Owlnotes.com

I work for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services and I've been there for 28 years. My official job title now is "Daycare Licensing Representative". The first 11 years, I worked with children who were abused and neglected. I investigated abuse and neglect, and took children out of unsafe homes. We went to court and put them in foster homes. I got out of that when I got pregnant.

I was threatened by a man whose three young daughters were being taken away from him. He had abused them, and he told me that if he lost them that he would resort to violence. He had a history of mental instability, and I decided to get into a different line of investigation.

I moved on to what I currently do, which is licensing daycares to make sure that they are safe for children. I go to daycare centers and private homes to inspect them. It's still sort of dangerous - a lot of the people are defrauding the government, and they really don't want you to find out about how they're doing it. They do their best to create a smoke screen to make you look like the incompetent one.

Well, just two years ago, my co-worker and I were locked into a daycare house by a man who threatened not to let us leave. I remember him saying "You ought to pray that you don't have an accident before you leave here." We stood there and were very afraid. Of course, we did get out eventually, but it goes to show the scare tactics that people will try and use.

They take too many children in, more than they are licensed to have. They'll claim that they're giving children a certain meal, say, "Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes," and then I'll find that instead they just had Ramen noodles. Many of these establishments are receiving partial funding from the state government, as well as the money they take in from parents, and that's just one of the ways that the violating homes skim off the top. They'll say that they're giving kids services or products that they aren't giving them.

No, not by any means. Some meet guidelines, and some don't. Unfortunately, the way that private daycare seems to be going, we're happy if the daycares we inspect just make the minimum requirements.

Yes, that's basically it. They are private in the sense that many of them are just private homes - people running a business out of their living room - but public in the sense that they are taking in other people's children. They receive some government funding, but my job isn't really to determine how or why they spend the money in the way they do. I'm there to make sure that it is a safe environment for the children.

Gosh, it's so different every day, but the paperwork is always there. We just got a computer seven years ago, and it was kind of tough to make the jump from how we had been archiving our information for all these years. We're still using carbon paper for records. It's tough to even find carbon paper any more.

I grew up traveling around the country. My father was a Master Sergeant in the U.S. Army, and we were often transferring to other places. We finally settled in Chicago, and I went to a number of high schools in the Chicago area. The last one I went to was Bremen High School.

I was interested in it, but art and music were my favorite subjects. I probably wanted to sing and create things for a living more than anything else. I used to sing solos for graduations, choir, etc. I love to sing.

Well, it was partially motivated by my father. He was ill, and he never really got the services he needed, so I thought that maybe I could do better for other people.

I was in high school, I guess, so the seed of wanting to get involved in people's lives to help them out had been planted then, though I wasn't aware of it at the time.

I went to Northern Illinois University. I was an art major. That lasted about a year; art is a really competitive field to stand out in. I started doing volunteer work. My first stretch was working for 6 months in St. Charles Youth Prison. I worked with a 16 year old who was in for murder, and I kind of liked it. So then I went to Geneva Youth Prison, and I uncovered a drug ring there, and the work was exciting. I applied for a job at Family Social Services, and I fell in love with the work. There were a lot of kids in the program with kids who came from single parent homes, and I matched big brothers and big sisters with potential candidates. This was all free volunteer work. I graduated with a degree in Family Social Services under the Home Economics major at Northern.

A mental health center hired me as a Mental Health Technician. I worked with mentally retarded adults in a group home setting. They lived in the home and I would help devise programs for them. I left when I got beaten up by one of the residents. I was left alone, and one attacked me, and I was terrified.

Well, when I got home after that day, there was a letter in the mail from the Department of Children and Family Services, asking me if I wanted work.

In a heartbeat. And I've been there for 28 years now. Before beginning to license daycares, I worked on projects like abuse and neglect in children. We worked with families who were in crises, and I worked with teenagers who were in constant legal trouble; also runaways and children in foster care.

I'm always in training, taking classes, going to seminars, and learning more.

I got in my car and drove to a town 40 miles south of here to a suburb to meet a co-worker. I was helping her with a case, because she had been having a hard time with an argumentative daycare provider operating out of a public home. We went to the home and the owner was pretty hostile, but she let us in because she had to. The owner kept nitpicking my colleague. We spent about 4 or 5 hours walking through the house and making everything was safe for the 12 kids she had in the house.

Houses are licensed to have a certain number of children based on factors like size and room and how much the owner can provide for the kids. Some people get greedy and try to put a bunch of kids in a small room, and that's when we use our tape measures to deny them.

I went through all of her records, which were incomplete, and I showed her what she would need to complete and provide for us. We also suggested other kinds of equipment that would be good to have in a group home.

A group home is the type of daycare that she was running, and it has more little children and babies than other daycares. The only educational requirements she's required to have for that is a few college credits in early childhood development, which is kind of scary. I think there should be higher standards for primary caregivers.

Anything but having them sitting in front of the TV all day. Work with the children, play with them, develop an art program for them. Take them outside and stimulate them actively. Let them play, but keep them from getting out of control.

