seven caseworkers quit in recent months, making it difficult for others to claim badly needed vacation and sick days.
Tammy Osborne-smith, director of the Jackson County Department of Job and Family Services, said her child-welfare staff is dedicated but overwhelmed. That Carlisle
observation isborne out in a recent survey that found that 53 percent of Ohio’s childrenservices caseworkers have experienced symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
“Thank God they continue to push forward, but there is a breaking point,” Osbornesmith said. “And I’m afraid they’re near it.”
•••
Ohio is among eight states and jurisdictions participatingin a federally funded researchproject that aims to address problems with recruitment and turnover in the child-welfare workforce, whose employees leave their jobs at rates up to six times the national average for all industries.
The plan is to develop strategies and interventions thatcan help alleviate stress and burnout for workers in Ohio and throughout the nation, thereby improving services for children and families, state officials said.
“We knew right away that we wanted to get in on the ground level of this work,” said Carla Carpenter, deputy director of the Office of Families and Children in the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. “There really hasn’t been this type of intensive look specifically geared toward child welfare.”
Gov. Mike Dewine noted the findings on caseworker stress earlier this month when he announced his proposal to significantly boost state spending on family and children services. His budget recommendation seeks to double Ohio’s investment to about $151 million a year, adding $74 million annually to aid a system flooded with children whose parents are addicted to opioids and other drugs.
Ohio has long ranked last in the nation in state funding for children-services agencies. The county-based system leans heavily on local support, but only 51 of Ohio’s 88 counties have tax levies to raise money for services.
Tim Schaffner, executive director of Trumbull County Children Services, said his agency is fortunate to have two levies and good community support. Even so, caseworkers in the northeastern Ohio county — one of eight counties serving as the state’s pilots for the research study — struggle to address increasingly complex cases.
“We had a 13-year-old who had revived his dad with Narcan nine times,” Schaffner said, referring to the overdose antidote medication. “It’s one thing for me to tell you that over the phone. But when you’re sitting across the table from that child?”
••• Tiffany Stevens apologizes for her tears. They’re quicker to flow now that she has a young child of her own, and Stevens can’t help herself when her colleague talks about the 7-year-old foster childwho penned a letter of disappointment to her addict mother.
“I didn’t use to be this soft,” Stevens said, smiling.
She was a Jackson County Children Services caseworker for about five years before becoming an executive assistant in the agency’s administrative offices in December. “I really fought with it,” she said of her decision. “I hated to be selfish.”
But as a young mother, Stevens wasn’t sure how many more nights she could lie awake anticipating the awful blare of the on-call phone, which might bear news as simple as a medical update or as urgent as a plea from the sheriff’s office to help with children who were in a car with their mother when she died of a drug overdose.
Stevens once bought a locket for a 10-year-old to keep some of the girl’s father’s cremated ashes. She alsoprinted out photos, hoping the child could remember him in happier times.
“It’s so easy to blame ourselves,” she said. “So-and-so overdosed. Well, what could I have done differently?”
Stevens, 32,recently staffed her agency’s booth at a job fair and had just one visitor. Although Jackson County finally won voterapproval in Novemberfor its first children-services levy, that support doesn’t necessarily make the jobs more attractive. Starting pay for a caseworker with a bachelor’s degree still sits well below $20 an hour, and the region remains steeped in poverty and addiction.
From 2013 to 2018, the number of children in foster care doubled, and placement costsrose by 90 percent, said Osborne-smith, the county job and family services director. “About 85 to 90 percent of our cases involve some type of addiction,” she said.
More children than ever wind up being adopted instead of reuniting with their parents.
Carlisle, the longtime investigator and caseworker, said child-welfare employees need lighter loads. That might mean less overtime and better pay, enhanced emotional support, or less paperwork and more technological assistance.
Whatever the path, the goal is to reduce stress so that caseworkers are better positioned to help kids and families.
Carlisle used to spend far more time with families.
Now, “You start the triage to see who gets knocked to the back burner,” she said. “And if you’ve worked in childprotective services, you know no one should be shoved to the back burner.”