A week ago yesterday was our national celebration of American mothers. But so often I find myself thinking about the children who aren’t being mothered, even if many of them live with the women who birthed them.
These are the children most at risk for abuse or neglect, the children whose plight is often forgotten until it becomes front-page news.
The heartbreaking death of 5-year-old Jeremiah Oliver still haunts me. The Fitchburg boy was missing for weeks until his body was found stuffed in a suitcase left by the side of the road. The Department of Children and Family Services or DCF had assessed his mother as stable enough to care for him, but the social worker assigned to make sure of that missed 8 mandatory visits. The investigation into Jeremiah’s death exposed an agency with an outdated structure, a lack of oversight, and most importantly, burned out social workers crushed under the weight of heavy caseloads.
For kids like Jeremiah, DCF is their last best hope for protection. But the perennially underfunded agency is only as good as its resources—and there are no perks here -- MBTA managers may have taxpayer funded free cars, but DCF social workers do not.
Public outcry forced immediate action after Jeremiah’s death. His social worker, 2 supervisors and later DCF chief Olga Roche were fired. Newly appointed chief Erin Devaney hired 230 new social workers with the goal of reducing the average heavy caseload of 25 cases to the optimal 15.
That was a year ago and DCF now has a new chief Linda Spears. Spears led the independent investigation into DCF ordered after Jeremiah’s death. Changes to internal systems—upgrades and new equipment-- have been put in place, but heavy caseloads are still at crisis levels. Now a preliminary report by the Ripples Group says the agency has an overwhelming backlog of appeals by family members and other caregivers fighting to reverse a DCF ruling of abuse or neglect. The Ripples Group – hired to investigate by the Office of the Child Advocate — reports that the wait time for a hearing is months and sometimes years, leaving children in a horribly dangerous limbo.
A year ago the legislature allocated 40 million in additional funds to the agency. And when Governor Baker submitted his first budget earlier this year, he proposed continuing this supplemental funding as well as an additional 29 million, including 2.2 million for Family Resource Centers. An acknowledgment the problem is large.
In the year until next Mother’s Day, let’s remember there are 40 thousand children under the protection of the Department of Children and Family Services. It shouldn’t take another Jeremiah Oliver death to remind us what’s at stake here is a matter of life and death.
