Hello,
This is to ensure you have a written version of my
complaint against Natalie, and other disconcerting incidents of a
pattern of behavior that rewards targeted bias in my experience with
different supervisors and talks with coworkers.
Through Natalie's
negligence, I believe she encouraged a course of action that would have
resulted in the arrest, death, or some level of foreseeable violence on
one of my assessments. I believe the violence was foreseeable because a
child, admitted to HARSHA, noted for his size, strength, and several
diagnoses related to mood/personality disorders, said he would kill his
father if remanded to his care. The child said he was afraid he would
kill his father or someone that they lived with, and could be "set off
at the slightest thing, anything really." The child reiterated this in
different forms several times over the course of a 45 minute
conversation.
When I brought this information to Natalie, she
shrugged, smirked, and laughed saying, "Dad needs to figure it out"
saying we'd swoop in when the police got called and cited Centerstone
affirming an inability to work with the father as reason enough that he
was not doing enough. She said dad needed to rely on family he stated 3
or more times he did not have, nor friends capable of dealing with the
degree of his son's mental health issues.
Father explained to me,
in detail, the extent of his serious heart condition which could kill
him upon too much exertion. Father detailed the lack of resources or
family that could handle the child. Father explained the extent of his
Centerstone therapy attempts and reasoning he did not believe they were
lending themselves to improving his son's sense of ownership of his
behavior, so he stopped playing along.
When HARSHA asked a couple
days later for what they were supposed to do, I quoted Natalie, which
was later regarded as unprofessional and documented in my mid-year
review, and Natalie proceeded to back-track her lack of direction, call
the father herself, and explain the efforts she was now willing to
engage in, after substantiating the father for neglect, on his behalf.
This is a father who called us in advance in an attempt to utilize us
for help, to be responsible, and to prevent the inevitable violence that
would come from reintroducing his son into his home.
The next incident.
Natalie
fabricated things I said, reported them to Amanda Vanleeuwen, and then
wrote in my mid-term evaluation that I did not provide evidence for
allegations that I did not make. It is unclear if Amanda wrote that I
was unable to provide this evidence or Natalie, but Amanda remained
silent when I confronted Natalie about her lie and presumably just
believed this was appropriate, given her own overhearing of my voiced
displeasure at our conduct as my desk is situated outside of her door.
People
talk and gossip and relay the unbelievable degrees of negligence, bad
advice, and malicious behavior they are witness to. Coincidentally, a
person who had recently lied to me on work we had done together, was
implicated in lying on a P.I. about a family she did not recuse herself
from assessing as she personally knew them. I did not have the P.I., nor
read it, nor claimed to have it, nor said I intended to do anything
with what I had heard because, you guessed it, I did not have the
physical evidence of it.
Natalie also construed that I alleged we
target black families for DCS cases. I was supposed to be a member of
the data team, and it's clear as day that we open a disproportionate
amount of cases as an agency against black families. That was many
months ago we were having those discussions, around the same time we
were talking around race relations and tensions in the office. I don't
even know where she got the idea that I could prove any one supervisor
or assessor was targeting black families or what I said about the
statistics that she turned into her allegation. She just simply lied in
an incredibly weird way.
The third incident.
Natalie
coached me on how to construct a narrative to create "evidence" that a
family was in more dire circumstances than they were. She highlighted
lines of a 310, denoting what she considered "allegations" that had
things like "grandma's boyfriend lives in the garage." This is a family
that both I, someone on my previous team, and we as a department have
assessed several times, as recently as a few weeks prior. The report is a
carbon copy of the report the same Community Partners person calls in
every few weeks because grandma is practically too old to take care of
child, but hasn't provided enough evidence to get the child removed, and
the child who's been with the system since she was like 5, now 15,
knows how to play it, regularly hiding evidence against her grandma, and
construing a way to get moved to her mother and step-father's home in
Ohio.
Natalie made nothing of my entire day spent navigating this
child's probation officer, Community Partner contact, step-father,
father, grandma, Ohio DCS, and even going door to door looking for
someone to remotely function as willing to respond to an emergency while
grandma was in rehabilitation for a surgery, but regarded my inability
to construct her fanciful world about the danger this child was in as
"leaving out allegations."
