Social worker shortage

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Tuesday, the 22nd of March, 2022.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. First up on The World and Everything in It: improving foster care.

A handful of states are facing a severe social worker shortage. West Virginia recently reported that Child Protective Service vacancies there are at crisis level.

In Idaho, lawmakers there are recommending the state hire more social workers and pay them better.

BROWN: Child welfare advocates recommend 12-to-15 caseloads per social worker. In Tennessee, some are juggling three-to-four times that load, leading officials to say the state’s facing an “unprecedented” turnover of caseworkers. In one Florida county some individual caseworkers were responsible for more than 80 cases. WORLD’s Lauren Dunn has more.

LAUREN DUNN: Alexa Muncy started working as a social worker at an Indianapolis nonprofit foster care agency after graduating with her master’s degree.

MUNCY: I went in very optimistic as it was my first like, adult job. So I was very gung-ho and really, was just willing to take on a lot of different things, and was trying to be as helpful as possible. But I did not anticipate it to be so all encompassing.

Muncy said it wasn’t uncommon to get phone calls from foster families outside of work hours. And she found it hard to leave work at work.

MUNCY: These stories that you hear from the kids were just heartbreaking experiences. And so you would go home. And it was just hard not to stop thinking about them. Or if the kid ran away, worrying about where they were, were they going to come back. Or when kids were maybe reunified a little bit too soon, and you didn't feel good about everything being lined up. There's just a lot of worry, because everything was kind of out of your control in the role that we were in.

Mirean Coleman is a clinical manager of a clinical team at the National Association of Social Workers. Coleman doesn’t think there is a shortage of social workers. She said that the latest numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show the social work field is growing, despite challenges during the pandemic.

COLEMAN: There were social workers who were very reluctant to go into the homes of some of the foster care workers for an evaluation. And as a result of that, there were some who left the field...I haven't seen any evidence that it created a shortage.

But Coleman recognizes that foster care is a challenging field to work in.

COLEMAN: It is a burnout field. Workers work very hard. And they move on to other areas…You're working with a group of children who may be abused, abandoned or neglected. And it is very challenging to work with the group, especially when you're trying to locate an appropriate foster home, and also seek the resources that the child might need. And that can take up a lot of the social worker’s time.

After working as a social worker for two-and-a-half years, Alexa Muncy became a supervisor—while still taking on some direct casework. As a case manager, she usually oversaw about 5-7 people.

Muncy said that her group was not fully staffed about half the time, and added that some social workers moved on to other employment after a year or less at the job. One common reason people left was low pay.

MUNCY: They felt incredibly stressed and like there weren't enough hours in the day to get things done. Because on top of the work you're doing in the field to support everyone, you also then have treatment plans and paperwork and documentation that goes along with all of it. So then that falls behind and then you become non-compliant with your job responsibilities, and you become overwhelmed.

According to Muncy, she and her supervisor sometimes took on higher caseloads to keep their caseworkers from feeling overworked. She worried that if she left, she might be leaving some foster families without needed support. But after her supervisor left, Muncy felt she could no longer stay. She left the foster care field on New Year’s Eve—2020—and is now a middle school behavioral health therapist.

Jami Kaeb and her husband Clint have 8 children ages 10-19, including three they adopted through foster care.

KAEB: I see so much turnover in this field, because it is a difficult, difficult job. But imagine a child who has been taken from their home and been removed from everything that they know, even if it was unsafe, it was what they knew, right? So then they meet their caseworker and now this caseworker becomes a person who is safe in their life. Well, when the caseworker transitions and leaves, that feels like a whole nother rejection to this child.

In 2011—the year after they started fostering—the Kaeb’s launched The Forgotten Initiative, an organization to help churches find ways to meet needs in their local foster care communities. There are now 40 TFI groups around the country.

Much of their work involves building relationships with agency workers. Kaeb says that TFI volunteers have written thank you notes for social workers, held appreciation events, and delivered snacks and other gift packages for holidays like Valentine’s Day or May Day.

KAEB: We're not here to meet needs that we think they need. We're here to listen and learn and then take what we've learned, and find creative ways to meet those needs.

Kaeb says that churches can play an important role in supporting social workers in foster care.

KAEB: God calls us to be responsible for those who others often overlook, right? Or to care for those who are often forgotten. And I would say our caseworkers are often overlooked, misunderstood, forgotten. We have a responsibility to be Jesus to each other, to show his love.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Lauren Dunn.

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