There was a time when families were their own support system. They spent time together, not dispersed in front of individual PCs. Adult children stayed closer to home and cared for their aging parents; they did not depend instead on social agencies for their care. Marijuana, not crack cocaine, was the drug of choice.
Rick Steen, who worked in Child Protective Services for 20 years before becoming the director of the DHS offices in Jackson County in September 2000, decries "the impact that drug use and substance abuse have had on people and their children. Basically, it's a cancer on society," he said.
Steen oversees 47 employees, seven of them Child Protective Services workers and two supervisors, as well as one supervisor and three workers in the Adult Protective Services division who cover seven counties in Southwest Oklahoma.
"It's getting harder and harder to make ends meet," Steen said. And just because Jackson County and surrounding counties are rural doesn't mean the portion of misery is any less than in the bigger metropolitan areas.
"What's happened in Oklahoma City has happened down here," he said. "Anything that you've seen happen on the Oklahoma City TV stations or in the paper has happened in Jackson County. It happens in every county and every town in Oklahoma."
"I guess when you've been around 35 years you kind of think, you know, I've seen a lot," said Debbie Williams, DHS Area Field Operations Division II director, "and we're still here."
Williams' area -- one of the largest of Oklahoma's six service areas -- encompasses 18 counties overseen by 14 directors with 649 employees whose annual salaries total $1.6 million. She tries to visit each of the counties once every six months, she said.
The number of food stamp recipients in Area II has increased 40 percent in the past two years. A large number of children are placed with foster homes, but DHS' Child Protective Services took custody of that many or more. In March of this year, the agency accepted 454 referrals for investigation of child abuse/neglect in Area II. Court intervention was requested for 96 of those cases. A total of 1,177 children ages 1 to 18 were in foster care. Adult Protective Services worked 123 confirmed cases of adult abuse/neglect. The majority of those cases were self neglect.
DHS staff, Williams said, "are under a tremendous ... tremendous ... amount of pressure" because of a state freeze in hiring. "We are asking them to do more and more and more."
Williams explained that staff are allocated by "workload points," not by the number of cases. For example, she said, one case may include medical benefits and food stamps as well as child abuse and therefore is given more points. The workload points, she said, are kept to track equity in work assignments.
Under the current hiring freeze, when staffers leave they are not replaced. As Tillman County Director Judy Stewart put it, "We've learned to work smarter, we do more with less."
State legislators, Williams said, are working under a tight budget themselves, and with so many agencies competing for scarce funds "if there is new money, where does it go?"
Social work is more challenging than it was 35 years ago when Williams got her start with DHS. The clientele wasn't as complicated, she explained.
When kids grew up, if they left home they moved down the road and stayed closer to home. When mom and dad got sick, the kids were right there to take care of them.
"They don't have the contact with mom and dad that they had years ago," Williams said. "I think they really depend on DHS to keep an eye on mom and dad."
And in the summertime, with school being out, Williams foresees an increase in demand for child services because parents trying to make ends meet are not able to provide the necessary oversight. "School is their childcare," Williams said.
Exacerbating the stress on the agency is a drug use epidemic that has grown worse by the decade.
"Probably 75 to 80 percent of our referrals have some substance abuse tied into it," said Stewart, who has been the director of the DHS office in Frederick for 11 years. She attributes much of the increase in demand for DHS services in Tillman County to a leap in substance abuse, which often leads to physical abuse.
Stewart points to the limited treatment services for substance abuse and the difficulty involved in getting clients to available services. "The main thing in rural counties is that it's just so hard to access services that they need," she said.
The Tillman County office employs seven family services case workers and three clerical workers, as well as two child welfare specialists supervised from Jackson County.
Clients who apply for services under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program are especially dogged by problems with drugs, she said. "So many of their barriers center around substance abuse."
TANF helps clients -- through a variety of training programs and activities -- find and keep jobs and offers cash assistance for living expenses for up to 22 months. To become eligible for the program, clients are required to undergo drug screening. The program requires that clients work 30 hours a week.
As Stewart put it, "Even in Frederick, Oklahoma, if you really want a job you can pretty much find one." It may pay minimum wage or not be exactly what the client wants to do, but it's out there, she said.
Greer and Harmon counties are under the direction of Cindy Clayton, who has been their director for six years. Three full-time workers field the cases in Harmon County where, she said, "the jobs are extremely limited." She oversees 11 full-time employees in Greer County.
Her offices are understaffed, and both the staff and clients are feeling it.
"Because the budget is so bad, we don't have the employees we need to have to provide the services we need to provide," she said. "If I lose another support person, I won't be able to fill a position. When you get two people working three caseloads it's difficult, and it does cause stress. It's a huge problem."
Karen Moses is director over Kiowa and Washita counties. She oversees 19 employees, including a DHS nurse, a child welfare supervisor, three child welfare workers and one supervisor.
Moses and her staff are also feeling the pinch.
"Our workers are having to carry a lot more cases than we had in prior years," she said, and "not having that one-on-one contact ... we sort of lost that personal touch. I'm sure on some of these people, we're not able to meet all their needs."
So ... is the glass half full or half empty?
Williams is fully aware of the challenges ahead. And she stands firmly on those 35 years of experience and pride in her staff.
"When you look at all of that ... yeah, I'm optimistic about the future," she said. "I just think I have the cream of the crop."
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