I began my career as an eligibility specialist with the Texas Health and Human Services Commission. My role was to determine eligible for families and children for Medicaid, TANF, and food stamp benefits. After 10 years in that role, I started working for Child Protective Services as a Conservatorship Worker. As a Conservatorship Worker, my role was to aid families in being reunited with their children. If family reunification was not achieved, I worked with family members or foster parents to find a forever home for those children. After 13 years of being Conservatorship Worker, I was offered the opportunity to be a Local Permanency Specialist, where I remained for the rest of my Child Protective Services career. As a Local Permanency Worker, my role was to see children placed in my area for all areas in Texas and ensure their needs were being met.
I began my career with the Texas Family Care Network in April 2025, as a Staff Support Specialist for courtesy worker team. I monitored the home study mailbox for the Kinship Program and I am the Missing Children’s Coordinator for all of TFCN.
What has kept me at my job is that I want to see families work through their challenges and remain a family unit. Once I started working with families, I never could see myself doing a different job. I have been blessed with amazing coworkers and supervisors who have stood beside me and helped me when things were good and also when things were challenging.
The delivery of our services has evolved throughout the internet. Over the last 30 years, the technology associated with the Internet has introduced so many more resources for our families and our staff. The ability to offer services on line, and to attend meetings and court hearing through Zoom and TEAMS, allows families an even better chance for success.
There have been so many memorable moments with my career, but I will have to go with my last encounter with a young teenage girl on my caseload. I had been her courtesy worker for over two years and when I made the decisions to switch jobs when I joined TXFCN. I informed her that I would no longer be her worker and she would have a new worker seeing her each month. She told the that it will be fine and then leaned over and whispered “ Now we can be friends on Instagram”. She gave me her information and told me to keep it a secret. I didn’t dare tell her I was going to have to learn how to use Instagram.