Statement of Carol Ann Loehndorf, President
American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Local 3041

Testimony Before the Subcommittee on Human Resources
of the House Committee on Ways and Means

Hearing on Child Protection Programs in Florida

December 14, 1998

Good morning. My name is Carol Ann Loehndorf. I want to thank the Chairman and the Subcommittee for giving me this opportunity to share with you my experiences as a front-line worker in Floridas child welfare system.

I started working for the State of Florida on June 3, 1963 and have spent about 20 of the past 35 years in child welfare and foster care. Currently I am a Family Services Counselor in the Foster Care Unit in Palm Beach County. I am also the President of Local 3041 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), which includes social workers in Palm Beach and Broward Counties. I would like at this time to offer into the record a recently-completed national survey of AFSCMEs child welfare workers, "Double Jeopardy: Caseworkers At Risk Helping At-Risk Kids." It describes many of the same working conditions Ill be talking about today.

I enjoy working with my kids and their parents, but I probably would not choose to work for the Department of Children and Families if I were starting my career now. Our caseloads are too big; the childrens problems are much more severe; and the state hasnt given us enough money to address these problems. Our salaries, which start at $26,000, dont reflect our professional status or, perhaps more importantly, the life and death judgments we must make each day. We also do not get the kind of training we need or the support we used to have from our supervisors and administrators. Morale has sunk to an all-time low, and staff turnover is very high in my unit and throughout the state.

The problems and challenges in child welfare are deeply rooted in our society as a whole, not just within the child welfare system. Unfortunately, some children will die while in the system no matter what changes are made or who is administering it because it is not humanly possible to make the right decision all the time. Approximately five years ago, in fact, I had the experience of having a judge reject my recommendation against reunification of a child with his parents, only to see him die at the hand of his father. Anyone, even a judge, can make an error in judgment in this work. Having said this, however, AFSCMEs front-line workers want to work with our elected officials, Department administration, judges, and child advocates to improve the system so we can do the best job humanly possible to protect our children.

Caseloads and Turnover

In some ways our child welfare system in Florida is better than the one I entered. Today, we have a broader array of programs and mechanisms in place which allow us to track and review cases more frequently with the goal of moving children through transition and either back into their home or into adoption more quickly. We also are moving toward concurrency planning where we will pursue more than one option for a child at a time. This shift away from a primary focus on reunification more accurately reflects the complexity of the situations we face. However, inadequate funding and staffing levels mean that our programs do not work as well as they could.

One huge roadblock standing in our way to delivering consistent, high-quality services is the enormous caseloads assigned to each social worker. Several grand juries have found that caseloads in Broward County are too high. The 1998 grand jury found that caseloads here average 50, which is just about the number of kids I have in Palm Beach and which is more than three times higher than whats recommended by the Child Welfare League of America.

This number, however, does not convey our situation in a meaningful way. It actually understates caseload sizes because it doesnt take into account the fact some personnel in this count perform administrative duties and do not manage any cases. It also ignores the fact that trainees with only a few cases are counted in the average. It ignores important inefficiencies in our operations. For example, we often transport a child for a parental visit -- a task that can take an entire half a day -- because we do not have enough transportation aides. Finally, it ignores the fact that many of us work far more than our official 40 hour work week because we simply cannot walk away from a child in crisis.

High turnover rates only make an overwhelming situation worse. Last year, the turnover rate in Broward County was 78 percent. In my own unit, we have eight social worker positions, but we are almost never fully staffed. Right now, we are down two because we have one vacancy and one new worker, who is still in training and is not yet responsible for any cases. Only two of us have been in my unit for more than three years; one has been with us two years; two have recently transferred from other child welfare units; and another has just completed her training but has virtually no field experience yet.

High turnover and inexperience have at least three negative consequences. When workers leave, those of us who remain have to pick up their cases until new employees are hired and trained, a process that can take several months or even longer. Our children lose continuity with their social worker, who may be the only stable influence at that moment in their lives. Finally, the social workers never build up the day-to-day experience they need to make the difficult judgment calls we face constantly. Its almost impossible to describe the subtle cues and red flags I recognize every day based on my years of work in the system. Theres just no substitute for this experience, but precious few of our workers stick around to develop it.

