Episode 2: Case Workers Face Front-Line Chaos
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CLAIRE HAMLET, HOST: Welcome back to “Virginia’s Foster Care: Crawling Through Broken Glass.” I’m Claire Hamlet. In this episode, Case workers Face Front Line Chaos, I’ll follow the daily challenges that social workers face as they run the foster care system.
OLIVIA DILLON: It’s real time. It’s reactive. It’s chaos.
HAMLET: Olivia Dillon is the assistant director at Caroline County Department of Social Services. She says there is no way to plan ahead in child welfare—because no two days look the same.
DILLON: People will always say, well, what’s a typical day look like? I can’t tell you a typical day. You know, if you’re a person that likes to get up or you like to end your day with a list that I’m going to do all these things tomorrow, this is not the job. This is not the job for you.
HAMLET: Most of the chaos occurs during emergency removals—when children are taken from their homes because of concerns for their safety.
That’s when the clock starts ticking. Children are immediately assigned a social worker who must coordinate an initial placement—typically meant to last about a month, until the first court hearing. In the meantime, the social worker drafts a family plan—a roadmap outlining the steps parents must take to regain custody of their children.
Carroll County Social Worker Jessup Lambert says when a child enters care, the first step is often reaching out to relatives—an aunt, a grandparent, someone the family trusts. Foster care becomes a fallback when there’s no relative or close friend who steps up.
JESSUP LAMBERT: We have something that’s called, basically a kinship waiver. So, if a child comes into care and let’s say the uncle wants to serve as placement but isn’t an approved foster parent, we can start what’s called the kinship waiver. It’s a process, and it basically allows them six months to become an approved foster home. So we would, we would do the, within 72-hours of the child being placed, let’s say, with the uncle, we would have to do an environmental checklist, like safety checklist of the home. We’d have to do a walk-through of that as well as the 72 hours to complete the central registry checks, and they would have to be fingerprinted and kind of do the criminal checks as well. But then they would have six months, really, to complete the rest of the requirements to become an approved foster home.
HAMLET: Lambert says his department in Carroll County rotates weekend duty among the team. The worker assigned is expected to stay on call overnight—ready to respond to any emergency that comes in.
LAMBERT: It doesn’t matter if it’s 2 am on a Saturday morning, a lot of times they’re pulling somebody over. It can be drugs. It can be anything.
HAMLET: Emergency removals can happen at any time. Even after the DSS office officially closes for the day.
LAMBERT: If a child comes into care after hours, there’s been times that the child, we’ve got a visitation room here with couch and blankets and pillows, and the child sleeps there. And the workers, they’re kind of reaching out to relatives that the parents have identified, just trying to see if there’s anybody, before the child can come into care. But, but sometimes it’s a last resort.
HAMLET: Eric Reynolds leads the Office of the Children’s Ombudsman. He says the scramble in DSS offices happens a lot. He investigates complaints about the state’s child welfare system. He can only make recommendations for change.
ERIC REYNOLDS: Any given week, there’s about 25 to 30 kids who are either living in an agency or, you know, sleeping in an agency office or at risk. Most of them are at risk of that, they’re in a placement, but they’re at risk of coming in and staying in an office agency. So usually there’s like, maybe less than five that are actually staying in an office per week.
HAMLET: If social workers can’t find placements for children, if they can’t let them sleep in offices any longer, they say they have no choice but to send kids far from home to other counties.
LAMBERT: Just because they come into foster care in Carroll County doesn’t mean that they go to a foster home here in Carroll County. The way that it works, we can place them anywhere in Virginia. I’ve got kids all the way out in Lee County, so basically the Tennessee line. I’ve had kids at Virginia Beach, and I’ve had kids all the way as far north as Leesburg, so almost Maryland.
HAMLET: And that distance doesn’t just impact the kids. It creates a huge logistical burden for the social workers who are responsible for monitoring the children.
LAMBERT: There’s some times that you may spend four and a half hours driving somewhere for a 15–20-minute visit, just checking on a, checking on a child, and coming back home.
HAMLET: And some kids end up in settings that are more restrictive than they should be in, just because it’s the only bed available.
