Chaos Reigns in Clarksville DCS Office

NASHVILLE, TN – Angel Miller, a regional director in the Upper Cumberland Region of the Department of Children’s Services (DCS), targeted several longtime employees, suspended three, terminated three, one twice, and pressured four others to resign—all in the past two years.

Miller had no comment.

Sarah Shepherd was a team leader in the Clarksville office who resigned in 2020. “I left because she (Karmen Davis) wouldn’t stop trying to get me to discipline people,” Shepherd said.

Miller hired Davis in late 2019 and she quickly became Miller’s confidante and right hand. ”Karmen Davis is basically Angel’s snitch and she lies a lot, “ said Autumn Moultry. Moultry was a Case Manager 4 supervisor with 18 years on the job. Miller fired her—twice.

Melanie Campbell was a lead investigator who worked for DCS from 2014-2020. Miller fired her in 2020. Campbell worked in Clarksville. At the time, Campbell had 70 cases that meant she was required to visit about 200 children at least once a month. Campbell wasn’t fired for her job performance but for gross misconduct.

Campbell failed to file a report about one of her clients, a teen-ager who later committed suicide. Miller put the blame on Campbell.

Both Campbell and Moultry appealed their terminations. At least five others appealed their suspensions or terminations between 2019-2021. The state employees’ union, TSEA, represents disciplined workers during the 3-level appeals process.

“Nobody wins at the first two levels because it’s all DCS people who hear the case,” Moultry said. But an independent panel presides over the third level.

Moultry said excessive caseloads and management’s bad attitude really wore her out. “It never used to be like that. The first eight 8 years we enjoyed our jobs,” she said. But now people work overtime, bring work home, but still can’t keep up with the number of cases.

“You’re protecting everybody else’s kids but don’t have time for your own,” she said.

One worker said case counts in Davidson County are up to 50 and team leaders have had to take some of them over. DCS leadership hasn’t effectively addressed the issue. (See Toxic Workplace)

Autumn Moultry Fired

Moultry’s problems started one Wednesday in May 2019 when she filled in for a worker who was in the hospital. The case was in Robertson County and the judge was a stickler. Moultrie didn’t have a report that the court liaison, Melissa Upchurch, was supposed to have gotten the previous week.

“They waited until I got to court to tell me it was missing,” Moultry said. The DCS attorney on the case, Julie Wooten, pretended she didn’t know anything about it. “She tried to throw me under the bus,” Moultry said.

Both Upchurch and Wooten testified against Moultry at her appeal hearing. They are in Miller’s inner circle. Miller also testified. An office email was their key evidence against Moultry. Miller claimed Moultry lied to the judge about it and fired her for it.

As we reported last week, an “us versus them” dynamic has created a hostile work environment in DCS offices around the state. The Tribune has interviewed workers in three different regions and all reported they endured petty vindictive managers who played favorites and picked on people they didn’t like.

Miller and her flunkies were in the hearing room for Round 3. Moultry said her resolve began to waver. “These people were saying terrible things about me and I thought ‘Am I this really bad person who did all these horrible things?’ “

According to Miller, the judge asked Moultry if she read all her emails. Moultry answered “Yes.” But Miller wasn’t in the courtroom that day and that’s not what the judge asked.

“Play the tape,” Moultry said. ”Play the tape.” The judge asked Moultry if she checked her emails, not if she read them all. The court recording proved Moultry had not committed perjury.

A member of the hearing board noted that the recipients of the “smoking gun’ email were other people involved in that case, not Moultry, who had been cc-ed. In short, the email was a pretext.

Both Moultry and Campbell won their jobs back and Moultry collected $30,000 in back pay. The harassment didn’t stop. The unfair treatment continued for 6 months. Then Miller fired Moultry again in August 2020.

Moultry, Campbell, and other case managers were team players, dedicated to the job and to each other, but they weren’t in the in-crowd. When they left, needy children lost their devoted advocates and protectors.

A House Divided

Although morale is low at DCS, it is likely rooted in organizational changes from the top. DCS has four main divisions: child safety, child programs, child health, and juvenile justice. In 2013, The Office of Child Safety was divided into three branches: assessments, investigations, and training.

“Prior to 2013 everybody worked for DCS under the same umbrella,” said James Snodgrass, an investigations team leader and trainer who worked at DCS from 2007-2021.

Snodgrass said regional investigative directors (RID) were hired when investigations were put in the Office of Child Safety. They hired their team coordinators and lead investigators. “They developed a separate chain of command for investigations,” Snodgrass said.

Regional administrators took on the assessment load, which had fewer and less critical cases. A turf war broke out between the old guard who feared losing control and a new bunch of managers. Battles over space and resources ensued. Snodgrass described it as a tug of war. “Regional administrators wanted the Office of Child Safety to fail,” he said.

The 2013 reorganization supplanted Child Protective Services (CPS). The only people whose jobs still have a CPS designation are the CPS directors in each of DCS’s 13 regional offices. If DCS were a railroad, CPS directors would be spur lines that no longer serve any useful purpose.

Too many DCS mid-level bureaucrats have become obsessed with discipline and punishment, vindictively wielding their power over workers with exemplary records.

In 2008 DCS hired Vanderbilt researchers to study why retention in the DCS Clarksville office was so bad. “Basically, they decided it was a leadership issue,“ Snodgrass said.

“If you have a supervisor hiding out in their car, ghosting their workers when they need guidance, not monitoring their people, they are not doing what they’re supposed to be doing,” he said.

Office hours are from 8:00 a.m.-4:30 p.m. “But they’re sitting in their car with their laptops and not answering their phone calls. They only come into the office when they have to recharge their laptops,” Snodgrass said.

From 2016-2020 Snodgrass was a special response team investigator. He travelled widely, visiting different regions to help out with their heavy caseloads. Sometimes he would take over cases from workers who were on medical leave or who had been suspended.

He was not privy to the circumstance surrounding a worker’s absence, but in hindsight, he says his role as a “fixer” provided cover for managers who had created their own predicament and were scapegoating employees to take the blame.

When COVID hit in 2020, Snodgrass said the special response teams went “Poof!” and he was reassigned to the Clarksville office.

“The people who were in charge in 2008 are still in charge in 2021 and nothing has changed,” he said.