CLARA BATES/ MISSOURI INDEPENDENT
Darrell Missey (left), director of Children’s Division, speaks at an Aug. 13 hearing, alongside Todd Richardson, director of MO HealthNet.
Staffing challenges were bad during Stillman’s time, but intensified over COVID.
In 2020, Parson targeted social services with staffing cuts, citing a COVID-related drop in state revenue. He cut 300 jobs statewide that had been previously filled, 200 of which were in DSS. Of those, 96 jobs were from the Children’s Division — mostly supervisors and mid-level management.
For Dan Johnston, a Children’s Division supervisor in Jasper County, Parson’s cuts stood out as a “blow to morale.”
“I lost my supervisor and she became my peer overnight,” he said. Candice Hastings experienced the challenges of being new to the job in a moment of mass exodus.
She accepted an entry-level position at Missouri’s child welfare agency last December without hesitation, excited to “make children’s lives better.”
She worked at the Children’s Division office in St. Joseph, training for two months to become a child abuse and neglect investigator. Panic set in for Hastings once she was on her own. As she’d knock on strangers’ doors to investigate hotline calls of abuse and neglect, Hastings would imagine all the scenarios she might encounter when the doors would swing open, and how clueless she would be to respond to them.
The gulf between her level of responsibility and her skillset, she felt, was enormous.
“I wasn’t adequately equipped to do my job as they expected me to,” she said she felt at the time.
Herrin, the child welfare attorney in Kansas City, said since COVID he has seen instances where in a six-month span there have been as many as six new workers on a child’s case.
“It’s very difficult to keep clients moving forward,” he said. “Sometimes it causes the parents to almost start from scratch, proving to the new worker that the child can return home.”
The case manager’s role is to facilitate and to help make sure the parents are getting the services they need to work toward reunification, as the court ordered, such as helping set up drug testing and treatment.
When they’re focused on other cases though, Herrin said, “some things will slip through the cracks,” and the caseworker might not have the time to ensure the parents get all the services they need. Some contracted services like parents aides, who provide weekly visits, and counselors are in short supply, too, he said.
“What we end up seeing is a lot of the families get put on the back burner with getting services put in place, visitation with their children,” Herrin said.
That can all delay reunification prospects, prolonging the child’s stay in foster care.
On the abuse and neglect investigation side, some worry that trying to move as quickly as possible will cause a caseworker to make a mistake, be it on the side of overlooking abuse or neglect or removing a child prematurely from their home.
“My real concern is something terrible is going to happen, and that is the history of child welfare: Reform comes with terrible cases of children getting harmed, or families being broken up unnecessarily,” said Clark Peters, associate professor of social work at the University of Missouri.