Kids Problems Worsening/ Services Not Available

Whats worse, all this is happening while our children have much more complex needs, including violent behavior and hyperactivity. Many children on my caseload need therapeutic placement sites to help them adjust emotionally to being put into foster care. One of the most time-consuming tasks I face is securing the medical, psychological and psychiatric exams and diagnoses necessary to place a child in the appropriate therapeutic foster family, residential therapeutic group home, or psychiatric facility. Then, after I go through this process, many of these critical services have waiting lists and arent available as quickly as we need them

Children without these placements end up in our offices. For several weeks now Ive had a 12 year old foster child in my office during the day because he was expelled from school and his foster mother works. Ive been trying to get him back into school or into a therapeutic environment, but this is taking a lot of time. Weve had kids in our offices until midnight because thats how long it took to find them a place to spend the night. They often return in the morning because theres nowhere else for them to go. This is a bad situation for these kids. It also means we cant effectively help the other 45 or 50 children on our caseload.

We also are facing an extreme crisis in attracting enough foster parents because more of our children have severe problems and more women are working outside the home. We always have had more difficulty placing older children, but now we are facing a new shortage of foster homes for preschool children, and an increased demand for child care in foster families with two working parents. Not only in Broward County but also in Palm Beach and other counties, foster parents take in as many as seven children at a time. These pressures cause burnout among our foster parents. Sometimes we cant locate a foster family at all.

Unsupportive Administration

Even with all these obstacles, I would feel good about the work I do if I were getting helpful support from the Department. Years ago, Department administrators saw their role as enabling social workers to do their jobs well and standing by them when they made a tough call.

Now, we feel like were under siege all the time. We cannot realistically do an effective job for all of the children for whom we are responsible. Inevitably some kind of priorities have to govern how we spend our time. Yet our management avoids this reality, placing this task on the front-line workers by default and failing to support them if something goes wrong. I am equally likely to be accused of neglect if I miss a report deadline or miss an appointment with a child. Management responds to problems by giving social workers additional paperwork. Investigations social workers feel like theyre between a rock and a hard place, receiving criticism both for not removing kids quickly enough and for too quickly removing them.

Our administration has been slow to invest in even basic resources to improve our efficiency or to improve the safety of our jobs. For example, I have to spend up to 15 minutes going outside and across the courtyard to another office just to copy a piece of paper. We finally got a fax machine just this month. Recently, management installed locks on our doors, but only after several disruptive incidents and pressure from front-line workers. I myself was threatened by a father at knifepoint as he took his child from my office. Management has yet to recognize the importance of cellular phones when we go into unsafe neighborhoods.

Proposed Solutions

How can we start to address these problems? The response of our state government last summer was to pass a new law privatizing all foster care services in Florida -- in other words to give someone else the operational responsibility.

Privatization will not solve, and in fact may compound, the fundamental problems which I have discussed. By putting a private management company between the state and direct front-line operations, it will be even harder to implement state policy consistently with adequate accountability.

Other states have done a better job than Florida without resorting to privatization. For example, Delaware recently passed a law which mandates that caseloads cannot exceed the Child Welfare Leagues standards by more than two, and which also requires sufficient funding for hiring enough staff to stay within these standards. Connecticut also has established maximum caseload sizes.

Instead of privatizing, Florida needs to give the child welfare system more funds to reach reasonable and safe caseload levels. This is not just a Broward County problem. I can say from my experience in Palm Beach that we need a lot more social workers, more money to pay foster parents, and more funding for the intensive services many of these kids need. (The State of Florida is eighth from the bottom in per capita state spending for child welfare according to 1996 figures from the Child Welfare League.) If we can lower caseloads and upgrade our equipment, we can finally get the chance to deliver quality services to the children and families we serve.

But money is not enough. The Department and the press need to stop scapegoating front-line workers when a child is injured or dies. No one can focus adequately on doing a good job in an environment of fear. We need administrative support to do our jobs well, including supervisors available to help in tough cases. Social worker training needs to be revamped and expanded, especially for new child welfare workers. Right now, new social workers dont get enough out-in-the-field training and mentoring, which is absolutely necessary for them to competently take over cases.

I found a real irony in a recent article in the Palm Beach Post which reported that

a private agency slated to take over foster care on January 1 has gotten cold feet because it wants immunity from lawsuits and assurances that the state will increase its payments at the same rate as the number of children coming into the system. In effect, the agency has admitted that, like the public sector, it will fail some individual children, and that it is concerned about not having enough money to serve adequately the children in its care. I will be very envious, I confess, if the funding guarantees requests are granted. If during my years with the Department we had received such reliable funding increases as our cases increased, I truly believe we would have a stable work force today and better outcomes for children.

Thank you for your attention. I will be happy to answer any questions you may have.