The Associated Press State & Local Wire
March 29, 2005, Tuesday, BC cycle
Keeping children safe is a fast-paced, high-stress job; This is the first in a two-day package on Child Protective Services investigators in San Antonio.
BYLINE: By BOBBY ROSS JR., Associated Press Writer
SECTION: State and Regional
LENGTH: 1744 words
DATELINE: SAN ANTONIO
A typical worker’s rough day: The copier broke down. The boss was in a bad mood. A client failed to pay an invoice on time.
Social worker Emily Winfield’s rough day: A woman gave birth to a heroin-addicted baby. Toddlers found playing outside – naked and unsupervised – spent another day away from their mother. And her telephone message light kept flashing, a sign of more children in need.
In the fast-paced, high-stress world of Child Protective Services, new reports of abuse and neglect pour in daily and every second of delay could leave a child in an unsafe – and potentially deadly – situation.
“My head hurts every day,” said Winfield, a 26-year-old recent college graduate hired as a CPS investigator in October. “I thought it was just me, but the other (investigators) said their heads were hurting too. I guess, I don’t know, maybe it’s stress.”
Gov. Rick Perry and top state lawmakers have made improving CPS a top priority this legislative session after a number of child abuse deaths in Texas. In some cases, state caseworkers had investigated whether the children were possible victims of neglect or abuse and decided the children were safe to remain with their parents.
A state review ordered by Perry found that CPS investigators – many juggling 70 or more cases a month – often took too long to visit suspected abuse victims and closed their cases too early. A 51 percent annual turnover rate among CPS investigators also hampers the agency, the review found.
Legislative proposals include hiring additional caseworkers, increasing investigators’ pay and using new technology to reduce workloads.
“I hope change comes about, because I think it’s going to be hard for the agency to keep people if change doesn’t come about,” said Audra Moy, a 29-year-old senior investigator.
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Someday, Winfield hopes to go to law school.
For now, the criminal justice graduate said she works 50- to 60-hour weeks and makes less than $29,000 a year.
Her 1998 Toyota has 73,000 miles on it – and counting – as she drives all over San Antonio, trying to keep up with dozens of cases.
She belongs to Unit 86 – one of two new Department of Family and Protective Services initial assessment units formed in October to help deal with a backlog of cases in Bexar County, which includes San Antonio. In 2004, 77 Bexar County investigators were assigned 14,525 cases, state records show. That amounted to about 189 cases each, many taking days and weeks to complete.
Five of the six investigators assigned to Unit 86 – including Winfield – joined the agency within the last five months. The exception is Moy, a six-year veteran. All are women – not that unusual in an agency where most employees are female.
Deep down, caseworkers understand that what they do makes a difference, said Melissa Tijerina, Unit 86′s supervisor.
But that idealistic notion can become lost in the day-to-day flood of investigations, paperwork and second-guessing, Tijerina acknowledged. To help deal with the emotional toll, a secondary trauma specialist occasionally meets with the unit.
Moy, the mother of a 21-month-old son, said investigators must learn to put aside their personal feelings and “go from there.”
But she said, “There are days when I go home and I tell my husband, ‘I don’t want to do it anymore. I want to quit.’ … You just have to take a step back and try to realize why you’re here.”
Tijerina, who has 10 years of CPS experience, said she does her best to train and motivate her new proteges, as evidenced by a pink note in 25-year-old Laura Gutierrez’s cramped cubicle.
“Great work on the assigned cases,” the handwritten message declares. “It is obvious you care about keeping kids safe. Thanks!”
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A 5-year-old boy afraid his abusive stepfather might kill him. A 6-month-old girl hospitalized with unexplained fractures from her neck to her feet. On a recent Thursday, these were just a few of the matters facing Unit 86.
The night before, Gutierrez had worked until 8 p.m. investigating a report that a 35-year-old man had put a pillow over his 5-year-old stepson’s head and then held the child under water. CPS does not identify reporting parties, but the lead could have come from a school official, a neighbor or even a relative.
Gutierrez learned that the man also had beaten up his 21-year-old wife – pregnant with her fourth child – and forced her to eat only one meal a day because he considered her “fat and ugly.”
