Angela Kraemer decided if she was going to leave the home to help generate income for her family, she would do something fulfilling.

At the suggestion of a friend 13 years ago, Kraemer founded Angela’s Family Services LLC, a business that helps facilitate court-appointed, supervised custodial visitations, often between children in the state’s foster care system and their biological parents.

The Washington state Department of Children, Youth, and Families refers cases to Angela’s Family Services.

“My agency solely focuses on the DCYF’s (cases) and is mostly working with foster children and Child Protective Services,” she says.

Kraemer, who runs the business with her husband, Kurt Kraemer, works with about 45 independent subcontractors who help coordinate and supervise visitations.

The starting rate of pay for a visitation supervisor is $16.75 per hour, including transportation time.

Kurt Kraemer oversees operations with four part-time employees assisting with various administrative duties.

Angela’s Family Services rents space for visitation at three locations—two in Spokane Valley and at another on Spokane’s North Side. She declines to disclose the specific locations of those visitation sites in order to protect the identities of clients and visitation supervisors. Together, the company has access to a total of 23 room spaces to hold visitations, she says.

In nearly 13 years of operating Angela’s Family Services, the demand for visitation supervisors has never been greater, she says, and finding visitation supervisors has never been more challenging. 

“I had 73 (subcontractors) before COVID,” she says. “We lost a lot of team members, many of whom are older and retired, because they didn’t feel comfortable working with our clientele. We work with a very high-risk population.”

Last year, the company served between 100 to 150 families a month, averaging approximately 1,200 visits per month. That was down from 2019’s figures of 200 to 250 families monthly with an average of about 1,800 total monthly visits. Angela’s Family Services experienced close to a 50% drop in revenue due to COVID-19, she says.

Pandemic aside, legislative funding to support visitation specialists has remained mostly level for the last 10 years, and it has become more challenging to recruit specialists to the company each year, Kraemer says.

In November, DCYF estimated there may only be 800 visitation supervisors to handle the thousands of requests for their services.

As challenging as the job can be, though, Kraemer says she can’t imagine doing anything else.

“What we do is so important to these children and these families,” she says.

Visitation supervisors transport children, who can range from infancy to 17 years of age, to one of the three visitation locations here. They also are charged with providing safety in an emotional and physical manner, she says.

Kraemer cites a hypothetical example of a child jumping on a couch and misbehaving and the visiting parent does nothing to correct the action. It then becomes the job of the visitation supervisor to intervene and get the child to stop, she says.

Visitation supervisors also are responsible for ensuring that conversations between parents and children are appropriate, she says.

Visitation supervisors document their observations of each custodial visit, detailing interactions between adults and children. Many of the parents are under supervision for prior criminal offenses and are working to restore their lives after losing parental rights, she says.

“Anybody who has case decision-making power has access to our notes,” she says.

Case summaries are available for visitation supervisors to review within the company’s confidential data base and then sign up for cases they may be comfortable with, Kraemer says.

“I would never want to put you in a situation where you felt you weren’t prepared,” she says.

For example, she has team members who are retired emergency medical technicians, firefighters, and nurses, or who have other experience in medical and public safety fields. Those visitation supervisors often take on cases in which the adult or child has medical issues, she says.

Once a referral is chosen, the visitation supervisor then contacts the biological parent and the child’s temporary caregiver to set up a visitation. The goal is to first establish weekly contact between parent and child. 

Kraemer started the company in Carnation, Washington, just over 10 miles east of Redmond, Washington, before moving all business operations and her family to Spokane. She still has several visitation supervisors working for the company on the West Side and in Central Washington, though most are in Spokane County, she says.

“I started this as just an individual. I really had no experience in the social services industry,” Kraemer says.

But she had a friend in the industry who recognized her passion for children and families.

“I was really hesitant. I went into it thinking I’d give it a try to see if it would work out. Within a couple of weeks, I fell in love,” she says. “I love what I do.”

Roughly a year after starting her business, Kraemer received more requests from DCYF to facilitate visitations. That’s when she began adding subcontractors to work as visitation supervisors.

“It’s more in line with how I like to work,” she says of the subcontractor model. “I don’t want to be somebody’s boss; I want to be their teammate.”

Subcontractors have greater flexibility when it comes to being able to set their schedules and can choose to take on as much work – or as little – as they like. Many of the visitation supervisors with the company already have full-time jobs in social services fields and use Angela’s Family Services as a second source of income, she says.