Could You be the Difference?

[Card: This video is an edited version of a video originally produced for the Indiana Department of Child Services.  The workers in this video are real child welfare workers in Indiana.  Scenes depicted in this are consistent with situations faced by Oklahoma child welfare workers. Due to mature subject matter, viewer discretion is advised.]

[Card: What do these children have in common?
Video: Footage of woman holding a newborn baby in the hospital; four young children sitting with a caretaker; a teenaged girl nodding along as someone talks to her; a teenaged boy looking sad; a teen in hospital scrubs walking down a hallway, two young boys eating a snack while standing beside a man in a baseball cap as he talks to the camera; a young child crying as an adult embraces them; a young boy playing in the swimming pool with a woman; a baby sitting in her caretaker's lap and looking up at them.
Card: Could you the difference in their lives?]

Heather Kestian, Child Welfare Worker: Welcome and thank you for considering a position in this challenging and rewarding field. To put it simply, the main mission of Child Welfare Services is to provide safety, permanency, and wellbeing for children. 

The job can be rewarding, complex, stressful, and sometimes a bit frightening. It's very important that you understand what the job entails before you accept the position. We want you to realize just what you would expect before you go any further in the hiring process. 

We want to make sure that the job you are seeking is a good fit for your skills and your personality. We hope this video helps you in making this important decision.

[Text: Not Just a Choice: Making the Commitment to Child Welfare]

Maribryan McGeney, Child Welfare Worker: It's very hard to really live with knowing sometimes the decisions that you make can result in a child being safe or a child fatality maybe even occurring.

Heather Kestian: You're dealing with the most fragile of our society. You're dealing with children who often times don't have voices of their own. And so they're looking to us to give them a voice.

Kristie Smith, Child Welfare Worker: Well, I think in getting involved in Child Welfare, it's a job that you have to be a caring and compassionate person. You have to want to be able to have, I guess you would say, that helping spirit to be wanting to help, but also you have to be organized.

Angela Lewis-Bettcher, Child Welfare Worker: Your peers and your coworkers understand best and sometimes they're your only resource in that way because your friends and family don't get it. They won't understand the nature of the work that you do and how emotional and exhausting it can be.

Speaker 5: Be open to different cultures and different things that may come about because nothing is normal in this job, to be honest.

Brittany Renkenberger, Child Welfare Worker: I think that you absolutely have to have a passion for this. You have to be passionate about advocating for children, advocating for families. I think that there has to be some sort of interest, I think, in the criminal justice system.

Kelli Silver, Child Welfare Worker: You do have to learn to kind of put some boundaries up. That was something that I didn't realize I was going to have to learn.

Heather Kestian: I think a lot of our family case managers come into this thinking, "I know what I'm getting into because I've learned about it in school, I've taken social work class." There's really nothing that can prepare you for the human element.

[Photos: a malnourished baby on an examination table; injuries on a child's back; injuries on a baby's back; injuries on a child's buttocks]

Loretta Rush, Judge: You just say how and why? Why do you have an eight month old with anal tearing or sexually transmitted diseases or a pregnant ten year old? A case last week, just bruising, battering, broken bones, retinal hemorrhaging.

Doris Tolliver, Human Resources: Child welfare is not law enforcement. It's not about going into a situation and building a case against these horrible people who did this horrible thing to this child. It's about looking at a situation objectively, not passing judgment, recognizing that sometimes bad stuff happens, people make mistakes. 

Then going into that situation really open-minded and seeing how you can help that particular family develop whatever skills that they need to ensure that the child is safe going forward.

Maribryan McGeney: Not only do you have to be compassionate, you have to be strong and tough and be grounded, but then you have to be prepared for anything, organized, you have to have excellent writing and grammatical skills and be able to articulate what you're trying to say and that's a lot to put into one person.

Angela Lewis-Bettcher, Child Welfare Worker: I think the good and bad of seeing all the emotion in this job kind of counter each other and that's the only way you survive. There are a lot of highlights and a lot of good that you do and that helps you shoulder the inevitable amount of pain and suffering that you do see.

Maribryan McGeney: You have to be able to, you know, after 21 years still cry and be able to feel for people, but leave at the end of the day and go home and know that things are going to be okay there.

Melissa Clark, Child Welfare Worker: I don't even know that I really knew what I was getting into when I took this job. I think I had the blinders on, but for some reason I took to it, I loved it, and I stayed.