Vol. 9, No. 1
October 2003

Snapshot of Child Welfare Supervisors in North Carolina

Demographically speaking, we only know a little about North Carolina’s child welfare supervisors. Our state does not have a database containing information about its child welfare workforce, with the exception of periodic head counts conducted by the N.C. Division of Social Services. The most recent of these, conducted in December 2001, found 433 child welfare supervisors working for our state’s 100 county departments of social services.

We do have additional data on this population, but it is incomplete. Between January 1 and August 20, 2003, 327 child welfare supervisors from 88 county DSS’s registered to attend the supervisory training, Cornerstone Two: What’s Good for Families is Good for Workers. Of these supervisors, 85% were women and 15% were men. Seventy percent were white and 26% were black. Virtually all (99%) had a degree from a four-year college; 25% had a Masters degree. Thirty-eight percent of the supervisors registered for this training had either a Bachelors or Masters degree in social work.

Although inconclusive—we know nothing about the supervisors who did not register for this training—this data seems to indicate that the racial breakdown of North Carolina’s child welfare supervisors is roughly in line with the rest of the state, which the US Census estimates to be 21.6% black and 70.2% white. The fact that a quarter of the supervisors have degrees in social work is also a positive sign, since several studies have found higher job performance and lower turnover rates among caseworkers with BSWs and MSWs (Albers, 1993; Dhooper, 1990).

References for this and other articles in this issue