Virginia’s foster care system has four tiers of placement. Tier one is comprised of local approved foster families. Therapeutic foster homes make up the second tier. DSS relies on private agencies to screen and approve therapeutic foster homes. The third level includes group homes. The highest level includes secure treatment facilities for children with delinquency or criminal behavior.
REYNOLDS: Unfortunately, we have too many kids in congregate care, whether it’s a group home, therapeutic group home, or residential treatment facility. We’ve got too many kids. Those should only be when it’s absolutely necessary. We need to have more families, more family environments, regular family environments for these kids.
HAMLET: The road back to family isn’t always clear, even for children placed closer to home and in appropriate settings. Dinah Hupman, director of the DSS Rockbridge office, says it’s also often not clear for parents who need to meet requirements set by social workers. Parents are told that they need to get counseling for substance abuse and mental health issues. They also are told they must get jobs and secure stable housing.
DINAH HUPMAN: The biggest obstacle to this is finding those resources within our local area. Of course, like I said, we are, we are finding we’re sending more and more people outside of our local area to try to get those resources. And then even at that, there’s a waiting list. And when our time frames say that we should have these children reunified six months, no later than a year, but we’re asking a parent to get on a waitlist where they’re not getting into services for three or four months later. It really makes it hard to meet those time frames.
HAMLET: And sometimes these resources act as a logistical barrier.
REYNOLDS: Unfortunately, what we see are the boilerplate foster care service plans like okay, parenting classes, substance abuse treatment, drug screens, you know, just going through, and you need to do a psychological evaluation, and probably a detachment assessment too. All this stuff that really is meaningless in the long run.
HAMLET: But Lambert, the senior social worker in Carroll County, says the service plans are generic at first because social workers need to figure out what’s going on in the family.
LAMBERT: You don’t necessarily want the, the cookie cutter plan. I mean, each plan is supposed to be, like, case specific, but generally, I mean, we may put a psychological in a lot of them, because if we were involved time and time again, it’s like, well, let’s just see if there’s something more in depth there that we’re missing.
HAMLET: Lambert says it’s hard for social workers to find the perfect mix needed to protect a child and help parents.
LAMBERT: I guess you’re wanting to make sure everything is covered, but at the same time, you don’t want to put 50, 50,000 services in place. And that’s, the parents just get overwhelmed, which it’s, it is a lot. But again, your child’s in foster care, so that’s the last resort there.
HAMLET: Jessica Martin, a CPS worker from Carroll County, says once a child enters foster care, expectations for parents only grow.
JESSICA MARTIN: If your child is into foster care, you have to go from being a good parent to a super parent to be able to get your child out of foster care. And there’s a timeline on that. And if you can’t do that in that timeline, then, then they’re going to look at terminating your rights.
HAMLET: Martin says DSS doesn’t stop monitoring if a child is returned home.
MARTIN: Even the child being returned back to your home, that’s just, that’s not the end of it. We’re going to continue to be involved, and lack of participation in services and doing what you need to do, your child can be taken out of your home again. And the second time is not going to be as simple and easy as the first time, because you’ve had the services the second time go around. I mean, you’ve had the services, they’ve been in place, you’ve been working on them. You were able to get your kid back, and you were just like, Oh, I’m done, and we’re not going to keep going around and around.
HAMLET: Attorney Valerie L’Herrou works with families navigating the system at the Virginia Poverty Law Center. She says social workers often engage in what she calls “goalpost moving,” which happened in one mother’s case that she handled.
VALERIE L’HERROU: We want you to do family therapy with the youngest child before she comes home to you. So, she did that. She got a job. She got a place to live. She went to weekly appointments with her younger child in child therapy. So, everyone said, okay, great. Everything is going wonderfully. Now, you know, we want to reunite you with your daughter, but you know what? Before she comes home, we think that these therapy appointments are going so well. You should go to two therapy appointments a week.
HAMLET: L’Herrou says shifting expectations are often rooted in bias—particularly toward families living in poverty.
L’HERROU: We’re talking about people who are low income, who are under a lot of stress, who often come from chaotic backgrounds themselves.
HAMLET: L’Herrou says she believes social workers mean well.
