kartooner

As some of you may or may not know I worked for the County of River­side for about 5 or 6 months. You would think work­ing for the Gov­ern­ment for this short amount of time wouldn’t have allowed room for inter­est­ing expe­ri­ences. How­ever, for me, 2 days is enough time to become involved in a “nov­el­is­tic” expe­ri­ence. Sto­ries while work­ing at the County could fill a novel and right­fully so this col­lec­tion of sto­ries will be pre­sented here on kartooner.com for anyone’s read­ing pleasure.

A ques­tion you might have is why have I decided to devulge these sto­ries? Well, truth­fully, I didn’t work for the CIA nor did I involve myself in the inner-office pol­i­tics. Yet, one doesn’t need to involve them­selves per say. The key to learn­ing about the world around you is obser­va­tion. With keep­ing an eye on every­thing that hap­pens around you even­tu­ally your filled to the brim with inter­est­ing expe­ri­ences. Such is the case with the GAIN Depart­ment, a divi­sion of Social Services.

The Begin­ning

To make a long story short, I applied for the County through their in-house tem­po­rary agency. Ini­tially, I wasn’t expect­ing to get the job let alone be faced with the respon­si­bil­ity of oth­ers. These oth­ers I’m refer­ring to were the fos­ter chil­dren par­tic­i­pat­ing in the GAIN (Greater Avenues for INde­pen­dence) program.

When I arrived at the offices I wasn’t expect­ing much. My job descrip­tion described a posi­tion that would require dri­ving and a key aspect to obtain­ing the posi­tion was a clean record, which I had. Over the next sev­eral weeks I would learn how to han­dle the ‘incen­tive’ inven­tory, pre­pare dri­ving routes for that par­tic­u­lar day and on Fri­days become a psuedo-secretary/office assis­tant (of which I received a mug with See’s Can­dies on Sec­re­taries Day).

My co-workers in the ILSP-GAIN Unit were com­prised of a won­der­ful group of peo­ple with strengths in teach­ing and most impor­tantly a spot in their hearts for chil­dren. Upon meet­ing them for the first time and being intro­duced to each of them I remem­ber think­ing to myself, “This is going to be great.” As a whole, the expe­ri­ence was indeed a great one but one that would even­tu­ally incur extreme respon­si­bil­ity and patience.

A few days into the Intro­duc­tory period I was intro­duced to Robert, the Social Worker who would teach me the ropes. His job was com­prised of the following:

1. Devel­op­ing routes for par­tic­i­pant pickup (the fos­ter kids)
2. Fig­ur­ing out what incen­tives and food were to be distributed
3. Mak­ing sure every­thing went as smooth as pos­si­ble with­out any delay in pickup or drop-off

Robert showed me how the routes were con­structed, via a com­bi­na­tion of sched­ules and Word. On any par­tic­u­lar day he was given the site (which was com­prised of sev­eral areas in the County), the teacher at the site, the stu­dents (or par­tic­i­pants) to be trans­ported to said sites and the food and incen­tives that would be dis­trib­uted to the youth. The incen­tives were essen­tially treats for the kids, gift cer­tifi­cates from Best Buy, Tar­get, Star­bucks and oth­ers. Our man­ager gath­ered the incen­tives for the day and would cre­ate a list for the stu­dents to sign-off on. For exam­ple, Stu­dent A would receive Best Buy Cer­tifi­cate #14567–00234 and would sign their name next to the cer­tifi­cate they received.

The classes were made up of about 12–15 stu­dents, each with their own intact per­son­al­ity which usu­ally included an intact atti­tude. These stu­dents (kids ages 13–20) were mostly from bro­ken homes (par­ents who gave them up, abused them, or kids involved in a string of vio­lent sit­u­a­tions lead­ing some to crim­i­nal avenues). The classes as taught by ILSP Advi­sors had sub­jects teach­ing them about things like taxes, the mil­i­tary, rent­ing, job oppor­tu­ni­ties, etc. Usu­ally, the class would begin with a Guest Speaker who rep­re­sented the spe­cific topic (i.e. Navy rep, Tax Advi­sor and/or a group of fire­men) talk­ing about their pro­fes­sion and then allow­ing the stu­dents to par­tic­i­pate in dis­cus­sions which led to in-class activ­i­ties. At the end of the ses­sion (as an incen­tive for their time) they each would receive a Gift Certificate.

When Robert showed me where the vehi­cles were kept, where to refuel and wash them if nec­es­sary, he also allowed me to sit in the seat next to him when he would pick up the kids from school, their homes, wher­ever. He men­tioned the kids would feel uncom­fort­able with a new dri­ver but that was nor­mal since they were used to chang­ing homes and nat­u­rally it wasn’t some­thing they looked for­ward to. This is where I met the groups of kids that reminded me of those ‘inner-city’ kids from the ABC After School Spe­cials or from movies such as Higher Learn­ing, The Sub­sti­tute, and even some­times Star Trek.

Con­tinue this story by read­ing Work­ing for the County: Part Deux.