Child Welfare’s Employee Exodus

Tennessee is the latest state to quantify its difficulty in retaining trained child welfare case managers. Its turnover rate is a bit more than 25%, and almost half of its case managers leave in their first year of service. In my experience, only part of the problem is low pay. A much bigger problem is a variety of micromanagement by supervisors, vilification in the popular culture, and being blamed for everything that goes wrong in a particular case. Until we solve the problem and find a way to keep rational, experienced case managers in the system, we don’t have a hope of reforming the problems we have in our child welfare systems.