Reynolds agrees. But he says the plans that social workers draft can end up doing more harm than good.
REYNOLDS: If they’re not done at the right time for the right reason, then don’t do them at all, because they’re a lot of, they’re expensive, and you’re wasting a lot of taxpayer money doing them because they’re just going to tell you exactly what you want to hear.
HAMLET: Social workers in Virginia are stretched because of their caseloads. In Rockbridge County, Hupman says she is forced to take on nearly double the state-recommended caseload. She has 27.
Each case usually means more than one child. Dillon, the social worker in Caroline County, says many social workers wind up quitting.
DILLON: I think the attrition rate for child protective services workers is like 15 to 18 months.
HAMLET: One in four new DSS workers leave within their first two years, according to the 2020 Virginia Commission on Youth Report. The report blames low pay and high caseloads.
DILLON: They’re not leaving Child Protective Services to go make more money at a different agency. They’re leaving the field because it is so demanding, the burnout risk is so high.
HAMLET: Reynolds agrees.
REYNOLDS: They can go to the Chick-fil-A and work and make a lot more money with a lot less stress and not have to be on call and not have to deal with angry parents all the time.
HAMLET: Martin, the CPS worker from Carroll County, left the agency in 2021 after more than a decade on the job. She says it wasn’t just burnout—it was the sense that she was being overwhelmed with the hardest cases, and she didn’t get enough support.
MARTIN: People are constantly, like, bashing you about everything. Whether it’s on the news, or on Facebook, or you know, over the phone or in public. And I was at a restaurant one day, and the lady that was working there, and I had on a pink hoodie, and I was up at the bar, and she was like, “the lady in the pink hoodie works at DSS!”
HAMLET: Turnover among social workers got worse almost every year from 2019 to 2022, increasing from 17% to 25%, according to the latest data.
REYNOLDS: You know, since COVID, they’ve, they lost a lot of workers, and they lost a lot of experienced workers. And so, what we have left are folks that are not necessarily qualified to make the decisions that they’re making, or have the skill sets to be able to deal with the families with all the challenges that the families face or have.
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HAMLET: Outdated technology also makes a difficult job sometimes nearly impossible. Virginia’s case management system, known as OASIS, is notoriously slow and clunky.
MARTIN: You can’t copy and paste into it. You have to write down case numbers if you want to go look up a case when it’s been case connected. It’s just not, it’s not easy to use and very time consuming.
HAMLET: It’s been in use for decades—and hasn’t aged well. As Reynolds put it, OASIS resembles “an old Nintendo game.”
And it’s not just OASIS.
Virginia is the only state in the country that still processes by hand a form that enables states to get reimbursed by the federal government for a portion of the costs associated with foster care, including housing, food, and case management.
The forms include information about a child’s eligibility, their family background and incomes, as well as placement details. Filling out the form is slow, labor-intensive, and susceptible to clerical errors that can delay support.
OASIS is so outdated, it’s not even compliant with federal guidelines.
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HAMLET: L’Herrou, the Virginia Poverty Law Center lawyer, says the state’s child welfare system is fragmented.
L’HERROU: We have the state Department of Social Services, which, you know, puts out all the policies and guidelines and directs the state and federal funds to the local departments. And then we have 120 local departments that all do their own darn thing.
HAMLET: That means that families get treated differently, depending on where they live, not just what they need.
The counties also vary in their abilities to provide counseling and steer parents to other services. One county could be rich with resources for a parent. And the one next door may have nothing.
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HAMLET: Dillon, the assistant director at Caroline County DSS, says the job means navigating impossible choices—between the safety of children and the goal of keeping families together.
DILLON: You just have to hold on to that little bit of positivity, or those success stories, and you have to, sometimes you have to ride on that for a long time till you get that next one. But as long as I think, for me, though, it’s being able to see like today, I made a difference in the life of this child.
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HAMLET: Up next, “Parents Can’t Win.” Luke Fountain will track the barriers that parents face in the legal system.
To read the full story, visit our investigative reporting page on the Rockbridge Report’s website at rockbridgereport.wlu.edu.
Music credit: “Mystery Box” by Amir Marcus