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9 JULY 2010

NO 1600

A view from 1996

When we look at a residential program’s organizational chan, what we often see is a pyramid, with direct care staff at the bottom. Such diagrams are usually organized on the basis of bureaucratic efficiency—Weber’s organizational criterion of value—and assume the necessity of close supervision and control of those at the lower levels. From this perspective, clients—for whom the organization supposedly exists—are seen instead as the objects of its control. It is as if the "customer" were viewed as an instrumentality of the organization rather than as its raison d’étre. Further, in such programs the customer is, in a sense, the "product" as well and needs to be seen as the center or focus of organizational effort, as Bames (1991) and Barnes and Bames (1996, this volume) have reported to be normative for residential workers in much of Westem Europe.

Programmatic consequences
In most U.S. residential programs, direct care staff have the least authority, the least education and training, the least recognition, and the least pay. Yet we bemoan our inability to attract quality caregivers. It might be more accurate, however, to suggest that the field includes a far greater share of excellent workers than should be expected, given its record of insensitive micro-management and the overall lack of support for direct care staff. Thus, in spite of the conscientious, loving, intelligent efforts of many caring people who take jobs as child care workers, this work continues to be "the only field you have to get out of to get ahead" (Stuck, 1994).

In spite of the efforts of state and national associations of child care workers, the field continues to be an employment but not a profession—or even, in most cases, a vocation or a career in the full sense of those terms. It can never be that as long as the work, its practice, its hours, and its required preparation (if any) are determined by bureaucratically organized agencies rather than by a professionally defined and regulated critical mass of direct and indirect practitioners who have entered the field through pre-service professional education instead of training. This is especially important if we expect direct care personnel to do complex work in critical and strategic relationships with other people where judgment built on basic good common sense and exercised on a minute-by- minute basis is required.

The desire to change this debilitating situation has been expressed in many ways over many years, but it has persisted as a vicious cycle. An administrator cannot pay a professional salary to a non-professional person in a non-professional role in the hope that such a move will increase the value of the work and thereby begin a process of upgrading it to the necessary level. Yet is it likely that competent professionals will take up work in such settings given present conditions, which effectively preclude using this expertise effectively? Even if professional education for it were available, how many people would spend two or three years in pre-service education to do this complex, demanding work in a professional way at the salaries that child care workers currently receive?

Data from a recent Child Welfare League of America (1993) study indicates that the mean salary for Residential Child Care Workers in the rnid-Atlantic region is between $15,0()0 and $17,000, or between $7.21 and $8.17 per hour. In and of itself, this figure is a defining statement that must be changed and can be, but only in tandem with needed changes in the other elements cited previously. Only thus can the vicious cycle be broken. The problem described in this section is composed of three parts—the lack of a conceptual model to define what the practice actually is; the lack of an implementation strategy; and the lack of a clear understanding of the fiscal viability of change. To some extent, all three must be addressed simultaneously.

DOUGLAS MAGNUSON, F. HERBERT BARNES AND JEROME BEKER

Magnuson, D., Barnes, F.H. and Beker, Jerome. (1996). Human Development Imperatives in the Organization of Group Care Programs: A Practical Approach. Residential Treatment for Children and Youth, 13, 3.

REFERENCE
Barnes, F.H. (1991). From warehouse to greenhouse: play, work and the routines of daily living in groups as the core of milieu treatment. In J. Beker and Z. Eisikovits (Eds.). Knowledge utilization in residential Child and Youth Care (pp. 123-155). Wasjington, DC. Child Welfare League of America.

Barnes, F.H. and Barnes, L. (1996). The convergence of the Israeli and the European experience: Implications for group care services in the United States. Residential Treatment for Children and Youth, 13, 3. pp. 49-62.

Child Welfare League of America. (1993). Salary study. Washington, DC. Author.

Stuck, E.N. (1994). Comment as a panelist on group care. Annual Conference of the Association for the Advancement of Social Work with Groups, Hartford, October 1994.

The International Child and Youth Care Network
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