My Service Learning With Child Protective Services ( Cps )

First Impressions Before taking this class or completing my service learning with Child Protective Services (CPS), I really had not had any experience with CPS. I just made the assumption that the agency was biased and flawed based on the experiences other people had with CPS. I also did not think it would be a place that I would want to work because I did not want to work with children, although now I realize that was a really unfair opinion I had of the agency. I also thought a lot of people abused the service because I had heard a lot of stories of people calling CPS on each other out of spite. After learning about CPS and being able to observe what the agency does, I do realize the agency is not what I thought it was. I also realize†¦show more content†¦Although my first day in the office was uneventful I was looking forward to going back, because I was excited to see what other types of tasks Ms. Green has to carry out. My first day was my only day in the office though, after a while Ms. Green stopped responding to my emails. From my understanding it was not Ms. Green who was avoiding me, it was the agency preventing her from communicating with not only me, but with other families who she could have been working with. I became so frustrated and disappointed that I was getting gypped from the service learning portion of class. I also imagine the families she was working with were frustrated as well because they were stuck in a sort of limbo. Even though I was not able to go back to the CPS office and complete any more hours there, I did get the opportunity to observe a case in court. Which definitely made me place some faith back into the agency, it made everything we learned in class click together for me. In particular there were some terms that came up in court that I remember discussing in class, such as family reunification, safe and stable housing, and the family service plan. I really felt like I was able to fully understand what was happening during the hearing because we covered so much in class. This case involved three children who were currently living in foster care with a family, and their parents who were trying to get the three children returned to them. I did not anticipate how emotionally