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.
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