[brief rant about the foster care system]

Was just mailed the transcript from that fucked up meeting we had back in the beginning of august

And the kid and us went over it and she went

“That’s a lie, they lied here. Here too. Why don’t they have my dad’s address, I have it and gave it to them. And how come I don’t remember a sister I had? Do they mean my brother?. And they have the dates wrong here”

We flip it over. And they get her dad’s name wrong twice. Not a misspelling.

But it’s like. I can’t give any information but it’s like [insert common last name ethnicity here] and [insert other common last name ethnicity here] like they’re interchangeable

time to play, "malicious mistake or overlooked because workers are overloaded?"

Like to use Ashkenazi Judaism for an example, it’s like her dad is Mr, Goldberg. But At least two different places he’s instead called Mr. Bernstein

I was pretty fucking furious and Kid was upset. She said “eat something” and handed me a cookie. And I handed her a red pen and went “circle everything you want corrected”

Which got us both through that shitshow but wow

It’s partial overlook and partial “cover our asses”

Doesn’t exactly scream like they value her as a person at all.

probably not paid and staffed enough to care about her as a person

Eat a cookie 😭 what a good kid

What a good kid and this system is terrible

she's an amazing kid but she has to be given time and attention to warm up to you and I really WANT her social worker to know her better but it's like "monthly check-in time" and that's it

so I feel like I'm bullshitting when I'm writing weekly progress reports about how incredible and smart and sensitive she is and then the social worker shows up and she just. shuts. down.

oh wow, fuck that

I'm so glad she has you guys, she sounds like such a great kid

ugh

I would guess overworked employee copying and pasting from a case with similar details

I'm not a social worker but I do write reports at volume and speed and it's a useful hack to have an excel doc with like fifty key template paragraphs of common situations... but there's some obvious key follow-on there in terms of editing/amending/adding specifics

Yeah, I used to see it in immigration lawyer documents where a random name that was not the name of the client would pop up here and there and, like, someone clearly didn't proofread well after splicing in bits from a different case.

On the one hand, I can sympathize with the overworkedness and finding ways to increase efficiency. On the other hand, when it's lots of errors like that, not just one stray oops, it does (rightly or wrongly) give the impression that the person just didn't give enough of a shit to proofread at all.

my templates all have 'spots that need to be filled in' in ALL CAPS so that they really stand out on a quick skim if I missed one