Work

Why haven't I been writing? What a week! I could explain it to you, but since it mostly revolves around my work, I think I maybe should explain that first. The company I work for, which has several offices in Wyoming, does basically 3 things that I could be involved in. We primarily contract with the Department of Family Services to do these things.

1. Supervised visits - this is what I've had very little participation in for a while now. This is when children have been removed from the home, but the parents still are allowed to have visits with the children. Our workers often transport the children to and from the visit and watch the interactions between parents and children. We are there as a safety, but unless safety is threatened, do not participate in the visit. We take notes on precisely what happens and report that back to DFS. I dislike that job because I cannot interact and it is sometimes hard to keep my mouth shut!

2. Family preservation - I am somewhat involved with this and this week was rather heavily involved. I am currently assigned to 2 families. One family has the children in the home and we were called in to help the mom create a budget, work on some parenting issues, and be sure stability is there. That case is about to be closed. My other family is a single mom whose daughter was removed from the home. We were called to work with the mom on financial and parenting issues to prepare her for her child coming home. We also transport the daughter to and from visits with the mom and currently stay with them during the visits. I really like this part of the job most of the time. It is sometimes frustrating, often time consuming, but usually in the end is satisfying as we see progress. Our goal is always stability for the children. We want to do everything possible to be sure they have a healthy, safe, stable home. We hope that is with their parents, but sometimes it is not.

3. Multi-Disciplinary Team meetings (MDTs) - I have been heavily involved in this area recently. I became involved in this area out of necessity in May of last year. When a child is involved in "the system" whether through a delinquency (they commit a crime), child protective services (abuse or neglect), or a CHINS (Child In Need of Supervision - when a child is having problems with school or at home and the parent or someone else asks for help) all people involved in caring for that child have meetings to discuss the case. Those involved are parents, social workers, therapists, school representatives, attorneys, and the District Attorney's office. We coordinate the meetings by scheduling them, notifying all parties when it will be held, directing the flow of the meeting (called facilitating), and then writing a report regarding the meeting. The main purpose of an MDT is to develop recommendations for the child. The report lists the recommendations and shows how those recommendations were developed and is distributed to all members of the team and the judge, who will make the final decisions regarding the child. I don't mind doing this part of the job, but it takes a lot of mental effort and we spend a lot of time in front of the computer - which is why I don't usually want to come home and sit in front of the computer more. We have to be quite meticulous especially in report writing. We have been training 2 new people to do this job and that's part of what has been stressful and frustrating and time consuming for me this week and in the past few weeks. We lost an employee in Sept. who was a major player in this area and since then my hours amost doubled. I am supposed to have my hours cut back to 25-30 when the new people are trained, but until we are sure they will work out, I'm still putting in a lot of time. I have been doing 6-7 MDTs per week, but this week I was involved in 10! Each MDT lasts 30 min. and they are scheduled back-to-back on Tue. and Wed. afternoon. But for a 30 min. meeting, I will spend 1 to 1 1/2 hours on the report process. You can see how my hours add up!

So that may be more than anyone wanted to know, but there's always confusion about what I do and it feels kind of good to actually write it out, in a nutshell, and see that I really do work hard! No wonder I'm tired. I think I'll go take a nap.