Agency Reopens Six Abuse Cases

Action Is Part of Departmental Overhaul

Vowing that city social workers will track down every child in peril, District officials said yesterday that they had to take quick action in six cases of child abuse or neglect that were closed and forgotten last year.

New standards are being applied to old cases as part of reforms announced by D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) yesterday, four months after the city's Child and Family Services Agency was rocked by the discovery of Banita Jacks's four dead children inside her home and the ensuing arrest of a troubled mother who had slipped through the agency's cracks.

"No cases would be closed until a child is located," said Fenty, adding that the agency will increase training of hotline workers and create a training system for city workers mandated to report signs of child abuse or neglect.

The Jacks case was a massive disappointment for an agency that had been on a steady, decade-long upswing after years of problems.

"There were some things that the Jacks case helped reveal about where we were," Fenty said. "Where we either needed to change the direction, add something or move even faster."

When the city learned that the Jacks case was closed by the agency without contact being made, Fenty fired six social workers connected to the case, and agency Director Sharlynn Bobo said she would make far-reaching changes to address the shortcomings that the case revealed.

The first big step was to reopen 306 cases closed last year without a resolution. With the assistance of Casey Family Programs and the Child Welfare League of America, the agency found a need to look further into 84 of the 306 cases and took immediate action in six situations where the children appeared to be in immediate danger, Bobo said.

Some of those cases might have been closed too quickly because of the city's 30-day timeline for closing a case.

The agency is considering changing that "too short" turnaround time, Bobo said. New York, for example, gives social workers 60 days to complete an investigation of an abuse complaint, she said.

But reforms are an ambitious prospect for an agency that is also facing a record-breaking caseload.

Since the Jacks family case shocked the nation in January, the city's child welfare agency has received 9,900 reports of neglect or abuse. About 500 of those reports are for educational neglect, which was the initial report called in for the Jacks family by a social worker at one of the daughter's schools, Bobo said.

The reports have led to about 2,000 investigations. "This is historic for the agency," Bobo said.