“To have a 5-year-old tell you that he’s afraid to go home because his stepdad is going to kill him, you begin to worry,” said Gutierrez, who earned her degree in psychology.
When visiting homes, CPS caseworkers carry a badge but no weapons – although they occasionally bring police with them when they fear the situation might get out of control. (In early March, two CPS workers fled on foot after encountering shotgun fire at a house they visited near Alice. The mother of a 9-year-old boy was arrested.)
The boy’s stepfather was not home when Gutierrez showed up without a police escort. After talking with the boy and listening to the woman describe four years of domestic abuse, Gutierrez said she gave her a choice: “Either she was going to have to protect her children or I was going to take them away to protect them for her.” The woman agreed to leave the home and spend the night at a battered women’s shelter.
That night, Gutierrez couldn’t get the family out of her mind. She felt confident she had helped matters.
“The majority of time, you hear nothing but bad stuff,” she said the next day. “But trust me, there’s a lot of good stuff that happens. Like, you didn’t see what I did last night on the news.”
That morning, Tijerina sent Gutierrez to the shelter to talk with the woman again and to discourage her from returning home.
“I really want her to make contact today to make sure that this woman understands that, ‘We think you did a really good thing – we know this is scary – and we want to make sure where you are and check what your plans are going to be,’ ” Tijerina said.
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Tijerina later joined Moy and five other CPS officials in a “pre-removal staffing” meeting to determine whether to take custody of a 6-month-old old girl with fractures all over her body, including her ribs, arms and right leg.
When it has time, CPS convenes such meetings so that everyone can compare notes before taking a child from a parent, Tijerina said.
The baby’s mother had brought her to a military hospital for vomiting and diarrhea, Moy explained. Just days before, doctors had treated the infant and her 2-year-old brother for pneumonia and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV. At that time, they had done a chest X-ray. When doctors reviewed the X-ray again after the child was brought back to the hospital, they discovered that her ribs were fractured.
The same child was seen in the emergency room at 1 week old for bruising to the buttocks, which her 23-year-old mother blamed on the baby’s breach position before her birth. At two months old, the girl was taken to the hospital for a fever and doctors noticed a bruised eye, which the mom attributed to the older brother throwing a ball. CPS was not notified in either case.
After discovering the fractures, doctors were running tests for brittle bone disease, a birth disorder, and the results would take at least a week. But two physicians said they suspected abuse was the cause of the fractures.
“They both feel that the tests are going to come out normal because there are other factors that will show up on X-rays that they’re not seeing,” Moy said.
In interviews with CPS, neither the father, who is in the Air Force, nor the mother could offer any explanation for the fractures. The mother suggested that perhaps nurses had been too rough in handling her daughter.
Before putting a child in foster care, CPS tries to find a close relative with no criminal record to care for the child. In this case, background checks revealed a history of domestic abuse involving both sets of grandparents.
The paternal grandmother told Moy that her relationship with her current husband was hostile until about five years ago, when the couple started going to church. “She spoke a lot about her religion and how that’s really helped her,” Moy told the group in describing her interview with the woman.
After about 30 minutes of discussion, it was decided that CPS had no choice but to take custody of the infant and her brother and find a foster caregiver, at least temporarily.
“I think you’ve got a lot of risk factors, even if you don’t know what’s causing the injuries themselves,” said Robbie Callis, a CPS program director who is Tijerina’s supervisor. “Young parents. Questionable parenting skills. The types of injuries.”
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Winfield spent the morning checking on children she had removed from their parents for neglect and placed in foster care. Before CPS took custody, she had taken pictures of the toddlers playing outside – at least one wearing no clothes – while their mother slept.
The latest case on her desk concerned a baby born addicted to heroin.
The mother claimed she had stopped using drugs in the fourth month of pregnancy, but the full-term infant weighed only 4 pounds at birth. After the hospital alerted CPS, Winfield removed the baby from the mother’s care and told her to check into a detox center. A judge later ordered the woman to pay $400 a month in child support while she worked to regain custody.
Most days, Winfield said, she feels good about the work she does. But she hesitated when asked if she would make it a year in the job.
