D.C. officials have stabilized the city’s child welfare bureaucracy from last year’s collapse, but thousands of children are still languishing in a backward system, federal court monitors have concluded.
In January 2008, the public learned that welfare bureaucrats had ignored desperate calls to help Banita Jacks’ four daughters, whose bodies were later found on the floor of their ramshackle squatters’ home in Southeast. After that, the backlog of abuse and neglect cases swelled to more than 1,800.
The backlog has now closed to about 30, federally appointed monitors at the Center for the Study of Social Policy have written in a new report. But the system continues to fail in its basic mission, the report states. Adoptions have plummeted, the numbers of children being yanked out of their family homes are skyrocketing, and hundreds of children are languishing in foster care for years at a time and are being bounced from one foster home to another with little reason, the monitors concluded.
The verdict is the same as it was in previous reports, the monitors said: “High quality planning, decision making and service delivery is not yet the norm.”
The city and its attorney general, Peter Nickles, are due in federal court Thursday. Nickles is fending off a contempt motion by lawyers representing thousands of children who say that they’re suffering abuse and neglect from an indifferent bureaucracy.
The plaintiffs’ lawyers, New York-based Children’s Rights, say the monitors’ report is vindication.
“The federal court has found time and again that D.C.’s abused and neglected children and vulnerable families are entitled to a level of care and service that the District is still simply failing to provide,” the group said in a statement.
Nickles says he and the Fenty administration aren’t getting the credit they deserve from rescuing the agency from last year’s crisis.
“I think there are a lot of good things happening,” Nickles said.
Matt Fraidin, a law professor at the University of the District of Columbia who has advocated for child welfare reform, said too many kids were still being needlessly snatched from their homes by bureaucrats trying to protect their jobs.
“The benchmarks [in the report] are extremely low standards,” Fraidin said, “and [the city] can’t meet even those.”
