Vacancies in Monroe County’s Child Protective Services division have been reduced by more than half in the last six months following an intensive recruitment effort, County Executive Adam Bello announced Monday.
Bello said openings in the division have been cut to 46 from 100 since September, and that he expects the rest of the vacancies to be filled by the end of the year with classes for new trainees starting this summer.
He added that vacancies among benefits examiners have also fallen substantially, and that for the first time in many years, there are no vacancies among youth detention workers.
“We had to make the case for why Monroe County is a great place to work and our community responded,” Bello said during a news conference Monday. “And we're going to have to keep thinking outside of the box taking advantage of new opportunities.”
Last fall, the county raised Department of Human Services workers’ pay, forged relationships with local colleges, hired a full-time recruiter, and bulked up in-house training efforts, among other things to address what officials called a staffing crisis in the department.
Bello said the county workforce had been subjected to “decades of disinvestment” by previous administrations. Pay hadn’t kept pace with inflation and benefits packages became less lucrative, making it harder to recruit and retain employees, he added.
Thalia Wright, Monroe County’s human services commissioner, said filling the openings means caseworkers will have lighter caseloads and can devote more time to the people they are serving.
Wright said that 80 to 85 percent of the reports received by Child Protective Services are unfounded. Often, those cases come down to families needing help with basic resources.
“As we also staff up and we do the work to get the bodies and to ensure that we have the adequate amount of caseworkers, we also equally have to do the community work, the education, the partnerships,” Wright said. “More on prevention, intervention, hopefully assisting families before they even engage in the child welfare system.”
