SOCIAL WORKER III Tamara Ochoa Tamara started her social career over 20 years ago, with her formal education taken at CBC and WSU. She started working at Lourdes full time for free, doing paperwork, assessments, and job shadowing From Lourdes she worked at Crondolet working with a cross cultural mix of adolescents and adults Mrs. Ochoa has also worked with children at the Connell boot Camp, has been a probation officer for Franklin County, Area Manager for Benton County Work Release, Tamara ran Casita Del Rio, which was an inpatient drug and alcohol center for women, and taught weekend adolescent classes at CBC Presently she works for CPS in the CFWS division and has worked there for the past four to five years The main focus of CPS is to assist and work with individuals, families, and children that are in crisis situations. Abused and neglected children, women and their families that are involved with domestic violence, and sexual assault are some of the areas that CPS deals with daily. Tamara’s current area of work is with the young child or babies that are crisis affected. She meets with the families, and children that are on her case load, which is between 18 and 21 different cases She has do assessments of each case in order to know what the problems, what the positive areas are, and what can be done in order to remedy, or help in the situation

SOCIAL WORKER III Tamara Ochoa Tamara stated that she uses a strength based perspective and tries to empower the family while working with everyone, and education Her daily routine consist of court hearings, meeting with clients at their homes, assessing clients needs, researching agencies to possibly refer clients to, paperwork, and more paperwork. Every Monday, and Tuesday she spends most of the day in court going over cases with the judges. The rest of the week is spent doing paperwork and meeting with her clients, which she said she goes to their homes to meet with the children once every thirty days. With clients that does not give much room for anything else. The best thing that she likes about her job is the flexibility that she is given. Which is saying that she has to prioritize her schedule in order to get done what needs to be done. She does report to her supervisor, but she gets to set her own schedule as long as she accomplishes what needs to be done then she is ok The thing that she would change if she could would be having a lower case load in order to be able to have more time with each client

SOCIAL WORKER III Tamara Ochoa When asked what she see’s as a cause of child abuse/neglect, domestic violence, and or elder abuse, she stated the two main reasons she believes are mental health, and chemical dependency problems. She also mention gang involvement, but didn’t think that social or economics was a big precursor. We did ask another social worker who stated that economics is starting to play a bigger role in abuse/neglect cases. The key element for intervention and prevention she believes is education. Getting help as early as possible is also a key element, as well as getting the right help and assistance Tamara said that as future social workers we should remember that no matter what a child goes through, the majority of children still want to go back to their moms. Also that even though a child might seem like everything is alright, that the children have been damaged in some way, and that the damaged effects stays with that child, whether openly displayed or hidden and blocked from view. The third thing is that especially here in the Tri-Cities we need to learn about cultures other than our own in order to help a culturally diverse population Tamara walked me around the CPS office, introducing me to different workers and hearing some of their thought and ideas that I found rather interesting. Ever person agreed that the position of a social worker is very stressful. And the amount of paperwork is ridiculous

SOCIAL WORKER III Tamara Ochoa I could actually see that the CPS investigators had hardly any paperwork or files in their cubicles, while the first stage CPS workers who work with a case up to a month have quit a lot of files, and then the CPWS (long term care) workers had their whole cubicles full of files stacked on files I learned that the number of children that are in need of safe home placement seriously outweighs the number of homes available. And even though the CPS worker tries to fit a child into the right home, sometimes it just is not possible. Tamara also stated that even though as a social worker you have to keep your personal feelings at bay, and just do your job, that especially working with a client for many years (which happens a lot) it gets hard sometimes to be unbiased Something that I learned was that even though CPS refers out to other agencies for client care, they do have an in agency education program called “Family Voluntary Services”. They use this service for those children and families that the agency believes can get the education and help that is needed before the problems fully develop, and other, harsher actions are needed When hired by CPS you go through a six week training course in order to learn major aspects of your job to be. Going over rules, laws, policy’s, and RCW’S are a major part of your training. Tamara repeated herself a few times, saying that continuing assessments are an ongoing part of a social workers job, if you don’t like paperwork then your probably not going to like being a social worker Lastly as social workers, a person has to learn how to handle stress in a positive way.