By Petula Dvorak
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 17, 2008
The District's child welfare workers are closing cases quickly but not always carefully, a court monitor warned two months before the bodies of Banita Jacks's four daughters were found decomposing in their Southeast Washington home after a city social worker had closed their case.
Moreover, the monitor warns that a dramatic increase in child-abuse reports prompted by the grim discovery may cost the beleaguered child welfare agency progress and lead to new strains after a decade of reform.
After years of federal receivership, D.C.'s Child and Family Services Agency remains under the scrutiny of the federal court-appointed monitor, whose report in November foreshadowed the cracks in the agency through which the Jacks girls eventually fell before their mother was charged in their deaths.
The agency had been making strides in becoming more efficient and accountable in dealing with about 4,500 children every year. On paper, the Jacks case appeared in order, because the social worker responded within 24 hours of a report and made several attempts to reach the family. The case was closed in 16 days after the social worker heard that the family had moved to Maryland and notified authorities there.
The case highlights the difficulties that come with applying box-checking standards to a profession that deals with a population as fragile, volatile and emotional as the city's imperiled children. "Really, you should never close a case until it's ready to be closed," said the court monitor, Judith W. Meltzer, deputy director of the Center for the Study of Social Policy.
For most social workers, that means seeing the child. It's a mantra that many social workers repeat, even though a caseload of 12, for example, can mean they are dealing with 50 to 70 members of 12 dysfunctional families.
Applying that standard after the Jacks incident, the agency reopened 309 investigations from last year that had been closed and labeled "incomplete," about 7 percent of the total.
Five types of contacts are required to close a case: the victim, the alleged abuser, the person who reported the incident, doctors or teachers, and all household members. In the 309 reopened cases, the five required contacts for each case were not all reached, said Mindy Good, spokeswoman for the Child and Family Services Agency. In some cases, she said, the child and the parent were never contacted.
The Child Welfare League of America, the country's oldest child welfare group, and Casey Family Programs, from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, have sent a team of seven experts to the agency to review the cases and determine whether further investigation is necessary.
The league often plays this role across the country, sending social workers and experts to places where a high-profile case can lead to a spike in reports and the added caseload threatens to bury an agency. "Washington, D.C., is not alone in this. We have been working in Connecticut and Colorado as well," said Joyce Johnson, a spokeswoman for the league.
The court monitor's November report took a snapshot of 40 random cases from 2007 and analyzed the agency's investigative performance. It found that in half of the cases, the five contacts necessary to close the case were not made.
And in four of the five individual cases in which a parent should have been referred to a specialist for mental-health treatment, no action was taken. The court monitor's analysis didn't explain why.
"As the monitor of the District's child welfare system, it makes me profoundly sad that the problems our monitoring efforts have identified with the quality of child protective services in great detail for the past several years were not addressed prior to these deaths," Meltzer said in a hearing about the Jacks case last month.
In her November report, Meltzer said that weak supervision, an emphasis on timeliness rather than quality in the processing of cases and the unwelcoming attitude of some hotline call operators have been long-standing issues in the agency. Those turned out to be key problems in the Jacks case.
Even more disturbing is Meltzer's prediction: Fallout from the Jacks case and the fourfold increase in reports now flooding the agency could create a backslide after years of progress.
"It's very sad. I do believe the agency is a different agency than it was in 1992 and a different agency than it was in 2000," Meltzer said. "I'm very concerned now that this increase in cases will return us to the 1990s."
The agency spent much of that decade in federal receivership, when it was understaffed and overwhelmed by heavy caseloads, fallout from the District's decade-long drug epidemic.
Since the Jacks tragedy, the agency received 800 new reports of abuse last month, an unprecedented spike from the usual 300 for that period.
Social workers said they are overloaded. "I used to get two or three new cases a week. Now I get eight to 10 new cases a week. To say I am stressed out would be an understatement," said a social worker who asked to remain anonymous because the agency told employees not to speak to the media.
To pick up the extra work, the agency has called on social workers who have no cases, including managers and directors, to leave their desk jobs temporarily, Good said.
The increase in reports came primarily from schools, neighborhoods and mental health officials after they heard that the bodies of Brittany Jacks, 16, Tatianna Jacks, 11, N'Kiah Fogle, 6, and Aja Fogle, 5, were found at their home in the 4200 block of Sixth Street SE in early January. Investigators said the girls might have been dead since May.
This troubled family fell through many safety nets before they came to the attention of a city social worker in May. They had lived in a hypothermia shelter, collected food stamps, raised the concern of a hospital nurse, worried a school counselor and were reported to District Court.
When they landed at the doorstep of the Child and Family Services Agency, the organization was in its best shape in decades. The caseload for each worker was about 12, a dramatic change from a time when some social workers had 50 to 100 cases. The backlog of cases lingering past 30 days was less than 50, down from about 800 seven years ago. Scores of new social workers were hired, and the agency was almost fully staffed. And the child-abuse hotline was finally set up to receive messages.
Despite the advances, the agency is now wrangling with the Jacks tragedy.
Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) fired the six child welfare workers who had come in contact with the case, explaining they "just didn't do their jobs."
Union officials have clashed with the mayor, filed appeals on behalf of the fired workers and held a rally to renounce the "scapegoating" of these individuals.
But this is not just a case of social workers gone bad, many critics, including former social worker and current D.C. Council member Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6), said.
Explaining the failure of the agency in this case requires more nuance than the explanations of the past decade, when hundreds of cases stacked up in piles, unopened by an understaffed agency that was under siege.
The agency is caught in a pernicious loop sparked by the 1989 court case, LaShawn A. v. Barry, which sent it into federal receivership for almost a decade. The conditions of the lawsuit brought about tremendous change and improvement in the agency, but many say it also created a palpable shift in the culture there.
"The agency is so compliance-driven, constantly trying to be in compliance with the federal lawsuit, that it is losing individual judgment of the worker," Wells said.
The Jacks case was a prime example of this practice, Meltzer said. The social workers and their bosses "went through the motions but repeatedly missed the facts, made poor decisions and acted to close the door" for helping the family, she said.
Wells said the Jacks case offers a classic example of how two social workers operating under different standards respond: the school social worker was answering to her mission, while the city social worker was also trying to comply with a prescribed list of standards.
Kathy Lopes, a school social worker, called the child welfare agency because Brittany Jacks had not been to class at Booker T. Washington Public Charter School for more than a month. City officials released a recording of Lopes's agitated calls to the Child and Family Services Agency hotline and the steely response of the city social worker answering. Lopes went to the Jacks home twice, she said. She never saw Brittany but did see Banita Jacks, who did not let her inside.
"The social worker from the high school did not stop until she saw the mom," Wells said. "The social worker at CFSA stopped after three visits and did nothing more than leave a note."
The agency is at a "plateau," Wells said.
"This case is not itself a setback," he said. "But it's really important right now for the agency to examine its mistakes here. And move forward."
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