Foster kids aren’t the only ones tired of telling their story over and over to new caseworkers because of the chronic staff turnover experienced by the Office of Children’s Services. GALs frequently work cases where three or four social worker changes during the case are not at all unusual. They are often the only ones with the complete history of the case and they tell it over and over again as social workers come and go.
Most GALs want to work with the social worker assigned to their cases because families and children can only benefit when everyone is pulling in the same direction for them. But this becomes a frustrating exercise when the worker is always new and the GAL has to repeatedly explain why everyone agreed upon a certain course of action. If the new worker doesn’t end up also agreeing with the plan, you are back at square one, developing yet another variation on the case plan. Worse, the kids and their families are about to be given yet another group of goals they must work towards. They too end up at square one over and over again. And they end up confused and frustrated by changing expectations.
Most of the time, the only thing the kids really want to know is when they can go home. Unfortunately, there are some very dysfunctional families who use this changeover in staff and case plans as the excuse they need to not even try to work the program to get their kids back. And that leaves us with no good answer to the kids’ questions about when they get to go home.
Social workers are often totally unfamiliar with the culture they encounter in villages. They have to learn about the local culture, family connections, and just how active the particular tribal government is in children’s matters. By the time they learn all they need to know, they are often already putting in their transfer papers because they have had enough of being overworked, understaffed and, in most cases, woefully unappreciated.
Most social workers do not enter the field because they enjoy taking children from their families. In fact, many enter the field because they think they can help families heal. But there are only so many hours in any given day. If you don’t have enough staff, something’s got to give. When your day is spent in crises mode, those precious hours needed to work with families get lost.
Add to this the fact that when you work with Native clients, you are trying to translate some very unfamiliar western concepts of law and expectations into their traditional understanding of family, and the job just gets harder. Pile on top of that the social isolation new workers feel in a unfamiliar community where their job does not make them anyone’s favorite person and you can see how this might lead to a social worker transferring out, even if the only other job available involves asking if you want fries with your order.
As a society, we make an awfully big fuss about children being important. But we seem to have trouble putting our money where our mouths are. Teachers and social workers are some of the most woefully under paid professionals around.
Money won’t make social work any easier. But it will make recruiting social workers a little easier if their pay is commensurate with their responsibilities. And the more staff recruited, the more positions filled and the less burnout. Who knows, some social workers might actually have enough time to do the family work they were trained for instead of running from one court hearing to the next, from one emergency placement to the next. They might have time to partner with their Native counterparts at the regional Native health corporations to provide better, more coordinated and more culturally sensitive solutions to the horrible problems produced by the drinking and domestic violence so rife in our villages.
Those children we most want to protect seem to end up being the most harmed, first by their families and then by a system chronically under funded and understaffed, whether it be the social workers, the court system or the group homes and foster families. When it comes to protecting children, we seem to talk big and act small.