Tuesday, August 21, 2007

SRS

There is a single mother of two children. The father is not in the picture at all. She gets no help financially from any one. There is no way for her to make it on her own with out sometype of help. People tell her to contact SRS. They offer all types of help for single mothers. She does and is informed that there is health insurance for her children as well as help financially with daycare and school expenses. There is also help with groceries and sometimes cash assistance. So, she fills out the application and spends months trying to get in contact with a case worker to get the help started. Once she gets the help everything is good. Then something happens like her children go to a different day care. The day care won't take payment from SRS without having a contract from SRS. She spends another month trying to get in contact with her caseworker to get this changed. In this process, she leaves several messages on her case workers machine with no response. She calls the supervisor only to find out her case worker is on vacation and has failed to leave this on her voice mail. It takes two more weeks to get the contract switched. Next, her oldest child starts kindergarten and won't be attending day care. So, she starts calling her new case worker (the other no longer works there) and they play phone tag. After a week of waiting for a return call she calls again only to find out that her new caseworker is in trainging and won't be back in the office until September 4th. She is told to contact another case worker. She has left messages with no response yet. To top this off she gets a letter from SRS saying that her food stamps will be discontinued because she failed to return the report she was to fill out. She had filled out this report and returned it said date. This was followed by another form inquiring about job and income information. This form was returned by said date. The question is that if SRS is suppose to be there to help and support the families who are in need, why do they make it so impossible to get the help and so frustrating on the families who are trying there hardest to make it. They have enough problems to deal with without the frustration from a company who is suppose to be there to help them through these times.

2 comments:

Christie Leigh Babirad said...

Michelle,

This was an excellent blog. I'm sure it's a tough situation to have to deal with. You're blog was very well written and organized. My critique would be to break up your sentences a little bit, and to just focus a bit more on how you break up your sentences. I would also be careful of the few typos. Just make sure you review your work. I know I had to go back because I made some too. Very interesting blog. Excellent Job!

Regina Cassell said...

You bring the reader into this mom's world, but help us by returning twice to indicate paragraphs.

Also work on tighter writing. We can always stand to lose a few words.