SALT LAKE CITY — The small community of Enoch, Utah, was rocked with grief last January when the five children in the Haight family — along with their mother and grandmother — were shot dead by their father, who then turned the gun on himself.
Later that year, a malnourished boy escaped out a window in southern Utah with duct tape on his ankles and wrists. His story became national news, as details emerged of the physical and emotional abuse he and his sister endured at the hands of their mother, YouTuber Ruby Franke, and her business partner, Jodi Hildebrandt.
Then, in July, 12-year-old Gavin Peterson of West Haven died of malnutrition, after officials said his organs “shut down completely.” Court documents allege family members abused him for years before his death, locking him in a carpetless room without bedding or blankets and beating him repeatedly.
"It’s heartbreaking,” said Tonya Myrup, director of the Utah Division of Child and Family Services (DCFS), of these recent high-profile cases of child abuse. “It’s heartbreaking for the caseworkers, for the community, families.”
Each of the families in these cases had prior contacts with DCFS — putting a spotlight on the agency and prompting questions about how to better prevent child abuse moving forward.
Advocates for reform within DCFS, which typically investigates around 40,000 child abuse allegations each year, are now pointing to the impacts of the agency’s high caseloads and turnover rates, which research shows can lead to increased rates of maltreatment of children.
Kevin Franke has worked closely with DCFS since discovering his children were abused by his estranged wife and her business partner. He believes most caseworkers care deeply about children but says the agency is understaffed and its workers are overwhelmed.
“Everybody has frayed nerves; everybody is overstressed, overworked,” he said. “To use the phrase ‘stretched too thin’ is really an understatement, based on what I’ve seen.”
While Utah's child welfare system has stabilized in recent months — with turnover decreasing from a high of 40% at one point in 2022 to around 20% last quarter — Myrup acknowledges that high caseloads and staff churn still pose ongoing problems in some parts of the state.
“I would say that things have improved — and that we are not quite where we want to be,” she said in an interview. “There’s absolutely still some work we need to do.”
'CUTTING CORNERS'
Even under the best of circumstances, investigating child abuse is difficult work — requiring caseworkers to confront some of humanity’s most horrible acts committed upon its most innocent victims.
Most people who decide to meet that challenge head-on are "very passionate about wanting to make a difference, wanting to strengthen families, wanting to engage with them and provide services,” said one former caseworker interviewed by FOX 13 News.
That was also the case for this former DCFS employee, who said she decided to go into child welfare because she “saw how positive and transformative it can be for someone to step in and provide help when needed.”
She was good at the job. One of her supervisors ranked her as a “truly exceptional” and “outstanding” employee, according to a letter of recommendation she shared with FOX 13 News to verify her employment history.
But the former caseworker — who asked not to be named, out of fear she would face future employment impacts for speaking honestly about what she experienced at DCFS — said the purpose that first brought her into the job started to turn to disillusionment the longer she worked there.
Utah caseworkers completed an average of 174 child abuse investigations each in 2022, according to data included in the federal government’s most recent Child Maltreatment report. Investigating these cases requires a range of tasks, from conducting and documenting interviews with families, writing reports, attending court hearings and responding to more immediate family crises.
Completing the demands of the job in a typical 40-hour workweek was a constant challenge, according to the former caseworker. To keep pace, she and many of her colleagues fell into a “culture of kind of donating time to DCFS” to do quality investigations.
“It was just unsustainable to keep up that pace of doing thorough work,” she said.
It was a perfect recipe for burnout, and she did — ultimately leaving her job at a DCFS office in rural Utah before agreeing to return to work in one of the agency’s Salt Lake County offices later on during the pandemic.
There, the former caseworker said she felt more pressure to close cases quickly.
“There was definitely a focus on not requesting extensions and keeping a certain caseload,” she said. “And that didn’t sit well with me. I saw that, you know, that just led to caseworkers doing subpar investigations.”
To manage their caseloads — and keep from burning out — the former caseworker says she saw some colleagues do the bare minimum necessary in order to quickly close a case, even at times when she felt a more thorough investigation may have been warranted.
“They didn’t have to sacrifice their personal lives because they were cutting corners,” she said.
The former caseworker felt this culture had a negative impact on the children DCFS was meant to serve, and she decided to leave the agency for good in 2023 after spending a total of around two years there.
Looking back, she felt there were “a lot” of instances where “if a case worker put a little more effort or involvement or passion into it, it could have prevented future cases” of abuse.
Myrup, with DCFS, recognized the challenges facing caseworkers amid high caseloads and turnover — especially during the pandemic — and said the agency has been working to determine whether it needs to adjust expectations for caseworkers moving forward.
“They’re working overtime, they’re burning out, they’re really wanting to make sure those kids are safe,” she said. “We just need to make sure we have a realistic expectation so that burden is not put on them to work those long hours, and that they can do the great work they need to with families.”
