D.C. Agency For Children Cuts Backlog Of Cases

The District's child welfare agency is beginning to get its backlog of investigations under control and fulfill promises made in a court order, in an effort to avoid a return to federal control.

After having hired aggressively to fill a large number of openings, the Child and Family Services Agency has significantly cut the backlog of investigations open longer than 30 days, signed a contract with a group headed by a nationally respected consultant and started a search for a director to lead the embattled agency.

This summer's peak of about 1,700 backlogged investigations has dropped to 752, city statistics show. According to the court agreement, the backlog must be 600 by Nov. 15 and 100 by Dec. 31.

The consultants are headed by Kevin Ryan, former commissioner of New Jersey's Department of Children and Families. Ryan was largely credited with reforming that agency. He and his team of three have a 90-day, $325,000 contract to assess problems in the D.C. agency and create a strategic plan, meet the requirements of the court stipulation and recruit a director.

Ryan said the agency had been on an upswing. Now the challenge is to get back on track after a calamitous year marked by two incidents in which children who had been in the system were found dead in their homes.

"It's so clear the agency was ascendant," Ryan said. "Outcomes for some kids were getting stronger, in part because the resources in this system are dramatically better than before the lawsuit. My sense is that there really has been positive, demonstrable, measurable change."

City officials also said they had seen steady improvement.

"This is a system that is a good system," said the District's acting attorney general, Peter Nickles. The hiring of Ryan's Public Catalyst Group will "help us to be a national-class system," he said.

The child welfare agency emerged from receivership about eight years ago, riding a wave of reforms that helped decrease the number of children languishing in foster care, lessened social workers' caseloads and increased staff and funding.

But the reforms stumbled, and the agency began to crater this year with two high-profile cases involving the deaths of children known to social workers. In January, authorities found the bodies of four girls in their mother's D.C. home. Last month, Maryland officials found the bodies of two girls in the freezer of a woman who said she had adopted them from the District.

The January case prompted what child welfare officials call a "surge," an increase in reports of abuse and neglect from people who had suspected it but never called.

That surge resulted in a fourfold increase in calls, and plummeting morale led to the exodus of almost 25 percent of the D.C. agency's social workers.