LANCASTER, Calif. – Social workers at the Department of Children and Family Service are feeling the weight of scrutiny following a string of recent child deaths.
This week a great-grandmother filed a lawsuit against DCFS in response to the death of her great grandson Noah Cuatro, the 4-year-old boy who died in Palmdale as a result of questionable injuries. The great-grandmother is claiming Noah died after countless reports of abuse made to DCFS and a dozen calls to the child abuse hotline.
Noah’s death followed two others in the Antelope Valley. Eight-year-old Gabriel Fernandez of Palmdale died in May 2013, and 10-year-old Anthony Avalos of Lancaster died in June 2018.
DCFS Social worker Janet Nichols says spending time with each child is even more critical in the wake of these child deaths—many of whom had cases out of her Antelope Valley office.
“I know a lot of workers are fearful, you know what if I’m the next one,” Nichols said. “If we check on a kid today that doesn’t mean they are going to be ok tomorrow. That’s something I try to stress to my coworkers. We can’t take it home and we can’t second guess ourselves. We go a lot on intuition and checking with management and brainstorming to see if a kid is safe.”
Nichols became a social worker 15 years ago, after being a foster mom to 43 kids in the span of 10 years.
“I thought I could make more positive changes and reach more kids as a social worker. So I went back to school in my 40s and became a social worker,” Nichols said.
Currently she has 27 child cases and is required to visit each kid once every 30 days. For her that is roughly one kid a day.
She spends most of her time in the car. The kids live all around Lancaster and the Antelope Valley. Some are in Los Angeles and Chino, others are in Bakersfield and Yucca Valley.
“I spent five hours on the road to see two children yesterday,” Nichols said.
Where a kid lives today can change tomorrow. Many kids move from foster home to foster home, which means new routes for Nichols.
She drives to see if they have enough food, are going to school, and whether they are safe. It’s a responsibility that can exhausting both physically and emotionally.
“I see workers crying and falling apart,” Nichols said. “Some say they don’t get appropriate supervision but I think sometimes we have to realize if there are 6 people in our unit and they all have 20 cases, how many does our supervisor oversee, right? And they are trying to stay on top of everything as well. The daily grind is just hard for all of us.”
She still loves her job and says she works every day to make sure each kid is taken care of. But she is not yet convinced the system is doing all it can.
“Sometimes I’m not sure if the system itself works. I think we cause a lot of trauma,” Nichols said. “A lot of our kids have frequent moves from home to home. We don’t have a lot of foster parents who commit and say I will be a foster parent no matter what.”
But Nichols says she is committed to each kid, no matter what.