Chemung County CPS Grade B Supervisor and CSEA activist Chris Ellis on the job. (Photo provided by Jennifer Yannette.)
Chris Ellis has more than 15 years of experience in child protective services, and has never seen the situation of trying to help families as desperate as it presently is.
“It’s a balance of trying to get a family into a better place and leaving them in a better place than when you first found them, in the time we have,” said Ellis, a Chemung County child protective services supervisor. “Some families have one kid and some have 13 kids.”
Ellis had worked in Steuben County, moving to Chemung County 10 years ago, and also worked for a private sector agency in Broome County. In that time, he has seen an increase in paperwork, more demands for data entry on computers, more mandates from the state Office of Children and Family Services, more staff burnout and more workers leaving for other positions.
What has not changed is the amount of time to spend on cases.
“There’s just not enough time to meet all the needs, wants, demands, recommendations, etc. The fact of the matter is, CPS has a high burnout rate and the recommendations and demands are ever increasing without necessarily taking into account the staffing or time issues,” said Ellis, also the CSEA Chemung County Unit executive vice president.
“When you deal with a fatality, you need to have certain reports completed in 24 hours. If a child dies, they still expect that report, and we’re left trying to find people to complete the work,” he said. “It’s a thankless job, sometimes it’s thankless from above and sometimes from the public. People aren’t beating down our doors saying, ‘Please come to my house.’”
“Child abuse doesn’t happen between the hours of 8 a.m. and 4:30 p.m.,” Ellis said. “It’s nearly impossible to complete all of it in the time we have.”
Coupled with time restraints is the challenge of holding onto staff. Training is expensive and intermittent, taking place over six months. New hires begin to realize how high the demands are, and transfer to other positions.
“Last year, our turnover rate was 44 percent,” Ellis said. “This year, it’s already at 25 to 30 percent. We just hired seven new caseworkers and one has already agreed to not take the job for a better job.”
The increase in opioid addiction has brought a new complexity to cases.
“The cases can be more involved than what they used to be, more complex,” Ellis said.
— Lou Hmieleski
We’ve definitely noticed an uptick in cases related to heroin and opiate use, especially in the last four years. Some of the individuals are in the early stages of dependency, but many are long-term users with a chronic dependency. For these individuals, it becomes about chasing that high. Everything else — child care, getting kids to school, all of it — takes a back seat to the addiction. As caseworkers, we deal with the fallout of drug dependency and we are seeing it very pointedly in cases of pregnant women and their newborn babies, many of whom are being born with withdrawal symptoms requiring longer hospital stays and acute care.”
— Marissa Capuano-Rushford, CSEA member and
child protective services caseworker, Clinton County
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