MsMarple, as always, I enjoy reading your posts. Thoughtful, accurate, and descriptive. I want to piggyback off of some of your statements here. As a social worker, I am right there with you, agreeing that change is needed in our child welfare system. I can also sit here with you and spout out a list a mile long of things that need to change. I would put at the top of that list: funding. I'm not trying to make this about money, but the fact of the matter is, social services is underfunded already, and we are constantly facing budget cuts. This causes us to have unimaginable, and sometimes illegally-high caseloads. So many child clients that at times, it is literally impossible to do everything that is necessary for your position. This is across the board-investigators, case managers, family centered (preventative) services, alternative care (foster care) workers, and everybody in between. Due to our lack of funding, we are constantly losing good workers/people who simply can't afford to do this job. I have a master's degree, and without my husband's income, our family would easily be approved for the very social services that I refer my clients to (food stamps, medicaid, etc.) I am currently a foster care case manager, and my caseload paired with my required duties is just nuts. Court reports have to be on time, court dates don't get rescheduled just because I'm busy, meetings every single day for each of my 12 cases (children), including one case that is a sibling set of 3 (all in separate residences at this time), documentation legally required to be uploaded into our state database within a certain timeframe, authorizations for therapists/support services payments and subsidies, the list goes on. I have said this before, but even if I was to work 12 hour days, 7 days a week, I would not be able to get everything done, ever. That being said, the one thing that I cannot miss or slack on is home or placement visits, which I do twice a month for each child. This is critical to make sure that everything is appropriate and together, and I always spend some time with the child alone, in a separate area away from the foster parents or facility staff, just to talk. Even in doing this, there is no real way to ensure their safety. By doing this, I am seeing the child for a couple of hours per month (2 visits is our agency standard, we are legally obligated to only one visit per month with the child).
Next suggestion, to piggyback again off of your comments here, would be a nationwide database. We do not have one. At my previous job, doing IIS (Intensive In Home Services), we worked with families at risk of their children coming into care in attempts to keep the family together and ensure safety. There was a case where we had suspicions of a male roommate being inappropriate, and it took us 7 weeks (one week after our case closed) to hear back from another state (one that we reached out to as a known previous residence), when it was confirmed that he has a POE and cannot have contact with children. Not only was this frustrating and unacceptable, but the heightened risk of harm to those children while under our supervision was literally unavoidable. I repeatedly went to CD (my agency was contracted through CD) with my concerns, and their FCS worker as well as their supervisor agreed with my concerns. Unfortunately, we cannot legally do anything based on a gut feeling.
Finally, I agree with your sentiment that it can appear that the focus is more on the parents and keeping the family together as opposed to the focus being on the child. In the last few years, we have incorporated SOS training, Signs of Safety, which is now the foundation of everything that we do. GAL's are trained in SOS, therapists, Juvenile Officers, Case Managers, Children's Division, and everyone in between. While this is family oriented, it is safety centered. It allows us to provide bottom lines as it pertains to the safety of the children at risk. Once this is implemented nationally, I really feel that we will see fewer instances of cases like this. Yes, we work with the family, and provide them services to help them get it together, when safety is perceived as a possibility (which is determined by the court, btw, not by any of us). SOS provides us with the tools to all be on the same page and hold parents accountable for their responsibilities as it pertains to their children and their parenting (which can include sobriety, parenting classes, therapies-whatever is dictated in their service/treatment plan, which is laid out by the judge).
Finally, I agree that if we were legally able to pull kids from the home whenever we saw fit, there would not be enough foster homes or group homes or residential facilities. We are already grasping at straws for placements for our kids, so this would require many, many people to step in and step up to care for these kids. Further, it would require an understanding that it is proven that the act of removing a child from their home and into foster care or residential facilities is equally if not more traumatizing for the child than the actual reason for removal. This re-traumatization then continues each time that the child is moved (from foster home to foster home, or to treatment facility, residential living, etc.). So in effect, we are traumatizing these children just as much as the abuse or neglect that brought them into care. This is the reason policies and procedures are geared towards keeping families together safely when possible. Family can be an aunt or uncle, grandparent, neighbor-whoever is familiar and safe to the child. The key word there is 'safely', which is where SOS comes into play. If we can't ensure safety, then the child can't be there. We just have to jump through a bunch of hoops to prove it.
