Butler County was a close second at 29 percent, with 45 departing workers. Montgomery County has only experienced a 6.2 percent loss ratio in its children services agency, with 22 of 355 staffers leaving.
Butler County Children Services director Bill Morrison said the 29 percent figure for this year — substantially up from an 8.4 percent departure rate in 2011 — is a bit skewed. The agency this fall laid off 14 people at the family visitation center, two IT workers and the director of placement services.
The move was designed to reduce an expected $2 million shortfall and is part of a major reorganization effort. Fallout from an ongoing labor dispute and three-week strike should also be considered, Morrison said.
“They’re (the numbers) not outside the box tremendously,” he said. “It’s those events that have caused us to lose this many people in the course of a year.”
Patti Jacobs, executive director of the children services agency in Warren County, said she “helped” a few of her social workers out the door because they couldn’t handle the job. She said the inherent emotional, stressful, and at times dangerous aspects of the job are just too much for many people to handle.
“When we interview people we try to be pretty open about what this job entails,” she said. “We’ve got folks coming in saying ‘I just want to help kids.’ Well, they have no idea that they’re going to be going in a house that’s crawling with mice and roaches and bed bugs and filth and nastiness and broken bodies. It’s just, it’s hard.”
Pay, benefits key
Deb Downing, assistant director of Montgomery County Children Services, said the agency offers competitive pay and benefits. However, she attributes a lot of the success in retaining workers to partnerships with universities. Like Jacobs, she said many young people come to these jobs with blinders on and experience a rude awakening when they are sent into a home to remove a child.
“Some of the colleges have child welfare training programs so we’ve been very heavily involved with that program,” she said. “We’re helping teach the classes, we’re sponsoring a lot of the students doing their field placements, so a lot of those students get hired by the county.
“They understand what the job is, they’ve completed a lot of the training, so they are very easily integrated into the workforce.”
Butler County is implementing a massive agency overhaul, front-loading services to hopefully get children reunited — if possible — with their families faster. Job and Family Services executive director Jerome Kearns said he believes both the labor dispute and the reorganization have had a big impact on what social workers call a revolving door at his agency.
“I think that the anticipation of organizational change and implementation of organizational change has led people to decide they want to do something different or go someplace else,” he said.
Union chief Becky Palmer noted that Montgomery County also has recently implemented a work flow change similar to Butler’s without a major loss of employees.
Employees leave
Jennifer Crail, who worked under the old agency model for seven years, left last month. She says she can’t stay at the agency anymore because she thinks decisions are being made for financial and political reasons, not to improve services.
Crail said management continues to erroneously, in her opinion, blame the strike, the lack of a contract and the reorganization for the high turnover. She said management doesn’t support or respect experienced workers.
“The change in work flow is not a problem or a reason people are leaving BCCS. The lack of training provided to employees expected to complete tasks outside of their area of expertise is a problem,” she said. “The lack of staff to safely implement the new work flow is a problem. The lack of clear, established guidelines to support a change in work flow is a problem.
“The complete disregard for the real barriers to keeping children safe and in their own home is a problem. The work flow does not inherently keep children any safer or provide any better service to the families we serve.”
Three county commissioners, Kearns and Administrator Charlie Young did not respond to Crail’s assertions. Morrison, answering for all, responded only with an explanation of the new work flow model and how it is expected to improve the agency outcomes.
Another former worker Doug Day, who was with the agency for three years, said he intended to stay for the long haul but policy changes and poor pay forced him to look elsewhere after he earned his master’s degree. He said hiring freezes and or slow hiring to fill vacancies also is a problem.
“After Jeff Centers left the agency, Jerome Kearns and Adam Jones stepped in and made some policy changes,” he said. “To me, it made the work more challenging and I personally thought the focus changed from helping families to counting pennies.
“Many experienced workers began to leave the agency and the agency was not replacing the departing workers quick enough. Caseloads continued to increase and morale continued to go down. It got to a point that, personally, pulling into the parking lot and walking into the building became difficult at times.”
More job fairs
Kearns addressed the vacancy situation, saying the agency will be holding a job fair on Dec. 23, when they hope to hire 10 new social workers. Regular job fairs are planned in order to avoid long delays in filling spots.
He said the laid-off workers at the visiting center don’t have social work qualifications so they couldn’t fill vacant slots. They are slightly “overhiring” with this job fair, but it won’t have a big impact on the budget shortfall, Kearns said.
“We’re not overhiring by that much, we’re only talking a couple people,” he said. “Most of these positions have been vacated by social service workers.”
Job and Family Services turnover also can be on the high end. Butler County came in the highest of the five counties surveyed with 20.6 percent and Montgomery again was the lowest at 10.2 percent. Hamilton County has a 12 percent turnover rate with 67 of 552 JFS workers leaving this year.
Moira Weir, executive director of JFS in Hamilton County, the agency that oversees human services such as welfare and food stamps, said JFS also is a job venue, like Children Services, where emotions can be charged and situations difficult to handle.
“People have to go through a metal detector because we’ve had some issues,” Weir said. “All of us in the counties are dealing with volatile populations. They are very vulnerable, they are in crisis and when people are in crisis everybody acts differently.”
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