Child Services Internship Report

Description

I was fortunate enough to fulfill my internship requirement at the department of child services. Overall, I finished the internship with a much larger repertoire of knowledge on the DCS and learned more then I had even thought possible beforehand.

The department of child services is an agency that promotes child safety as well as family wellness. DCS asesses family situations to determine if the family or children can benefit from supportive services.

History

DCS is a large organization and is organized as follows. Regional Managers, district managers, Deputy director, supervisors, and case managers. There are approximately 194 case managers locally in northwest Indiana, 34 supervisors, 3 district managers and one regional

DCS was initially integrated with fssa welfare but around 2005 DCS separated from the fssa. Innovators at DCS initiated a practice roll out around the end of 2006. Within this new practice model it emphasized engaging families. One effective model of practice implemented in 2008 was that of CFTM (child and family team meetings). In 2008 DCS workers began training and learning how to engage families though cftms.

The abuse and neglect hotline quickly became a large and reputable source for notifying the agency of potential cases due to the abundance of advertising for the hotline. Those advertisments contributed to higher call volumes. While the hotline was used around the state, all calls were routed to one number, answered in Marion County Indiana. Despite the effort of the workers in Marion County, there was still a slight disconnect with some callers because of the differences among communities in the state. For example, the worker in Marion County may have had trouble building rapport with a case coming in from Gary,

I started my internship in the permancey department. The permenancy division deals with families that have been entered into the DCS agency through an initial contact with the assesment division. In permenancy case managers work with families and foster families. They try to get families reunified or DCS will help find foster parents or family members for permenant placement of the child. The Family case manager I first shadowed was very organized and she also made sure to schedule interesting things to do, to guarantee that I would be getting as much valuable experience as possible. On my first day, I started off slow by learning about all the forms and paperwork as well as a little about the computer databases for the agency. Later, I was able to go out on home visits also known as face to face contact visits. These visits were to foster homes and schools. We would visit the homes and once there, we would review information with the family on the child's health, school socialization, any new concerns, progress or lack thereof. In these visits we spoke to the foster parent and the child together and then individually. Some of the other face to face visits I went on included going to supervised visits or random drug screens and visiting homes because of school neglect or truancies of a child who is missing too many days of school. As part of my