High staff turnover at Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families is making already difficult situations worse.

WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Laura Tillman to discuss her article written with Ginny Monk, “At CT DCF, staff turnover is high. The costs can be devastating,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. Read their story here.

WSHU: Hello, Laura, you’ve reported on a series of tragic deaths of children in the care of Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families over the past year. Is that what prompted you and your colleague, Ginny Monk, to do a deeper dive into why this has been happening?

LT: Yeah, we were really interested in, you know, all of the different ways that the Office of the Child Advocate and other stakeholders have been investigating the possible policy changes that could address some of the issues that came up. But in those discussions, we kept hearing about one concern everyone acknowledges: there’s a lot of worker turnover at DCF. So, over the past several months, we have just tried to get deep into the real picture of that turnover, why it matters, what can be done about it, and who is affected by it.

WSHU: And also, you found that the amount of money that was being spent on overtime tripled in the past five years. Why?

LT: There’s a lot of overtime being worked in some situations by people who have been with the agency a long time. One of the dynamics we heard about is that DCF has many female employees. A lot of them, you know, are in the time of life when they’re maybe having kids. And so one of the dynamics we heard about is that when people can’t do things after hours, they have family responsibilities, some of the longer-term employees end up kind of picking up the slack and helping out and doing things like driving kids to see their siblings, or other things that can’t necessarily happen during the normal work day. There’s also the phenomenon that when people suddenly leave, someone needs to do that work, right? And so people are adding these cases to their existing case loads. So I think there are a number of ways that turnover is driving overtime, but also overtime could be driving turnover, because as people work harder, they burn out.

WSHU: This burnout seems to have escalated in the past five years. You figured it started just before covid And then escalated after that.

LT: We found in the minutes of one of those meetings I mentioned that DCF said that before the pandemic, turnover was somewhere between 10 and 12%, and then post-pandemic, and this was at the end of 2023, they said it was between 20 and 30% at that point, so it could have as much as tripled in that time in just a few years.

WSHU: Now, you used one person as an example of someone who had gone through child custody as a teenager and had experienced it over a number of years and now has some children herself. Her name is Rylee Carew. Could you tell us about her, her experience, and how it illustrates the devastating impact of turnover?

LT: So Rylee, now, she’s a mom. She has kids of her own. When she started out involved with DCF, she was a two-year-old who was removed from her own mother, and she was in foster care for several years, and then adopted in first grade. Then, later, at age 16, she was actually removed again from her adoptive family, and at that point, she was in foster care again. Through those years when she was in foster care, you know, she had a lot of contact with DCF caseworkers, and what really struck me was when she talked about this one caseworker she remembered from her teenage years who was really committed, you know, seemed to be doing whatever she could at the time Rylee was pregnant, she would take her to shop for clothes and take her to Taco Bell, because that was her main pregnancy craving. And she would, you know, use money out of her own pocket, Rylee said, to pay for these things. And then one day, Rylee had a doctor’s appointment, and they told her, “You know that worker is not assigned to you anymore, you’re not going to have that worker anymore. You have a new worker.”

And she just talked about how big of a loss that was, in terms of a figure that she had come to trust disappearing overnight, which, you know, for a kid in her situation, was something that happened to her a lot in her life; trusted adult figures who sort of betray that trust or disappear, but also that they didn’t tell her why this had happened, and the message that that sent to her too was, you know, you’re not even worthy of receiving some kind of explanation from us about this. So I think it’s like it’s an important perspective to hear, because turnover among child welfare agencies is very common. It’s a really hard issue for agencies across the country, but it does have real costs on the children and families that the DCF serves, and I think that her perspective illustrates that.

WSHU: Now you’ve talked with the past commissioner and incoming commissioner, what is the state doing about this? How are they tackling this problem?

LT: Yeah, I think, to their credit, they really see this as a true concern. They’re working in a number of ways. They’re establishing new, you know, mentoring programs for existing workers. They’re doing what they call state interviews, which are like interviews with people who have decided to stay, to sort of identify, what are those reasons that people who do stay at DCF stay, and can they create more of those conditions for other people there. They’ve hired a bunch of new social work case aids, which are these kind of helper positions for the social workers who can do things like drive kids to appointments, so that the existing case workers don’t have such a heavy load of of tasks that they don’t really need to be doing themselves, but often have had to do themselves in the past, which just makes their workload that much bigger. So they’re, they’re trying a lot of different things. They’re, you know, trying to recruit better there. There’s a lot of emphasis on this idea that they want to make sure that the people they bring in really understand the job and are good fits from the get-go, instead of having people come in who are really not sure if it’s the right job for them and then maybe leaving very quickly. One of the pieces of data that the new commissioner, Susan Hamilton, shared was that, you know, as many workers, about 50% of workers are leaving in the first two years at DCF. So I think that shows that those first two years and kind of who you bring in, and if they’re the right fit, are really important.

WSHU: And also, pay has been an issue. They’ve really emphasized trying to pay people a lot more to attract people to stay.

LT: They do pay people well for these jobs in Connecticut. And I think that you know the pension. And you know, to be fair, people are making a lot of money from overtime. So there are also people making a good amount of money from that overtime, in addition to their base pay. So there are a number of reasons why it’s an attractive job, but I do think with the COVID dynamic, one of the sort of repercussions of COVID, in addition to the cases in DCF care being more acute, is that there are just a lot of jobs for people in the mental health field. There’s a lot of demand for therapists. There’s also a lot more work for people in mental health that can be done remotely, and the remote work is another issue in this story that we looked into, because there are a lot of people who have concerns about how much work, how much time these workers are able to work from home, and while they do DCF always emphasizes that all of those kinds of things you imagine them doing, like meeting with kids and parents and going to court is still done in person. A lot of the other work can be done from home. And some, you know, some lawmakers and others have real concerns, including Commissioner Hamilton, about how this affects burnout, because people are not coming into the office as much to get that support from their colleagues after a tough visit that they’ve made, they might just go home. On the other hand, a lot of DCF employees say they’re drawn to work at DCF because they can work so much remotely, because it’s a good work-life balance for them to be able to work remotely. So it’s a really tricky issue to figure out the remote work.