I’m tired of all the complaining from you business types about how hard it is to recruit top talent in Connecticut` because the urban schools are lousy and the salaries are too high and the temperature is too low and their mommas don’t dress them very pretty.
You think you’ve got problems? You should talk to the the state’s social service managers. They are very concerned that Connecticut is destined to suffer a serious shortage of social workers.
I’m not talking about the kind of shortage that is brought up at General Assembly budget hearings, where every imaginable special interest (including, of course, social workers) offers up a collective whine about how the poor will always be with us, and about how Connecticut’s cities will look like the wastelands of Somalia unless every social service budget is quintupled.
Nightmare Scenario
No, I’m talking about a real crisis, in which the phone will ring at 3 a.m. and the commissioner of children and families and stuff will answer it, and Hillary Clinton will be on the other end, demanding to know why, if it take a village to raise the children, that the Connecticut village doesn’t seem to have any social workers.
And Hillary will be told that all the Connecticut social workers were lured away by Massachusetts, which has announced a major initiative to hire 80 or 100 or maybe 50,000 new social workers for its Department of Social Services — many of which are expected to be poached from Connecticut.
What makes this particular program so alluring to Connecticut social workers is that, in addition to requiring a graduate degree in compassion, bureaucracy and grant writing, candidates must pass a fill-in-the-blank test.
The test is expected to be so successful at screening for professionals that the Massachusetts caseload will be reduced by 50 percent. In an effort to sabotage this act of aggression against Connecticut, I will share some questions with you so that you can distribute them to friends in weird places such as Maine and New Hampshire, so that Massachusetts will be flooded with successful applicants.
For those readers who are not trained social workers, don’t be discouraged if these questions seem very, very hard. You must have years of social worker training to understand the complexities.
Q: Anyea Williams of Newark, N.J., told local police detectives last September that her ____ now on trial for murder, had threatened to kill her if she talked to the cops.
A: Crazy Boyfriend.
Q: The Massachusetts Department of Social Services has admitted that it made many unbelievably stupid mistakes in the case of a 7-year-old boy from Middleborough who was repeatedly burned with cigarettes and beaten by his mother’s ______.
A: Crazy Boyfriend.
Q: A Brooklyn, N.Y. jury in March convicted the ______ of a 7-year-old girl of beating her to death as punishment for sneaking a snack from the refrigerator.
A: Crazy Stepfather.
Connecticut child protection folks have considered a similar test but at present, only one essay question is administered.
Q: When confronted with an undereducated, unsophisticated young mother with children, living with a crazy guy, what should be your primary objective?
A: Preserve the integrity of the family.
Oops.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