“It’s stressful, especially when you come in and that light’s blinking and you’ve got 20 messages on there,” she said. “You’re trying to remember who’s who. Sometimes, I get confused on which case I’m working because there are so many.”
Gutierrez seemed more optimistic about her prospects for a long-term career with the agency. She said she tries to balance her job and personal life.
“Sometimes, I’ll be driving home and I’m like, ‘If I went on this exit, I can go visit this one person,’ ” Gutierrez said. “But I have to tell myself at 5 o’clock, ‘You can do it tomorrow.’ … I do OK because I make it that way. A lot of people don’t make it that way because you want to do nothing but go out and help.”
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On the Web:
CPS report: www.hhs.state.tx.us/CPS-Review.shtml
The Associated Press State & Local Wire
April 3, 2005, Sunday, BC cycle
For veteran caseworker, protecting children ‘a calling’; This is the second in a two-day package on Child Protective Services investigators in San Antonio.
BYLINE: By BOBBY ROSS JR., Associated Press Writer
SECTION: State and Regional
LENGTH: 935 words
DATELINE: SAN ANTONIO
Most nights, Child Protective Services caseworker Sheila Dismuke-Williams heads home with a mountain of paperwork, getting a brief respite from her stressful job during the dinner hour.
Dismuke-Williams tapes “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and four soap operas every day, and watches them while eating.
“I get through all five of them in an hour,” she said. “So what does that tell you?”
It tells her husband, Anthony Williams, a probation-officer-turned-cigar-salesman, that his 46-year-old workaholic wife “can do a lot in a little bit of time.” As he put it, “I’ve never seen a woman work a VCR that well in my life.”
After six years with CPS – where the typical investigator juggles 70 or more child abuse and neglect cases a month – multi-tasking just becomes a way of life. But the job isn’t for everybody, Dismuke-Williams said.
Gov. Rick Perry ordered a review of CPS after several child abuse deaths last year, including in San Antonio. While the review found CPS investigators often took too long to visit suspected abuse victims and closed cases too early, it also concluded that high caseloads and relatively low pay prompted half of new CPS investigators to quit during their first year.
Somehow, Dismuke-Williams sticks with it. She makes $36,000 a year and works on a team that handles what her supervisor described as “the worst of the worst” cases in Bexar County.
“It’s not a 40-hour week job, especially if you really want to stay current,” she said. “You have to sleep at night, and you don’t want that on your mind that some child may be in need and you just didn’t have the time.”
Dismuke-Williams deals with everything from baby-killing boyfriends to crack addicted moms, so she said it sounds strange to people when she tells them she loves her job.
“People say, ‘What? You love child abuse and neglect? Get real.’ But that’s not what I mean. Somebody’s got to do it, and I feel like it’s a calling,” she said.
Dismuke-Williams decided to pursue that calling in 1995 after her layoff from a computer services company where she worked for 15 years.
She enrolled at Our Lady of the Lake University of San Antonio, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in social work. Then she was hired by CPS, where she jokes that she has stopped only briefly to catch her breath since.
“She probably works too hard sometimes,” said her supervisor, Raquel Garza, a 14-year CPS veteran. “You have to kind of force her to take some time off.”
A poster in Dismuke-Williams’ office makes light of the constant flood of cases: “Due to the current unending workload, the light at the end of the tunnel will be turned off until further notice.” Another sign warns: “All unattended children will be towed.”
Dismuke-Williams’ husband, whom she married four years ago, spent 10 years as a probation officer, so he understands her hectic schedule, if not her passion for the job.
Williams said he quit his state job when he decided he’d had enough.
“The victories were there, but they were few and far between as far as helping people,” said Williams, 39.
So after his future bride took her job with CPS, he was skeptical.
“Is this really something you want?” he said he asked. “It seems like you’re fighting a losing battle.”
“But I love what I do,” she assured him.
In Williams’ view, his wife thrives on the stress.
“She does well even when she thinks she’s not doing well,” he said. “She questions herself, but I always tell her, ‘You’re doing better than the average person, so keep plugging away.’ I think she has a fear of getting things wrong, which makes her excel.”
She admits the job takes a lot of overtime just to keep up, often unpaid overtime.
