Parents taking on D.C.’s beleaguered child welfare system have lost faith in Mayor Adrian Fenty’s reform efforts and are asking a federal judge to hold the city in contempt, according to court documents obtained by The Examiner.
D.C. has been subjected to class-action litigation over its troubled child welfare bureaucracy for more than two decades. Modest progress had been made, advocates said, but parents in the class-action suit said in court papers that Fenty “has allowed the child welfare system to return to a dysfunctional state.”
“Given … the deteriorating performance of the child welfare system, plaintiffs can no longer rely on District government to act on its own,” the parents’ attorneys wrote last month in a request to U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan to hold D.C. in contempt, “and again must turn to the court for help.”
The parents’ motion — filed by attorneys for the New York nonprofit group Children’s Rights and the D.C. chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union — could put the city back into court receivership. D.C. spent most of the 1990s under a court-appointed receiver, being freed from that status in 2001.
The contempt motion comes on top of a string of setbacks for the child welfare bureaucracy. Fenty was publicly embarrassed when it emerged that bureaucrats had ignored calls for help for four daughters of Banita Jacks, whose decomposing bodies were found in Southeast.
Since then, at least three small children have died on the city’s watch. Calls to the D.C. abuse and neglect hotline have exploded, and the agency’s backlog of open cases ballooned to a high of more than 1,800 earlier this year. The backlog shrank to nearly 1,500 in the last week, according to documents.
But that’s not good enough, ACLU attorney Arthur Spitzer told The Examiner.
“It’s not a matter of resources. It’s management and leadership,” he said. “It became clear to us that the contempt motion was really the only way to get the leadership to focus on this problem.”
City officials did not respond to request for comment. Interim Attorney General Peter Nickles was in Beijing and couldn’t be reached for comment.
City Councilman Tommy Wells, D-at large, who oversees the city’s human service agencies, said he doubted that putting the city back into receivership would address the fundamental problems in the child welfare system.
“There’s no magic to having receivership,” he said. “We have to make sure that every child is seen and safe.” Arguments on the contempt motions are scheduled for next month.
