Saturday, June 20, 2015

[Mendocino County] It’s All Good


Grand Jury >> E.M. Forster begins Chapter 6 of his novel Howards End with an appalling pair of sentences: “We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.”--Only an Edwardian Englishman who hung out with Virginia Woolf & Co. could publish those sentences, perhaps Thank God! Yet I believe it likely enough that many well-off Americans think the same thing from time to time and in the privacy of whatever’s still private.
I remembered >> Forster’s sentences as I read the Grand Jury’s report, titled “Children at Risk,” which evaluates the performance of our county’s Family and Child Services Agency. Almost all the catastrophes the agency deals with have some connection to poverty, actual and emotional. The GJ’s report (Google ‘Mendocino County Grand Jury’) is heart-wrenching, since it focuses on the failure of a costly system to help those it’s supposed to help. Here’s the Summary, paragraph 1: “The Mendocino County Family and Children’s Services Agency is one of the lowest-scoring child protective agencies in the State of California . . . . In spite of a dedicated, caring, hard-working staff, the agency appears to be falling further behind. Every performance indicator points to understaffing as the main culprit. The understaffing has many causes: noncompetitive compensation, work overload, poor management, and low morale. Senior management is aware of the issues and their consequences, but has failed to address them.”--Whew!
What to do? >> When an entire agency fails, as CFS appears to have done, our Board of Supervisors must act. I’m not now headed for a familiar rag on the BoS. This crisis is not a business-as-usual crisis. Our Supes need to person up & recreate the agency. Task calls for a certain amount of drama: fire some higher-ups & let the Why be said or leaked. Then, make clear in the job postings that the County wants to give replacements the back-breaking excitement of rebuilding CFS into an agency which values its line people & their supervisors. From the ground-up work. Make clear that—within a reasonable time frame (5yrs, say)—the new leadership can work without fear of firing, so long as they meet performance benchmarks developed and agreed on with the CEO and BoS. Let us citizens know what the plan & benchmarks are. Give progress reports. Be foolish enough to hope! We’ve got nothing to lose but disgrace.
The GJ >> identified noncompetitive pay as a major problem. At the line level, in the trenches, low pay may not be a major matter. Mendocino pays better entry salaries than other poor counties: Lake, Shasta, Humboldt, Colusa, Glenn. Our HR should play some Billy Ball—people don’t choose social work (in the public sector) to get rich. Find the unexpected great ones.--Yes, some will train & trot (memorable phrase!), but they’re not likely to be the best fit for our community. Just keep recruiting. Eventually one builds a team. It’s a matter of morale & leadership. And youth.
June 18, 2015
Ukiah Daily Journal
Column by Jonathan Middlebrook

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