On Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge Thomas F. Hogan did what no one else in the city seemed to be able to do: He ordered CFSA to come up with a plan to fix itself. He gave the troubled child welfare agency a two-week deadline.

Hogan’s directive spells certain trouble for the already troubled agency! CFSA has definitely heard the words “plan” and “deadline” before Wednesday. It’s understanding those words that’s given the agency fits, according to Marcia Robinson Lowry, the executive director of Children’s Rights, the national advocacy group that has watchdogged the agency for decades. Children’s Rights spurred this latest round in U.S. District Court after filing a contempt order in late July.

It is the concept of deadlines and plans that caused Children’s Rights to take action in U.S. District Court.

“We had certainly been concerned for at least the last four or five months,” Lowry told me in early August. “CFSA was supposed to have agreed to an acceptable 12-month plan in January. It became clear they were not going to be able to do that…They couldn’t come up with a satisfactory plan. Finally, we withdraw our objections to [a] six month [stabilization] plan. It was March already and they did not have a plan that we thought was adequate. Since the period was half over, we decided to do a 12-month plan starting on July 1. We expected to have an adequate plan by the end of June. We did not get an acceptable plan by the end of June.”

Lowry’s group met CFSA officials several times to express its dissatisfaction. Those meetings, Lowry says, were disappointing and failed to address the agency’s lack of progress on righting the agency. The meetings sometimes included D.C.’s top lawyer Peter Nickles.

Nickles did confirm to City Desk that Children’s Rights’ main beef with CFSA concerned the agency’s failure to address its issues in a systematic way. The agency just never could get specific enough to satisfy Children’s Rights, Nickles says.

[Nickles told the Post in July: "I had looked to Marcia and the plaintiffs as partners to improve the agency," Nickles said. "This has sort of taken my invitation and said we'll hold you in contempt."]

Lowry says that given the agency’s bad marks in a November ‘07 review and the handling of the Banita Jacks case, the agency should have been more aggressive.

Banita Jacks pleaded not guilty this morning to killing her four daughters. Her attorneys have 15 days to enter an insanity defense The indictment handed down Wednesday, via WaPo, includes new and disturbing info about how the girls, believed dead for about six months, initially died:

The youngest, Aja Fogle, 5, had been strangled and beaten, the indictment says. Her sisters, N’Kiah Fogle, 6, and Tatiana Jacks, 11, had been strangled. As previously thought, Brittany Jacks, 16, had been stabbed, the document says.

In an e-mail dated August 25, Interim Director Roque Gerald confessed some bad news to Child and Family Services Agency employees: there were 1,442 cases still in the backlog.

In mid-July, the backlog stood at 1,708 cases, according to agency documents. It has been more than a month since Sharlynn Bobo resigned. Since July 14, the backlog has shrunk by 266 cases—and this is with the full throttle support of the Fenty Administration. Gerald wrote in his e-mail:

“Today’s message is with a heavy heart but also with no less passion and commitment to support you in every way I can. We remain burdened by our valiant attempts to address the current backlog crisis.”

Gerald goes on to state that the backlog had become enough of an issue (again) that he had to reach out to the mayor’s office. On August 22, he e-mailed City Administrator Dan Tangherlini. Gerald’s communique “led to a face-to-face meeting with the CA and some others on the EOM staff” on the evening of August 22.

“It was a good, productive meeting. Loren Ganoe, Camelia Pierre, Jim Toscano, and I all came away with a better understanding of EOM concerns—and with a sense that they gained a deeper understanding of the challenges CFSA is facing and strategies we’re using to meet them. You must continue to press to safely close backlogged investigations. Meanwhile, I’ll keep oversight authorities informed about our efforts, barriers, and successes,” Gerald wrote.

Gerald noted that “results” from his sit-down at the mayor’s office were “immediate.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Children’s Rights, the New York-based group behind a long-standing lawsuit against the city over it’s care/treatment of children, filed a contempt motion in U.S. District Court yesterday. The motion was filed over the recent–and not so recent–troubles at CFSA.

Children’s Rights clearly did its homework. The motion totals 35 pages. The filing alleges breakdowns across CFSA as the introduction makes plain:

“After years of planning, reorganization, investment of additional resources and capacity building to improve the system, the District’s executive leadership has allowed the child welfare system to return to a dysfunctional state. As a consequence, the reform effort in the District has stagnated and begun to retreat. For the children who depend on the child welfare system for their basic protection and care, this return to the past means a future filled with uncertainty, instability and further harm. …”

“Though significant strides have been made to improve the quality of services and outcomes provided to the abused and neglected children in the District over the past 15 years, the District has never achieved compliance with the applicable court orders now even these advances are at grave risk. …CFSA’s performance in many areas of child welfare practice is substandard or declining or both. This erosion in CFSA performance directly flows from an unstable and deteriorating management situation with CFSA.”

