DCF workers deal with ‘shameful’ office conditions

DCF workers deal with ‘shameful’ office conditions

Workers at the state’s beleaguered child welfare agency are contending with fleas, mice, and decrepit working conditions and an overload of cases that have left some workers coping with traumatic levels of stress and almost all with plummeting morale, according an official survey of more than 1,500 employees.

One worker described seeing cockroaches in the Leominster office, scuttling across the same floor that babies crawl on during supervised visits with their parents. The office walls are “punched through, and the social workers sit in closets,” the worker wrote. “Shameful.”