A D.C. elementary school principal who was desperately trying to get help for a girl whom she believed was being molested was rebuffed by a child-welfare worker, delaying intervention for the child who prosecutors say was being assaulted.
Cristina Encinas of the Latin American Montessori Bilingual School was told by the case worker that she didn’t have enough expertise to judge the situation and that she should go back and gather more evidence, The Examiner has learned.
She eventually persuaded officials to open a case and the little girl’s male relatives are currently being prosecuted, the principal said Tuesday.
But Encinas’ story raises the disturbing possibility that D.C.’s child welfare bureaucracy still has hidden horror stories of institutional failure.
Encinas said she called the city’s abuse hot line in May 2007 about the girl, who is now 7.
“When I talked to someone there, they asked me about my experience,” Encinas recalled. “They said, ‘Ask the child. Then call us back.’ That’s supposed to be their job.”
The child welfare system is already teetering amid revelations that its employees ignored warning signs that a homeless woman, Banita Jacks, was a danger to her family. Last month, federal marshals discovered the badly decomposed bodies of Jacks’ four daughters on the floor of a Southeast row house.
Mayor Adrian Fenty promptly fired six bureaucrats in the Jacks case.
Encinas said a staff psychologist at her school told her how to talk to the girl without prodding her. They ended up playing a board game and the girl volunteered her experiences, Encinas said.
“Thank God I had a counselor with me,” Encinas said. “But, if she wouldn’t have had this display, nothing would have been done.”
Encinas’ account is supported by a Jan. 14 e-mail sent to D.C.’s top child-welfare official, Sharlynn Bobo, by family advocate Nancy Smith.
“Clearly, this was a terrible response by the [h]ot line worker and could have both led to catastrophe for the child and to an unwillingness to report in the future,” Smith wrote to Bobo the day before Bobo testified on the Jacks case to the D.C. Council.
In her note, obtained by The Examiner under the Freedom of Information Act, Smith reminded Bobo that she had briefed her on the matter “informally” months before and told her to “fix this, too, before another messy case hits the press.”
Bobo told The Examiner that she wasn’t trying to hide Encinas’ account; her agency was “completely consumed” by the Jacks case. She acknowledged, though, that she didn’t ask her staff to look into the matter until after The Examiner called her office.
“I will follow through to determine what happened,” Bobo said.
Calls to the abuse hot line have risen by at least 400 percent since the Jacks case was made public, said Judith Meltzer, the deputy director of the Center for the Study of Social Policy, a nonprofit group and court-appointed monitor of the city’s child protection system.
“You’re asking people to make very hard judgments and decisions very quickly, and the public has zero tolerance for mistakes,” Meltzer said.
