The caseworkers are drowning, and our troubled kids are slipping under the waves

Published 1:27 pm Tuesday, April 12, 2022

Taking care of kids is hard enough in a stable family every day. Think about what happens when the family is in trouble and the kids have to be taken care of by the state.

It’s a staggering job, every single time.

And the challenges are taking their toll on even the most dedicated workers at the state Department of Children and Family Services.

“We’re drowning,” DCFS Secretary Marketa Garner Walters told lawmakers this spring. “It’s salary. It’s workload. It’s COVID. It’s the ‘Great Resignation.’ It’s the work itself.”

It’s hard work. And the department, even with greater support from Gov. John Bel Edwards’ administration over the past six years, has trouble keeping up.

Faced with skyrocketing caseloads and meager salaries, almost half of the entry-level social service workers at DCFS quit last year, legislators were told.

Caseworkers are on the front line and a DCFS official said that the agency is about 35 people short of what is needed in the New Orleans area. There are similar staffing problems elsewhere in the state, as stressed families are hardly limited to urban areas.

The budget hearings in the annual sessions of the Legislature are usually focused on shortages and deficiencies. This year, unusually, because of added federal funding, the state has more money to put into projects and services.

But a great deal of that money is one-time in nature. An agency like DCFS needs recurring sources of funding to meet annual payrolls.

With significant funding coming from federal sources for programs like food stamps, DCFS is an agency that is — regrettably — not as much front-and-center for state legislators. God knows there is not much political benefit in supporting it. But the state funding remains a critical element in the lives of Louisiana’s vulnerable children.

Rescuing a kid left in a park, working with law enforcement to take over the case and deal with the child’s needs, making progress through counseling the family, or going through the courts to deal with problems — that’s the kind of daily project that many of us would not want to take on for a lot more money than caseworkers earn.

They start, with a college degree, at just under $30,000 a year.

“I believe that every single person that works in this agency is hyper-committed to do this work,” Walters said. “Because it is so damn hard, that it would be much easier to go work for Costco and make a lot more money.”

An 11-year-old found sleeping outside a park by police had an unconscionable wait for help from DCFS, state Rep. Jason Hughes, D-New Orleans, told Walters.

“Talking with our judges, we have youngsters that are sitting in detention centers that technically don’t need to be in the center,” added state Sen. Jimmy Harris, a New Orleans Democrat. “What the judges are being told and what the city is being told is that due to lack of staffing, they can’t get to those children in a timely manner.”

Things are clearly more difficult in a time of a pandemic and crippling hurricanes in Louisiana. Isolation and financial stresses hit lower-income families the hardest.

But if we are a pro-family state, we ought to be doing better when the family structure is stressed — a lot better.