Present my government I.D. It lets the people know right off the bat who I am, and there is a better chance that they will cooperate. Lawfully, they have to let me in to inspect.

I try to make it less so. I always come in as humbly as possible. I believe that if you come in badgering, you're going to entice people to become more hostile. So I try to be as friendly as possible about it.

You don't get rich, that's for sure. When I started this position 28 years ago, I was making $16,000 a year. Now it's probably up to around $40,000 for Social Worker 1, which is basically the entry level.

About $60,000. I have no real desire to try and climb the ladder to make a lot of money. I do it mostly for the kids.

I would get out of DCFS and set up my own private practice. I could be a counselor to families and individuals or be a social worker for hire.

No, not really. The thought had crossed my mind, but for me I feel like I need to focus on family first and be home enough to deal with all that. I also wanted to focus more on me, doing art and music, etc. I don't have the time or effort to go back to school and get a degree in therapy.

You never really leave work. My mind is always full of my work whenever I'm not actively at work. You become especially sensitive to the sort of people who you help at work, even when you're not working. You become more sensitive to things like homeless people, domestic disputes, etc. in your personal life as well.

I throw myself into my other hobbies, especially my art. It's good therapy, because I can escape from everything else and keep it separate from the job. I love to take photos, scrapbook, etc. I like to sew, I like to knit, and I still love music.

I'm not going to be there until I'm an old woman. I plan to retire at a fairly early age, and my husband and I have started an online business similar to support us. I'm not holding onto any hopes for social security to support us.

Learning to take my eyes off myself and focus on other people. The single best thing is the perspective that comes with the job. You realize all of the things that go on in the world and you're all that much more compassionate or able to empathize with people. And the added bonus is that you're sometimes able to help those people that you're now more aware of.

Well, self-growth, I guess. On a day-to-day basis, you don't know what's going to happen, and so you learn to take yourself a bit less seriously because you can never be prepared for it all. Certainly puts things in perspective.

Well, being physically threatened by providers who don't want to be exposed as sub par is certainly a con. You'd like to feel safe at your job, and in a job where you go around pointing out how people have failed to meet guidelines, you naturally run up against some hostilities. It's just part of the work. But I'd say that the biggest con of the job is a lack of support from management.

They're more worried about statistics than the individual details of what we really do. They're more interested in how many homes we visit and inspect than making sure the kids are safe, and they always want us to do more. They want to look good—lots of inspections and no problems. They would be happiest if we were just in and out of the daycares with all good marks.

That's right! Then of course they're asking why we didn't look further into these daycares and dig the stuff up. They definitely care when people are asking them why we didn't catch something. Of course, the ultimate blame is passed to the lowest levels of inspectors who license buildings. So, the con of working with any social services agency is realizing that the people you're working with, including yourself, are by no means problem-free either. And you'll never be able to help everybody.

Well, the majority of my complaints used to be that daycares were taking in too many children. Now, though, the complaints are more serious. Things like the homes having no running water, no heat, children being abused, even children dying.

Yes, definitely worse. I still hesitate to say that, because there are some providers who do a fine job of taking care of the kids, but the bad providers have gotten much worse. The bulk of my caseload is a struggle to keep the providers doing the bare minimum. A lot of times you get homes that you work up to an acceptable level, and then the next time you visit they're back to their old ways.

Well, there's a process. It doesn't happen very often. A home can surrender its license, but it never does. There would be a legal case opened against them to strip them of their license.

It's uncertain. We sit there waiting for a balanced budget to show up and fund us. Sometimes we have no idea if the funding is going to show up, seeing as we are state funded. And we need more money, because we need more workers. Social workers are more important than ever, with the state of daycares as they are.

Well, first of all they should do volunteer work. You need to have some exposure to that kind of work to find out what kind of people you want to work with. You might decide you want to work with children, or the elderly, or the disabled, etc. Plus, that volunteer work looks great on a resume. When they're actually in school, you can study whatever is attached to the kind of volunteer work you found most interesting, be that sociology, or childhood development, or gerontology, which is working with the elderly. If you're a person interested in going in social work, though, I would recommend going for a graduate degree.

It just seems to me that there are a lot of Bachelor degrees in the field right now, and that a graduate degree helps you to stand out from the crowd more and get the job that you really want.

They need to be balanced. They need to have a sense of who they are and good self-esteem, because it's very important that you understand that you won't be able to help everyone. Social work has the ability to demand a lot from you, emotionally and through hours. So you need to have outside activities like exercising, art, music, etc. You need something that is separated from your work.

Self-centered people can't hack it. Self-absorbed people don't work well in this field, because they aren't aware of other people's needs.

That I'm not in control of everything. I had too high of expectations for myself when I entered the field. I wanted to save the world. You have to learn the hard way that while you should have a desire to be perfect, you can't make it an expectation. So I guess that if I could go back and do it again, I would have more realistic expectations.