FW: DCF work harder than Brain Surgery or does DCF need brain surgery
Fern5827
Subject: DCF work isn't brain surgery: `It's harder'
From: Wex Wimpy wexw...@citicom.com
Date: 1/7/2003 4:49 PM Eastern Standard Time
Message-id: <nqim1vg2vs9g0cd0l...@4ax.com>
DCF work isn't brain surgery: `It's harder'
BY DAVID GREEN
dgr...@herald.com
It's Wednesday morning, and Department of Children & Families
caseworker Diony Antigua prepares to plunge into a stack of paperwork
on his desk. Then his phone rings.
A counselor at a Miami-Dade elementary school is on the phone. She
wants to talk about a 13-year-old boy who was once briefly in
Antigua's care.
''We were doing an activity today in class,'' the counselor explains,
``and he said he wanted to kill himself.''
Antigua nods intently. It's a case he remembers well. Several years
ago, he briefly removed the boy from his mother's care after she
nicked the boy's cheek with a vacuum wand while preparing to spank him
with it.
Antigua eventually sent the boy home and closed the case. But now,
even though the boy is no longer officially his responsibility,
Antigua feels obligated to help the school counselor figure out what
to do next.
Yank the boy from class and call his mother? Call the police and have
him committed for psychiatric testing?
This moment exposes the nebulous skills that cut deeper than training
and lie at the heart of social services' casework -- judgment,
guesswork, common sense, luck.
The DCF's army of nearly 2,000 caseworkers must peer into
refrigerators, pore over report cards, scrutinize skinned knees -- and
arrive at a verdict that determines a family's fate.
That sometimes alarms outsiders.
''This isn't brain surgery,'' says Richard Gelles, acting dean of the
University of Pennsylvania's School of Social Work. ``It's harder.
``This is a system that depends on 23-year-old art-history majors to
make extraordinary decisions that have a huge impact on families.''
`I WANT TO KILL'
The DCF recently allowed a Herald reporter to accompany Antigua on his
daily rounds. Antigua isn't an art-history major. In fact, the polite
40-year-old man sporting a silk tie and goatee was a doctor in the
Dominican Republic before he emigrated to the United States a decade
ago.
In his spare time, he studies for his medical licensing exam. He
occasionally sings tenor with the Florida Grand Opera. He spends as
much time as he can with his two young sons, who live nearby with
their mother.
But for roughly 60 hours each week, Antigua does what he's doing this
morning -- juggling court appointments, paperwork, family visits. And,
as is happening now, fielding curveballs.
He sits in his cubicle in the DCF's hangarlike Opa-locka office and
listens to the school counselor on speakerphone as she describes the
suicidal boy.
'We were filling out a holiday wish list today, and he wrote `I want
to kill . . . ,' '' the counselor said. ``But he never finished the
sentence. So I took him aside and asked him to finish his sentence,
because a comment like that always alarms you, and he told me he
wanted to kill himself.
``He said he hated his life and he just wanted to die.''
Antigua clucks his tongue. He consults with his supervisor, and they
decide the boy's mom should pick him up and take him to a counseling
center for evaluation.
He tracks her down at the security booth where she works as a guard.
''What is wrong with that boy?'' the mother says by phone after
Antigua tells her what happened. ``I think they're doing something to
him at that school, because he's fine at home.''
CHALLENGES
Everyone agrees caseworkers have a problem.
Their starting salary is roughly $27,000. They go through only nine
weeks of formal training, soon to be seven, before they're sent out
into the field.
Once up and running, they can average as many as 44 cases at one time
-- more than twice the nationally recommended number. (Antigua's
caseload is closer to 20.)
Roughly 30 percent of caseworkers quit or move to another DCF job each
year, according to the agency.
These factors create a towering workload that at times can impair a
caseworker's judgment, or worse.
Frontline DCF soldiers such as Antigua still smart from the lash of
publicity over scandals such as Deborah Muskelly, who lied about
visiting 5-year-old Rilya Wilson. The child later turned out to have
been missing for 15 months before the DCF caught on.
Muskelly was arrested on charges of theft and misconduct. She has
since signed a plea deal.
The there was Mirla Pronga, the Miami caseworker accused of getting
drunk and passing out at the wheel of her car with a foster baby in
the backseat. She goes to trial next month.
The DCF is scrambling to fix the caseworker problem. The agency is
drawing up a plan to raise salaries, enhance training, stem turnover
and cut caseload by limiting the number of abuse hot line complaints
that it investigates.
But for now, caseworkers are still struggling.
''It's difficult to be able to meet all the requirements and quality
issues when you have such a workload,'' says the DCF's Amy Karimipour,
director of human resources. ``We're looking at how we can stabilize
those folks.''
`SHE MUST COME BACK'
The phone in Antigua's cubicle rings again. This time it's the mother
of a 14-year-old girl whose case Antigua is handling.
The mother tells Antigua her daughter was recently picked up trying to
cross the border into Mexico with her boyfriend. The Border Patrol
later released her.
The girl is pregnant again -- her second child -- and is afraid to
come home to Florida, the mother says in Spanish, her voice taut with
near-hysterical concern.
''You must tell her she has to face responsibility in her life,''
Antigua informs the mother. ``Tell her we'll try to help her meet
whatever needs she has. But she has to face responsibility.''
OUTSIDER
Night is falling, the sky drained to a washed-out pink behind the
jagged silhouettes of palm trees, and Antigua is still on the job.
He has long since sweat through his suit. He sits on a worn couch in a
modest house in Homestead, the walls decorated with dolls and
Christmas cards.
This family, to whom Antigua is paying his required monthly visit, has
been in the DCF system for more than a decade. After a year on their
case, they treat Antigua like an uncle.
''Hey, Mr. Antigua!'' the 9-year-old girl yells. ``Watch me do my
cheer!''
''Hey, Diony, look at me!'' another calls.
When Antigua inherited the case, the parents were drinking heavily. He
told them he was going to give them a final chance, then he would be
forced to disband the family.
He advised the mother and father to move out. A grandmother had to
move from another city to care for the kids.
Then eventually -- when he was convinced the couple were sober and
faithfully attending parenting classes, domestic-violence counseling
and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, part of the agreement they hammered
out through a ''family conference'' meeting in the Miami Model Court
Program -- he let the mother back.
The father is still being asked to stay away.
Antigua turns to the mother, a woman with long hair, jeans and a
studded leather belt. He gently inquires about whether she's keeping
the house clean, staying sober.
''How's your husband doing?'' he asks.
''He's doing well,'' the woman says.
``Is he drinking?''
``As far as I know, he hasn't been drinking anything.''
``Does he want to come back here?''
``Yeah. He does. He's having a hard time.''
Antigua jots the woman's answers on a form. And at that moment, he
betrays his role.
He's not an uncle, not a family friend who stopped by to chat. He's an
outsider, a man with a briefcase, injected into their midst by a call
to the DCF abuse hot line and now judging them, scrutinizing them,
trying to divine which levers to pull in their family structure.
<snip>