When it comes to the problems plaguing “child welfare” wrongful removal drives everything else – including caseworker turnover. Case in point: Massachusetts

A system that tears apart families at a rate 60% above the national average is driving its own caseworkers away.

The Boston Globe had one of those stories almost every major newspaper publishes sooner or later – the one about the enormous number of family police caseworkers who keep quitting and how this adds to the terrible turmoil faced by children and families caught up in the system. 

But this story took things a step further than most.  Every story blames high stress and low pay.  But the Globe story also cited something else: a job that had become like an assembly line, processing children and families, where the workers felt they weren’t helping anyone.  Citing Ethel Everett, a leader of the caseworkers’ union, the story explains that 

the reality of the job clashes with many new employees’ idealism.  

“They think they’re going to be working with families, helping families to engage in services, to be self-sufficient, to move on to higher education,” Everett said. “The reality is we are moving kids night to night, we’re driving kids across the state for one-night placements to get them to school, we’re putting bandages on situations.”… 

A worker from [the Department of Children and Families] Chelsea office, who asked to not be named, left DCF in early 2024 after about two years, frustrated and disillusioned. “They market that they’re here to help families, but some of the situations it just felt like I wasn’t,” he said. 

The story puts a lot of the blame for this on high caseloads.  But it also offers a clue concerning why the caseloads are so high.

The story begins and ends with the story of Maria Toscano and her desperate efforts to schedule a visit with her children in foster care. She discovers that the caseworker she’d been texting – her fifth in less than a year - had left the Massachusetts family police agency, (DCF), and no one at DCF had bothered to tell her. 

At the end, the story circles back to Toscano and reveals why her children were taken in the first place.  She was not accused of beating them or raping them or torturing them No, as happens so often in Massachusetts and across the country, the children were torn from Toscano because she was, herself, allegedly a victim of domestic violence at the hands of her husband.  Taking a child under those circumstances causes the child even more trauma than taking the child for other reasons – that’s one reason it’s illegal to do it in New York. 

Ah, but DCF would surely remind us, that wasn’t the only reason.  According to the story, Toscano’s husband 

was also cited for substance abuse, according to DCF records she shared with the Globe. She was also cited for a history of violence and mental health concerns, though there is no allegation she was violent with her children. 

In other words, probably nothing that couldn’t be fixed by removing the actual abuser instead of the children and then getting Toscano the kind of high-quality therapy that wealthy people can simply go out and buy. 

And, in fact, Toscano tried. But it wasn’t enough: 

Toscano has records of repeatedly enrolling in domestic violence counseling and therapy over the past year, yet the frequent changes in caseworkers leave her feeling like her benchmarks for success keep changing. This fall, DCF shifted her children’s goal from reunification to adoption, she said. 

We don’t know if this was done at the behest of Caseworker #5 before leaving or maybe it was Caseworker #6 after reviewing the file left by Caseworkers 5,4,3,2, and 1.  Whatever the case, as Toscano says: 

“I did all those things and my kids have not been reunified.” 

This is not an aberration.  It is a symptom of the culture of contempt for families and a lust for child removal that has characterized Massachusetts child welfare for decades.  That’s largely a result not of frontline workers’ desires, but pressure from dreadful leadership at DCF compounded by constant hectoring from the state’s so-called “child advocate” Maria Mossaides.  The result: a state that, as of 2022, the most recent year for which data are available tore apart families at a rate 60% above the national average and nearly double the rate of neighboring Connecticut, even when rates of family poverty are factored in. 

In addition to the enormous harm that does to the children, it deluges caseworkers.  That makes the caseloads too high, so workers who really want to help families can’t provide any help.  So they quit. 

So here’s how to keep good caseworkers on the job: 

● Uproot the culture of removal.

● Find leadership for DCF that wants to uproot that culture and will grow a backbone and stand up to the likes of Mossaides. (That’s what happened in Connecticut.)

● Invest in high-quality family defense, basic help to ease the worst stresses of poverty and safe, proven alternatives to foster care. 

Then the cycle can be broken.  The caseloads will come down, and good workers will stay. 

Because when it comes to the problems plaguing “child welfare” wrongful removal drives everything else – including caseworker turnover.