Whoever said, "Ignorance is bliss" must've been intimately acquainted with the child welfare system. Lord knows, after a dozen years in this field of endeavor, I can certainly understand the sentiment that what you don't know hopefully can't hurt you. But sometimes what you don't know can bite your tail--as I learned today!
Today I spent my fifth of the past ten work days in a mandatory training class for my job. Today's subject matter was a Federal law which, apparently, someone somewhere in our state has flagrantly violated despite its existence for at least five years. My employer is staving off millions of dollars in fines by requiring all staff who work directly with child placement (even workers who only occasionally do so, e.g. supervisors who rotate night/weekend "on call" duty) to participate in these rather thorough sessions to ensure everyone receives identical information as to what sorts of placement decision actions will & won't be tolerated by the Feds (in general, decisions influenced solely by ethnic/racial or national origin of either the child or the prospective family are verboten). Reasonable enough, though based on my experience in the office & region where I work and where all our placement decisions is driven by the treatment needs of the individual child, I was unaware of the need to go through this information. By the time the session ended, I no longer wondered why. I DID, however, wonder where the heck the flagrant violations divulged had taken place! The worst examples of violations cited were, thankfully, not from this state, but were pretty appalling (and eye-opening, as the state cited most often was a Midwestern one, not a Southern one, where everyone assumes intolerance lingers--sadly, not always inaccurately!).
Examples of violations included prospective adoptive families being advised (BEFORE any children were placed in their homes) by staff of the placing agency to move to more ethnically appropriate neighborhoods or to change their religious affiliations to suit the "needs" of the child who might be placed in their home! Other incredible tales included caseworkers carrying a variety of nuts or fabric swatches with them while meeting with prospective adoptive families to select which "skin tones" they'd accept for placement! All this "racial matching" nonsense blew my mind! I was never exposed to such nonsense growing up in the environs of New York (members of my own family were bilingual--in the case of my maternal grandfather, trilingual; one great grandmother was fluent in three languages PLUS spoke smatterings of several others!), so I have a hard time believing anyone anywhere thinks such behavior is anything but reprehensible!
Needless to say I'll be studying that law to ensure I don't run afoul of it in the future...plus getting certified to write home evaluations, an item also covered today which neither my supervisor nor I were aware of. I suspect several of our office staff will be doing so in the near future as a result.
I'll do anything I need to do to write more (especially for pay)! ;)
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