It’s not every day that you see social workers carrying picket signs.

Nor is it an everyday  experience to see a social worker with a bullhorn chanting "What do we want?" while others respond in turn "More staffing. Now."

On May 28th, about 40 social workers held signs and chanted slogans outside the office of the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (DCF) in Holyoke. “We’re here because we care,” social worker Ethel Everett told the news website MassLive. “We want to be able to help families and do our jobs.”

The noontime informational picket was designed to motivate local residents to contact their elected representatives and insist on reforms that will bring caseloads down to safe levels.

The incident that sparked the picket was the DCF’s apparent bungling of the case of a 5-year-old child named Jeremiah Oliver, who was reported missing and then, four months later, found dead. The DCF has acknowledged that caseworkers failed to conduct home visits and that nobody noticed the boy was missing, according to news reports.

Ms. Everett, who has worked for the DCF for 24 years, told a reporter: ”Everyone’s on edge so like when is the next tragedy going to happen, no one wants to be the next social worker that has a Jeremiah Oliver or kid that dies on their caseload.”

Everett added that the staffing shortage is made worse by other factors, such as a lack of technology that could aid caseworkers in doing their job more efficiently.
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