Tonya Myrup shares below how demands for DCFS caseworkers have increased over time
'ON THE BACKS OF WORKERS'
Myrup told a child welfare committee last year that there are several reasons caseworkers like the one FOX 13 News interviewed leave the agency — including historically low pay, the traumatic nature of the work and the growing demands of the job, which requires ”way more than you could ever do in a 40 hour work week."
On the last point, Myrup noted that the “amount of scope creep” in child welfare has been “unbelievable” since she started at DCFS in 1995.
"There are 1,000 ways to improve child welfare outcomes,” she said. “We've done it mostly on the backs of workers, and it's not sustainable.”
Workforce churn in child welfare isn’t a new problem, and it isn’t unique to Utah.
Turnover in the industry has hovered between 20% to 40% across the country over the years, according to Casey Family Programs, a group that focuses on reducing the need for foster care across the country. An optimal turnover rate in the human services sector is considered at or below 12% a year, according to the organization.
“We’ve had shortages — workforce shortages — across the country over the past couple years, and social services is one sector that’s been particularly hard hit,” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said in a recent news conference. “The turnover is happening more rapidly than it used to in the past.”
Utah’s child welfare system “could use some more caseworkers, for sure,” he said.
High staff turnover has been associated with a host of negative impacts.
One study found higher-turnover counties in California had higher rates of recurrence of abuse than lower-turnover counties, while federal data has shown that “high caseloads and workloads” affect the ability of caseworkers to respond to “maltreatment reports in a timely manner,” according to a U.S. Children’s Bureau issue brief.
Several studies show turnover also negatively impacts an agency’s bottom line, costing between 70% to 200% of an exiting employee’s annual salary, including in overtime costs.
It takes about two years for new caseworkers to learn and develop the skills of the job — “and as a result, service effectiveness decreases when more experienced employees leave,” according to one research study.
Franke said he’s seen that manifest in Utah, where views many caseworkers as “extremely young” and “inexperienced.”
"Experience comes with time and practice," he said. "And the unfortunate truth is, so many of these professionals are bailing. They’re ditching out and they’re saying, ‘I can’t take this anymore. This is not worth the stress. This is not worth the low pay.'"
'WE DON'T HAVE TO WAIT FOR TRAGEDY’
To stem the bleeding of turnover at DCFS, the Utah Legislature recently approved a pay increase for caseworkers, “to try to keep people here,” so that when reports of child abuse do come in “we have more people that can do the work,” Cox said in his news conference.
Data shows turnover has been declining since the state implemented those raises, which brought entry-level pay for caseworkers up to around $52,000 a year. Lower turnover has also helped bring down the workload for employees, Myrup said, though there are still some areas where “we are struggling with some high caseloads.”
“We have definitely seen some really significant improvement” overall, she said.
To further stabilize the workforce, Franke said he wants to see state leaders implement an even bigger raise for caseworkers during the upcoming legislative session.
“And I’m not talking about like a little teeny bump in pay, like a 3 or a 4% raise or something like that,” he said. “No, you know, these individuals need a significant pay raise.”
DCFS told FOX 13 News it wasn’t prepared to discuss what, if any, budgetary requests it may make in the upcoming legislative session.
But at his recent news conference, Cox said he planned to continue working with the Legislature and DCFS “to try to understand what those caseloads are, how we can lighten those caseloads and get more resources,” so deaths like Gavin Peterson’s “get taken care of in a way that saves lives.”
Myrup said the analysis of caseload demands and expectations for workers DCFS is working on will help determine if there need to be adjustments for employees, especially as additional requirements have added to the time needed to resolve a case.
"We’re really just assessing caseload to say, ‘Is that average caseload — what we’ve expected five and 10 years ago — is that realistic now?’” she said.
That study is something Myrup believes could help better provide caseworkers with the support they need “to help them achieve those great outcomes” the agency strives for in child abuse investigations.
But in some cases, Myrup says it may still not be enough — a realization that is one of the most “incredibly difficult pieces of this work.”
“I think the hardest part is you can do everything within your authority; you can do all of the… make those efforts and do everything you need to do,” she said. “And unfortunately there may still be just poor outcomes.”
Still, the former caseworker who sat down with FOX 13 News said she hopes that by speaking out, she can help spark changes at DCFS that could give the agency’s caseworkers the best chance possible at protecting kids like Gavin Peterson, the Haight family and the Frankes moving forward.
"How many kids are living in neglectful situations because we don’t have the time to make sure it doesn’t happen again?” she said. “They’re safe enough. They don’t necessarily need an intervention like a removal. But they also deserve our time. We don’t have to wait for tragedy to occur.”
In the video below, Tonya Myrup talks about how the community can help prevent child abuse.