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Children’s social workers Larry Golan, Mike Ross and Mellonie Freeman testified at the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors Tuesday in support of a proposal by two of the Supervisors to audit the Department of Children and Family Services as quickly and extensively as possible.
The social workers called on the Board to involve social workers in the review.
“As you know we are serious about reforming the child welfare system. We are not satisfied with the status quo and we believe our input as social workers on the ground working our hardest to keep children safe is invaluable to meaningful reform,” said Larry Golan, a supervising children’s social worker in the Glendora office.
You can watch the Aug. 3 testimony here.
The Supervisors unanimously passed the motion introduced by Supervisors Michael Antonovich and Don Knabe. The motion also included a significant amendment by Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky:
“DCFS should remove responsibilities that are redundant, excessively time consuming, unlikely to improve child safety, and not required by Federal or State law,” language almost identical to social workers’ recommendations for reforming the child welfare system.
Supervising social worker Mike Ross talked about specifics to ensure the most comprehensive review possible.
“We would like to collaborate on developing methodologies, selecting a firm and setting the parameters of the review,” he told the Board.
“We also hope that this motion is a vehicle to streamline constantly changing safety enhancements and base policy changes on a need for change rather than in reaction to one unique situation.”
Supervisor Gloria Molina took the opportunity to once again make general misstatements about children’s social workers. She said: “Many social workers, including supervisors, are not using their computers…Are they going to look at that?”
Photo: Children’s social workers Larry Golan, Mike Ross, Michael Aguilera and Mellonie Freeman at the Board of Supervisors’ hearing room Aug. 3.
I understand the rationale for the audit, and I welcome any possible steps to reduce unnecessary, redundant and extraneous demands that are not relevant to child safety or required by existing law. However, I am skeptical that such an audit is going to result in any meaningful, long term change. They still have not implemented most of the sensible recommendations of SB 2030, which among other things, found that CSWs had over DOUBLE the caseload they should given the tasks involved in the work. That was some 12 years ago or so. Workloads have skyrocketed since then but the caseload yardsticks remain the same. In addition, there is no consistent way of measuring DI caseloads and much of the work in DI is not “counted” in terms of staffing (e.g., amending petitions, Pre-Release Investigation reports, on-hand case counts over 30 days, etc.)