This is a family that, for many
months, we've all known grandma is old, we've all talked in circles as
the kid discloses something, retracts, or plays in real time how she's
going to navigate her living arrangements. This is a family emblematic
of our complete inability to take completely foreseeable situations, do
more than say "it's not crazy enough" and move on. And when I brought
the situation to as good a resolution as possible keeping all parties
informed and involved, Natalie found a way to criticize my 311 for not
including enough superfluous information. It's not about the job I did,
it's about conforming to her narrative.
Moving forward.
As
a result of me politely, but firmly, disagreeing with her perspective,
explaining the problematic nature of pigeon-holing families and
introducing non-essential information, and reminding her that my work
has been above reproach for the supervisor who trained her and has been
doing the job for 12 or 13 years, Natalie retaliated by marking up my
mid-term review to suggest I'm combative, unduly derogatory, and
negligent in my ability and willingness to record allegations or on what
constitutes a dangerous situation for a child.
Natalie then
decided to flag my mileage reimbursement, ensuring I would have to
navigate a financial hurdle. When I emailed travel about this, they told
me I was emailed on August 3, 2020 by Natalie, 4 full days after I no
longer had access to my work email, that the travel did not match Magik
and my day sheet. I do not record my travel in Magik (my attempts to
reach people often enough), no discrepancies were cited, and with Covid
dramatically diminishing how often I traveled, I was able to keep pace
with just updating it on the days I went to different locations.
Normally, I have a running physical list and input all of the locations
towards the end of the month. I submitted my travel before August when
I'm told changes were made as to how it was to be recorded.
Most
importantly, I did not lie on my travel and stuck to the same direction
that had been approved since I got hired as to how to input it. Natalie
had my personal email, I emailed her asking for a copy of my evaluation,
but chose to ignore sending any notice of this alleged discrepancy
ensuring I'd have to deal with it almost a month later.
Natalie
is persistently aggressive in her pursuit of families. She will
routinely say "This is a case" before we've ever left the building. When
I was first hired, a mom, obese with leg issues, did not answer the
door for me on two occasions, one not being home, and one because she
could not get up. The allegations were something like the child being
kinda grungy at school. Natalie's advice? Bring the cops. I didn't do
so, mom opened the door for me the next day, and she explained the
things going on with her child that lend themselves to her being grungy.
Moving on from Natalie.
I
was under the direction of Heather for a month or so. One family had a
child get outside from their faulty door. Both parents were polite,
forthcoming, showed me the door, and admitted to occasional marijuana
smoking. The mom had a previous DCS case with us for a marijuana
positive baby. She screened clean for two months, closed the case, and
regarded her caseworker as awesome.
Heather said that the child
might have gotten out of the house because mom was high. Mom told me she
was in the bathroom. Heather told me to go back and ask mom 4 times
over the course of a week to drug screen and suggested I do so in
increasingly suggestive of consequences or demanding ways. Mom declined
each time, and was getting increasingly frustrated that DCS was not
respecting her right to decline. To Heather, it's enough that she
previously had a case and smoked, regardless of our safety plan,
experience of her compliance, and actual good opinion of us in
understanding why we would be concerned.
I've occasionally been
passed to Jenna when my primary supervisor is out. I had an assessment
with a parent who admitted to having a drug problem in the past, was
currently screening, and signed a release for me to get her recent drug
screen records, but declined to screen for me. The kids were healthy,
she had documented them going to the hospital, the house was clean, I
had no evidence. Two weeks or so pass by, I had already submitted it,
and Jenna tells me to go back to this mom's house, drug screen her, and
question things unrelated to the report.
I spoke with the mom,
noticed bruising on her arm, which she had bruises on various parts of
her body the first time I met her and pointed them out as something of a
frequent occurrence given her very tiny stature. When I mentioned the
bruises to Jenna, she was angry I didn't drill down on this mom about
them, because it must be drug use. This mom went on to have a drug
incident a few days later, which was silently, with that knowing look,
regarded as evidence "more" should have been done. It's not that mom
lied to me, that I did not have evidence of drug use, or that I was able
to maintain my rapport by not treating her like a criminal, it's that
an addict relapsed, so it justifies an aggressive posture in the mind's
of some supervisors.
