Adrienne Green: How did you get started in the social-work profession?

Judith Schagrin: I was 9 years old when I heard about a social worker for the first time. I was always intrigued by social work and about working with people in need. I was very fortunate to grow up in a family where both of my parents were in service professions, so serving others came naturally to me. I am grateful and privileged to have had a wonderful childhood, and I believe every child deserves that. I started out in social work in 1979; I’ve been at the same agency in different capacities for the last 33 years. I ended up in public child welfare, which was not at all what I wanted to do at the time. I thought, “I'll stay here for 2 or 3 years.” I've never left.

Green: How has the state of foster care changed in Baltimore County in the last 30 years?

Schagrin: The greatest changes have been the result of computers. Child welfare has become much more highly regulated. The fix to every problem in child welfare is a new policy, and of course, documentation to go with it. We complained about all the documentation 30 years ago when we kept paper records.

On the positive side, we're now able to gather much more data to better understand our population: who the children are, their ages, the demographics. We're able to identify racial disproportionality. But now, there's also a much heavier emphasis on the documentation—almost as a proxy for doing good work. If you enter your contacts within a certain period of time, you must be doing good work, when realistically, that doesn't measure your engagement skills with families.

Green: What is the foster-care population like in Baltimore County?

Schagrin: We serve children who have been found by the Juvenile Court to be children in need of assistance as a result of maltreatment, or a disability that renders a parent unable or unwilling to provide care for them. In Baltimore County, we serve roughly 800 to 900 children a year: 50/50 boys and girls. Our younger children are proportionate to the Baltimore County racial population, while our older children are more mixed. The younger children tend to come into foster care due to maltreatment—typically neglect that's related to substance abuse or mental illness. The older kids have been subjected to often chronic and complex trauma as young children, and have some really serious behavioral and emotional needs.

There's been a great emphasis on reducing the number of children in foster care. The reality is you can't work to the numbers. For any child who is unsafe, for whom we can't engage family in creating a safety plan, foster care saves their lives. Nobody has been able to say, “This is the right number of children in care.”

Green: Part of your job is to evaluate the families that children will be living with. How do you go about evaluating whether someone is fit to be a foster parent?

Schagrin: We can't live with people. We can't put cameras in their houses. We have a fairly rigorous home study process that includes background checks, several interviews with family members, and references. We work really hard to study a family as thoroughly as we can, and engage them in a conversation about our kids’ needs [in order] to enable them to make a good decision for their families and ensure that we have families who can stick by them.