This is the text of an email sent to LA County children’s social workers in response to comments made by Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina:
Dear Social Workers,
I was upset to wake up yesterday to another front-page story in the Los Angeles Times. The number of emergency response referrals over 30 days continues to grow and Supervisor Gloria Molina continues to work against reforming the child welfare system.
Molina’s comments (“Right now, our caseloads for these workers are within the yardstick where we want to be” and “If you tell me we need more people to make the same dumb mistakes without proper supervision, I disagree.”) were especially unhelpful and displayed a lack of understanding of social work in LA County.
As social workers our unwavering commitment is to the most vulnerable children and families in Los Angeles County. In order to get through this crisis we must not lose sight of our mission, no matter what the Department and the elected leaders of this county do or say.
In order to get out of the current crisis and restore morale we must immediately:
- Add more trained and experienced staff to our emergency response units. The Department and the Times numbers on temporary reassignments are inaccurate and misleading plus temporarily reassigned workers will return to their regular positions soon. ER units need resources and that should be a top priority.
- Streamline new policies. Major policy changes have occurred in the last year and they have contributed to the ever-growing number of cases in ER. Policies like ARA sign off have not helped keep children safe. We need to overhaul the system to restore autonomy in order to make smart choices on a fast turnaround.
We know that quality social work continues on ER cases even if they are over 30 or over 60. We also know that while the Department’s goal is a caseload of 18 in emergency response, we are not there yet and cases from previous months are not included in that number.
I, along with other social workers and our union leadership, will deliver this message to the Department and to all five LA County Supervisors. As you know we have been regularly meeting with them on our recommendations for child welfare reform.
We have also repeatedly invited Supervisor Molina to experience social work first hand by spending a day in the field with a social worker. She has continued to rebuff our invitation.
This is a tough time, but we are doing important work and we know what it’s going to take to make things right.
You can read more online about our recommendations for change and learn how you can get involved.
Sincerely,
Tony Bravo
SEIU 721 Treasurer
Supervising Children’s Social Worker
First and foremost our social workers are hard workers. It is unfortunate there have been some fatalities and some CSW’s who have made bad choices but it happens in any job. People need to remember we are the after math of the child abuse. In other words, we find out the abuse after it already happens. However, it is the community, family, neighbors and other agencies who can help us reach the child in a timely matter. Our ER section requires more attention and each individual duty it takes to close a referral is time consuming. It is impossible virtually to close referrals in a timely fashion because of additonal detentions or VFM and now CLETS added to the referrals is another task. As far as looking as social workers individually, our job is stressful, we work free hours, we work weekends, holidays and dream of our referrals because of liability. If a social worker does not do whatever it is which caused a child to be in danger it should be looked at on an individual basis and not blame the whole agency. We do not judge our families by other families, they are individual and investigate each family on their need for services. This should be done the same for social workers and others should not be punished for a neglegent social worker, if indeed found to be after a complete investigation. Smearing a CSW’s name on the paper, is not going to improve the situation but destroy morale and increase the chances of future abuse because of the lack of trust with the community one is creating. We dont judge the other supervisors based on Molina’s lack of knowledge of social work, so why are we congregating against an agency which has protected several children and continues to provide services for families to help keep them in a safe home with family.