When the Pitt County Board of Commissioners begins its budget workshops on May 7, its members will wrestle with the question of adding positions to a department with multiple vacancies.
Pitt County Social Services Director Sharon Rochelle and five of her social workers lobbied the county commissioners to fund the additional positions in the upcoming fiscal year 2024-25 budget.
More than a dozen employees with Pitt County Department of Social Services attended Monday’s board of commissioners meeting in support of the staffing requests.
In previous budgets, the commissioners did not add staff because there were vacancies in various social services divisions. Kandice Franklin, adult services program manager, asked the commissioners to look beyond the vacancies this year.
“We’ve done a lot of work in trying to recruit staff, but we are understaffed and when we are trying to obtain people from other counties to come and work in Pitt County, if they are familiar with DSS and how things work, one of the first questions they ask is how many positions is this unit staffed for,” Franklin said. “When they here we only have eight workers is APS (adult protective services) or five workers in this program or two, it is a deterrent.”
Franklin said the state Department of Health and Human Services put the department under corrective action in 2022 because there were too few social workers to oversee the number of adults services cases being handled by the county. The department is now out of corrective action because people from different areas were pulled in to meet the corrections, Franklin said.
“We want to continue to serve the citizens of Pitt County. We want to provide protection to the citizens of Pitt County,” Franklin said.
Pitt DSS also is out of compliance with the number of cases child welfare workers can carry under N.C. Department of Health and Human Services standards.
“Even with the vacancies filled we will be out of compliance,” she said.
Kecia Adams Council, program manager for child protective services, has 13 positions in her division and six are vacant. This means her social workers are carrying between 29-60 cases each when their caseload is supposed to be 10.
“We have a reputation for having excessive caseload sizes. That’s why it’s hard to get people to come to Pitt County,” Council said.
“I like working in Pitt County, I love being a social worker. I love working with families, trying to help them through those crisis times and motivate them to do things differently,” Council said. “But it’s hard when you don’t have the time to invest and engage with families like you would like to.”
If a family is determined to have experienced an issue with child abuse or neglect, an in-home services worker is assigned to help support families as they work to change their dynamic.
When it’s been determined that a family has experienced child abuse or neglect, an in-home services worker is assigned to monitor and ensure the safety of the child or children and provide support to facilitate changes in the family, said Coleen Anderson, program manager. That division has experienced 100 percent turnover in recent years. The longest-serving worker has currently worked 18 months.
Rochelle urged the commissioners to watch the video of the April 9 Pitt County Board of Social Services meeting to get a more in-depth perspective on the budget she is requesting.
She is requesting $44.6 million, $6.6 million more than the current fiscal year’s nearly $38 million budget.
Rochelle is requesting 85 new positions; 30 would work in Medicaid certification and recertification, 32 in child protective services, 12 in adult protective services, nine in food and nutrition services and two administration positions.
Rochelle said people often view social services as a burden on taxpayers, but the money spent by the organization has a multiplier effect; for every Medicaid dollar spent in Pitt County there is a $1.5 to $2 multiplier effect, Rochelle said.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly called food stamps, $1 brings about $1.5 in economic activity, she said.
Coulson asked if Medicaid expansion created the backlog. Gallagher said the state fully funded 13 positions to help with the increased work brought about by expansion. DSS had a number of applicants but the new hires didn’t stay.
“Of those 13 positions, 10 are still vacant. Adding vacant positions to vacant positions may or may not solve the problem,” Gallagher said.
Commissioner Tom Coulson later asked if there were jobs that didn’t require specialized training and if county could solicit college students to take on those positions.
County Manager Janis Gallagher said she has talked with Rochelle about collaborating with Pitt Community College to recruit workers in the income maintenance division. The work doesn’t require a social work degree but employees do have to go through pre-service training. There are DSS employees who can provide that training, Gallagher said, and there are discussions about training people in groups.
Several DSS workers also spoke about the large number of Medicaid recertifications they have to do along with processing new clients.
Deborah Conner, an income maintenance caseworker, said she and her co-workers routinely work 7:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. to meet their deadlines.
Gallagher said DSS is able to hire employees, but they don’t stay, in part because of the workload. At any given time the department has up to 55 vacant positions.
She wants to explore bringing in “classes” of employees for training and to begin work together so they will have built camaraderie and a greater portion of the work can be spread among them, lessening the stress.
“Our employees are not shy to call my office when they want to share their concerns …. I hear a lot from social services folks and much of what I hear had to do with support of their supervisors and drama in the workplace,” Gallagher said.
The county has brought in outside individuals to provide management training to supervisors to give them leadership skills and give them management skills.
But the large caseloads contribute to the stress.
Adding, and keeping, more employees would reduce the stress and the individual caseloads, Gallagher said, but, “adding 85 positions to 55 vacant positions without a plan is not going to solve your problem, it’s just going to eat up vacant positions.”
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