By Clara Bates, Missouri Independent, September 19, 2022
More than half the frontline staff working in the Children’s Division at the start of the last fiscal year left by the end of the year. Some who remain take second jobs or sell plasma to make ends meet. It’s a situation advocates warn puts Missouri’s most vulnerable children at risk.
Eighty open cases of child abuse and neglect sat on Matt Cordova’s desk in 2017 during the height of the “hole I found myself buried in,” he remembers.
Twenty open cases would have been a lot to handle; 80 was impossible.
An investigator at Missouri’s child welfare department for two years, Cordova was tasked with following up on reports made to the child abuse and neglect hotline. Investigators make home visits to any child allegedly abused or neglected to assure their safety within a set timeframe.
For Cordova, who worked in a rural circuit spanning four counties, that could mean hours on the road each day, sometimes driving hundreds of miles.
Stretched thin in part because of high staff turnover rates at Missouri’s Children’s Division, Cordova found himself triaging. He only had time to establish the “bare minimum” safety requirements were met in each case before he would need to move on to the next.
It was what Cordova calls “an endless cycle of trying to keep up” that left little time for building close relationships to help struggling families avoid falling even further.
He was on-call for one week each month and could be summoned at any point, day or night, to investigate a hotline tip. The most urgent calls required a three-hour response time, often leaving him scrambling for childcare.
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