In the latest Kern county hearings over the county’s budget crisis, Kern County Department of Human Services Director, Pat Cheadle, says county department cuts are unfairly targeting her and the agency she leads.
For some prior Kern Child Protective Services staff that’s poetic justice.
In April 2000, commissioned by the California Department of Social Services (CDSS), a report confirmed public opinion that California’s Child Welfare System is overburdened (see California’s SB 2030 Workload Study). It was found that the state’s Child Protective Services (CPS) staff is working roughly double the report’s recommended minimum standard and nearly triple its recommended optimum. The recommendations were never fully funded, caseload demands have continued to increase and California has fallen behind in addressing the overburdened system - mathematically, the work just cannot be done to the standard that's required of it.
Ms. Cheadle snubbed these facts.
In February 2009, at Civil Service Commission hearings, the new Director appeared to deflect the workload study with double-talking, explaining that when compared to like-sized California counties, Kern performed closer to those recommended standards. She seemed to ignore the obvious fact that it is still not performing to them - an ignorance that possibly comes from never having firsthand experience as a CPS social worker.
In this state-proven overburdened system where an error-rate would be anticipated, why then did Ms. Cheadle elect to fire hard-to-recruit-and-retain CPS staff for finding errors in their work - errors that her own staff has labeled as “overkill?” Were the errors excessive and flagrant and to what were they comparatively excessive and flagrant?
She can't answer that.
In fact, Ms, Cheadle’s decision was arbitrary. There is no mean, median, or mode for comparing error-rates found in unique, 6-month, “super audits” of CPS staff’s work that she ordered. Moreover, Ms. Cheadle painted those mistakes as “egregious” explaining they put children at more risk – playing off of an obvious fact in an overburdened system. Further, she did this despite that her CPS managers disagreed with her process – CPS managers, interestingly, who have had firsthand CPS experience.
Why the unique super audits in the first place?
With every child’s death, Kern CPS researches if it has had anything to do with that child’s family – regardless if the death was from abuse or neglect. Applicable past and/or present investigations are examined for CPS to learn what, if any, it could have done to possibly prevent the child’s death – a noble and needed practice. However, that practice became Ms. Cheadle’s exploit to penalize overburdened staff when inescapable mistakes were found. She targeted this staff arguing that she needed to hold them more accountable – regardless that it’s an accountability that is proven to be unreachable.
How “egregious” were the errors to her?
Not enough to go back and undo. To date, with the exception of one (which looks to be an accidental death, where no one was arrested and the children were returned to the parent), none of the other 102 mistakes found over a half-year’s time in fired CPS staff’s work have been horrible enough to correct. None of those “egregious” investigations have been re-opened or re-investigated.
Hence, her decision was short-lived. She stopped “super audits” despite that subsequent mistakes have been found in other CPS staff’s investigations where children have died. Probably to Ms. Cheadle’s realization, more “super audits” would mean virtually every CPS staff would be fired since mistakes are the standard in a broken system.
Is it fair, then, to those who have already been fired during her naive and anxious hunt for blame? Who protected those protectors?
That will probably be up to litigation that financially cannot be afforded by social workers and thus, may never happen. Ultimately, CPS staff and the families they work with suffer the most. As for Ms. Cheadle’s complaint of being singled-out with budget cuts, as is said in Spanish: El burro hablando de orejas ("The donkey talking about ears").
Harrison Trustt
PO Box 20475
Bakersfield, CA 93390-0475
(661) 496-8107
trustthar@aol.com