“It’s the only job I’ve ever known where people take leave to get caught up,” she said. “So, it’s kind of like the old double-dipping thing. You’re not going to get paid because you’re on leave. But you take leave just to get caught up on your work.”
And while it’s not always easy to deal with the stresses and rigors of the job, case workers do it by reminding themselves “you can’t do everything, you know. But we try to do as much as we can,” Dismuke-Williams said.
One of the most difficult tasks is removing children from their homes, she said. It’s traumatic for children, even though they may go to a much safer and healthier environment, because their home is “all they’ve got,” she said.
She once removed a group of 11 kids from a home. “I remember the day I removed them,” she said. “I was not just physically drained, but emotionally drained. Because I mean, to see their faces, it was devastating. But later on those children were able to share with me that it was the best thing that happened to them. They didn’t know it at the time. And today they’re doing very well.”
But proving neglect or abuse can be difficult, she said, so it’s discouraging to see borderline case after borderline case until there’s enough of a chronic pattern that the state can take action.
“You just have to pray that no child dies in that situation because you may not have enough (proof) to remove,” Dismuke-Williams said. “It’s very stressful because we go in, and even though we have an assessment with 77 questions, it’s just like you meeting me here today. I have to try to figure out, ‘Are these children going to be safe?’
“So, you’re making a quick assumption based on the information that you’ve received,” she said. “It’s scary because people lie, and some folks are so good at it that you can’t possibly tell.”
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On the Web:
CPS report: www.hhs.state.tx.us/CPS-Review.shtml
The Associated Press
April 26, 2005, Tuesday, BC cycle
Keeping children safe is a fast-paced, high-stress job
BYLINE: By BOBBY ROSS JR., Associated Press Writer
SECTION: Domestic News
LENGTH: 1333 words
DATELINE: SAN ANTONIO
An alarming report lands on Laura Gutierrez’s desk at the end of the day: A 5-year-old boy is afraid his abusive stepfather might kill him.
In a nearby office, a separate complaint reaches Audra Moy: A 6-month-old girl is hospitalized with unexplained fractures from her neck to her feet.
In the fast-paced, high-stress world of Child Protective Services, new reports of abuse and neglect pour in daily and every second of delay could leave a child in an unsafe – and potentially deadly – situation.
Gutierrez, a caseworker with the Department of Family and Protective Services, scans the report on the boy and quickly realizes she won’t be going home at 5 p.m. This case needs immediate attention.
As an investigator with Unit 86, one of two initial assessment units formed in October to deal with a backlog of cases in Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, Gutierrez doesn’t always have the luxury of signing out after an eight-hour day.
In reviewing the report, she learns that a 35-year-old man allegedly put a pillow over his 5-year-old stepson’s head and held the child under water on different occasions. Child Protective Services does not identify reporting parties, but the lead could have come from a school official, a neighbor or even a relative.
The man has a violent temper: Gutierrez said allegations suggest he beat up his 21-year-old wife – pregnant with her fourth child – and forced her to eat only one meal a day because he considered her “fat and ugly.”
Gutierrez, a 25-year-old with a degree in psychology, decides to visit the family’s home.
“To have a 5-year-old tell you that he’s afraid to go home because his stepdad is going to kill him, you begin to worry,” Gutierrez said.
Last year, 77 Bexar County investigators were assigned 14,525 cases, Texas records show. That’s roughly 189 cases per person, many taking days and weeks to complete.
Five of the six investigators assigned to Unit 86 joined the agency within the last five months, with starting salaries of about $29,000 a year. The exception is 29-year-old Moy, a senior investigator with six years of experience. All are women – not that unusual in an agency where most employees are female.
A state review ordered by Gov. Rick Perry found that CPS investigators – many juggling 70 or more cases a month – often took too long to visit suspected abuse victims and closed their cases too early. A 51 percent annual turnover rate among investigators also hampers the agency, the review found.
Perry and state lawmakers are hoping to ease the burden. Legislative proposals include hiring additional caseworkers, increasing investigators’ pay and using new technology to reduce workloads.
“I hope change comes about, because I think it’s going to be hard for the agency to keep people if change doesn’t come about,” Moy said.