Probably the most disconcerting is experiences of things Britt has done or said with regard to our families.
Every
third household I walked into remembered Britt for how much he (she,
Brittany at the time) scared the living crap out of them. Britt would
threaten them, say they already had a DCS case, and generally abuse the
fear and power of the position to compel people into the narrative that
served our intervention. For the entire 2 years I spent in the office,
like clockwork I would get a callback to something Britt did or said
that a family felt scarred by.
Britt was then promoted, and one
person after another under him would tell me about a level of
inappropriate video sending or texts. They would be getting written up
for not following directives that weren't given, for not following
directions to lie to clients about their rights, and a general
disorganized mismanagement of their caseloads resulting in compounded
issues that never needed be. I reported Britt's behavior to another
supervisor and cited, regularly, when another family mentioned what
Britt put them through.
An inability to acknowledge, tame, and
work to reduce personal punitive bias destroys our credibility,
conception of ethical behavior, and ability to engage in restorative
behavior. It constitutes at least half of our ongoing directives.
In
regular discussions with nearly the entire office, as I'm actually
incredibly personable, and genuinely interested in people, I would hear
horror story after horror story about wholly inadequate training,
advice, and malicious missteps regarded as "Oopsies! Honest mistake!"
when they would inevitably end up in front of our attorneys or a judge
who would, hopefully, blow a hole through the smoke.
For the
entirety of the time I worked there, I begged for a 311 standard that
everyone could follow and everyone could ensure they would be getting
the same advice about how to write adequately. Never was the leadership
interested in doing so, and an attempt I made to create a shared vision
board of what one would look like was regarded as me having a negative
or unhelpful view of the agency by a supervisor attempting to have it
removed.
I've caught wind of at least 2, likely 3, occasions
where we've straight up fabricated the nature of a story in order to
remove children. I hate to even mention this one, as I'm positive they
would target the people involved with the details, and I can't provide
anything more but the urgent insistence that you put people under the
microscope when it comes to removals. I would only disclose who to talk
to further under sworn and sealed testimony at this point.
We
choose, over and over and over again, to regard allegations against
familiar characters as more valid than they're worth, even when the
caller will admit to using us as a retaliatory tool. When you make the
mistake of pointing this out, you're told to "do your job" as though we
are meant to remove any remote discernment or tact in the 15th time
we've, functionally harassed, a mom surrounded by neighbors willing to
keep calling for little to no reason in the span of a few weeks...that
we've safety planned with several times over...
We aggressively
destroy our reputation and rebuke or exhaust the people who work the
hardest to not let the mess of DCS spill onto the families. We cite
catch-phrases and rarely if ever actually followed policy as a reason to
never improve and never have real conversations. We send people into
the field with such a naked disregard for their ability to stick to the
facts because that serves the baked in aggressive narrative from the
leadership that we're "helping." There's also seemingly ZERO
consequences, literally ever, for anyone but the lowest, most-stressed,
and earnestly wishing for things to get better.
Here's the thing,
because I'm perpetually open, honest, and genuinely attempt to make
people's experience with me a positive one, I'm still struggling at the
idea of the families being thrown to the wolves. The place is gutted for
responsible leadership, and the new people are not going to know better
as their habits form around being punitive and accusatory. As such, if
the mechanisms within the State have no means or concern for addressing
this, it's going to be my responsibility to again bring peace to my
mind.
I will speak to any reporter that will listen. I will track
down as many former employees as I can find. I will use my very large
and trusted network of people who have relied upon me and regarded my
work as above and beyond to draw as much attention to the problems with
this office as I can. I'll flier our familiar neighborhoods with their
rights and tips for not getting stepped on. I'll explore bringing class
action civil litigation, because again, my families and coworkers like
and trust me to respect what they're going through. I'll make TikTok
videos if I have to. You need to get dramatically better, fast, because
our families deserve so much more than what you've been offering.
This isn't a joke to me.
