Between 2013 and 2017, several child welfare workers in Illinois were attacked or seriously threatened. In 2018, child protective investigator Pamela Knight passed away in the hospital after sustaining injuries from a brutal attack that occurred while she was trying to take a child into protective custody. In 2022, child protective investigator Deidre Silas was stabbed to death while making a home visit to check on children. It is no easy job to be a child welfare worker. They are often overseeing more than 17 caseloads, which is the maximum amount of caseloads that child welfare workers should have. These cases are often complex and each detail needs careful attention.
These cases are often harrowing and take a mental load on the employees. There have been numerous demands from the union that represents most of the Illinois social workers – AFSCME Council 31 – to improve the child welfare system and work environment for DCFS employees.
Fortunately, some of these demands have been implemented recently. One of them being a plan to hire and train more child welfare workers because DCFS is understaffed. Between 2021 to 2022, DCFS lost nearly 500 investigators. According to the National Child Welfare Workforce Institute, there is about a 21% to 40% annual turnover rate, and some spots in these workplaces often go vacant for long periods of time. The hiring process has become more streamlined by hosting career fairs where many of the hiring processes are done on the spot, shortening the waiting time to hear back from DCFS from 9 months to just a few weeks. Soon enough, the agency will have 4,000 employees for the first time in decades.
With more DCFS child welfare workers, there also needs to be more protection for them. Although there is a buddy system for child welfare workers to go in pairs while doing home visits, a law enforcement officer can be called to accompany a child welfare worker for protection during high-risk reports. In the Springfield office where Deidre Silas worked, since her murder two Sangamon County sheriff’s deputies work with the DCFS staff, going with them to many removals and helping social workers check on the criminal records of persons in the homes with the children. However, in some regions of Illinois, sometimes there are not enough child welfare workers or enough law enforcement officers in the primary jurisdiction of a child welfare location to accompany a worker during a visit.
One way to provide adequate accompaniment for these workers is by the passing of House Bill 4449. HB 4449 will allow law enforcement assistance from other jurisdictions to accompany a child protection investigator during these high-risk reports. Call your state senator or representative and let them know to give their support for HB 4449. You can find your state congressmen through this website. You could also reach out to the chair, Robyn Gabel, of the Illinois Rules Committee, where the bill is at at the time of this writing, to put the bill on the agenda and make it a priority. There is hope to improve one of the major systems that protects our children, and you can be part of the solution.
This is an editorial that I find compelling. In addition to supporting a law that would let DCFS field offices seek help from law enforcement in other jurisdictions, it seems to me we need sufficient funding for the DCFS to reduce that terrible turnover and attract and retain more workers so we can get the caseloads down to something near the optimal 15 cases per DCFS worker.
Earlier this semester when we had a social work club event where staff from the Child Advocacy Center came to explain how they do forensic interviews with children, we learned that they pretty much have to regularly schedule training sessions for child protection workers because the turnover at DCFS is so high that within a matter of months a significant portion of the workforce needs the training.
The turnover reflects the high pressure and modest pay in the difficult work of child protection and child welfare work. Child protection specialists (fully trained) have salaries (as of July 2024) starting at $75,492, but child protection specialists who have recently been hired (or transferred) and are in the 6-12 month training period start at either $52,944 or $59,424. Child welfare specialists have starting salaries at $72,060. In comparison, about four years ago (in 2020) the Springfield Illinois police department paid new patrol officers about $78,000, and new firefighters started out around $75,000.
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