When visiting homes, CPS caseworkers carry a badge but no weapons – although they occasionally bring police along with them when they fear the situation might spiral out of control. (In early March, two CPS workers fled on foot after facing shotgun fire at a house they visited near Alice. A woman eventually was arrested.)
The 5-year-old boy’s stepfather was not at home when Gutierrez showed up without a police escort that night. After talking with the boy and listening to his mother describe four years of domestic abuse, Gutierrez gives her a choice: “Either she was going to have to protect her children or I was going to take them away to protect them for her,” she said.
The woman agrees to leave the home and spend the night at a battered women’s shelter.
At home that night, Gutierrez can’t get the family out of her mind. She feels confident she helped matters.
“The majority of time, you hear nothing but bad stuff,” she said. “But trust me, there’s a lot of good stuff that happens.”
The next morning, Gutierrez spends time at the shelter, talking with the woman and trying to discourage her from returning home.
Moy, herself the mother of a 21-month-old son, said investigators learn to put aside their personal feelings and “go from there.”
But she said, “There are days when I go home and I tell my husband, ‘I don’t want to do it anymore. I want to quit.’ … You just have to take a step back and try to realize why you’re here.”
Melissa Tijerina, Unit 86′s supervisor, later joins Moy and five other CPS investigators and supervisors in a “pre-removal staffing” meeting to determine whether to take custody of the 6-month-old old girl with fractures all over her body, including her ribs, arms and right leg. When time allows, CPS convenes such meetings so staff members can compare notes before taking a child from a parent, Tijerina said.
The baby’s mother had brought her to a military hospital for vomiting and diarrhea, Moy explains. Just days before, doctors had treated the infant and her 2-year-old brother for pneumonia and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV. At that time, they had done a chest X-ray. When doctors reviewed the X-ray again after the child was brought back to the hospital, they discovered that her ribs were fractured.
The same child was seen in the emergency room at 1 week old for bruising to the buttocks, which her 23-year-old mother blamed on the baby’s breach position before her birth. At two months old, the girl was taken to the hospital for a fever and doctors noticed a bruised eye, which the mom attributed to the older brother throwing a ball. CPS was not notified in either case.
After discovering the fractures, doctors ran tests for brittle bone disease, a birth disorder. The results would take at least a week. But two physicians said they suspected abuse was the cause of the fractures.
“They both feel that the tests are going to come out normal because there are other factors that will show up on X-rays that they’re not seeing,” Moy said.
In interviews with CPS, neither the father, who is in the Air Force, nor the mother could offer any explanation for the fractures. The mother suggested that perhaps nurses had been too rough in handling her daughter.
Before putting a child in foster care, CPS tries to find a close relative with no criminal record to care for the child. In this case, background checks revealed a history of domestic abuse involving both sets of grandparents.
The paternal grandmother told Moy that her relationship with her current husband was hostile until about five years ago, when the couple started going to church. “She spoke a lot about her religion and how that’s really helped her,” Moy tells the group in describing her interview with the woman.
After about 30 minutes of discussion, it is decided that CPS has no choice but to take custody of the infant and her brother and find a foster caregiver, at least temporarily.
“I think you’ve got a lot of risk factors, even if you don’t know what’s causing the injuries themselves,” said Robbie Callis, a CPS program director who is Tijerina’s supervisor. “Young parents. Questionable parenting skills. The types of injuries.”
CPS investigator Emily Winfield said she feels good about her work. But she hesitates when asked if she will survive a year in the job.
“It’s stressful, especially when you come in and that light’s blinking and you’ve got 20 messages on there,” she said. “You’re trying to remember who’s who. Sometimes, I get confused on which case I’m working because there are so many.”
Gutierrez seems more optimistic about her prospects for a long-term career with the agency. She said she tries to balance her job and personal life.
“Sometimes, I’ll be driving home and I’m like, ‘If I went on this exit, I can go visit this one person,”‘ Gutierrez said. “But I have to tell myself at 5 o’clock, ‘You can do it tomorrow.’ … I do OK because I make it that way. A lot of people don’t make it that way because you want to do nothing but go out and help.”
—
On the Net:
CPS report: www.hhs.state.tx.us/CPS(underscore)Review.shtml