The filing goes on cite untimely and poor investigations for children at home or in foster care, a foster care system that fails to place children with adequate families, and fails to match up kids with adequate medical needs.

You can read the entire contempt motion here.

The social worker who pleaded in vain for the city to intervene in the Banita Jacks case has a new job: She’s working for Deputy Mayor for Education Victor Reinoso.

Kathy Lopes had been a counselor at Booker T. Washington Public Charter School, where 16-year-old Brittany Jacks had attended. After Brittany stopped going to school for a month last spring, Lopes visited the Jacks home and repeatedly tried to get the city’s Child and Family Services Agency to intervene. After it was discovered in January that Brittany and her three sisters had been murdered, the city released tapes of Lopes all but begging a CFSA social worker to check on her.

Lopes started as a “program analyst” on March 3; according to Reinoso, her job is connected with a pilot program that aims to identify at-risk schoolkids and coordinate the delivery of city services to help them. She currently works out of the deputy mayor’s Wilson Building office suite, but Reinoso says that next month Lopes will start working in one of two DCPS schools slated to debut the program this school year. Another five schools will start the program in August. (The chosen schools are scheduled to be announced at 10:30 this morning.)

Reinoso says Lopes came to his notice due to her involvement in the Jacks case. “We reached out to her,” he says. “She obviously understands the importance of people coordinating on these issues.”

Lopes went through an interview process along with about a dozen other social workers before she was selected. “She obviously has a lot of persistence,” Reinoso says. “You’ve got to have a lot of persistence in this line of work.”

Lopes could not be immediately reached for comment.

Today at noon, Child and Family Services Agency employees–along with numerous sympathetic union reps–staged a protest outside their headquarters at 400 6th Street SW. The employees were protesting the firings of six of their co-workers in the aftermath of the Banita Jacks case. They were also protesting the media coverage of their agency following the Jacks tragedy.

In the downpour, they talked about being singled out and scapegoated. There were many other agencies that should have taken more of the blame. If the police couldn’t get through to Banita Jacks, one argued, how were they supposed to?

The workers chanted “We’re fired up! We can’t take it no more!”

A boot-and-umbrella count charitably estimates about 100 workers, union members, and curious onlookers. Tony Sanchez, an admin. reviewer with the agency, hovered in the back, scrunched between so many of his soggy brethren. A friend held an umbrella over his head. He held a folded sign. “It was an injustice done to the workers,” he said. He explained that the six who were fired were never told exactly what they did wrong before they were terminated. “They didn’t do anything wrong according to the policy.”

I asked Sanchez who he would hold accountable for the Jacks case. He replied: “Mrs. Jacks.”

One more spoke with the bullhorn. Then people started going back inside the building, leaving the entrance to a few wet media folk. The protest lasted about as long as three cigarette breaks.

I was directed to Debra Courtney, president of the local. Of the six workers, she said: “They were made to [be] the fall guys.” She says the six were just following procedure. They’re “holding up pretty good,” she says.

Courtney added: “They have faith in their counsel.”

Meaning: The fight isn’t over.

A few minutes before the protests, everyone got a handout. It was a letter from the union to Mayor Adrian Fenty sent today.

I wish I could post the whole thing. But I can’t. So here’s a sampling of what the letter—written by Geo T. Johnson, Executive Director of AFSCME Council 20—states:

Yet another high profile family tragedy weighs heavy on the hearts of District residents. The horrific deaths of four Southwest Washington children at the hands of their troubled mother has led many people to ask, ‘How could this happen? How could city agencies such as the Child and Family Services Agency fail to protect these innocent children?’

The answer that you pulled from your thick crisis containment playbook was media-perfect: call a quick press conference; conduct a ‘thorough’ two-day investigation; pin the blame on some frontline folks and then skip to the next sound-bite. Ah, so simple.

But with all due respect, Mr. Mayor, there is no ‘Simple Button’ to press to plug holes in the city’s safety net for families and children. Nor is anything gained by promising major reforms but then not sticking around long enough to see them through….

The letter goes on to cite real examples of what their workers go through:

Management has told social workers to use Flex cars to conduct investigations, but they cannot transport children in Flex cars because it creates a liability problem. If social workers use their personal cars when they go to court or to some neighborhoods, they end up paying thousands of dollars in parking fines because they can’t feed the meter.

There is of course deeper problems, the letter states the problems as: “outdated policy manuals, lack of continuous training, and excessive caseloads.” In fact, the letter claims social workers are carrying 50 percent more cases then they are mandated to by LaShawn.

The letter closes with a plea to Fenty to join the union in a “genuine partnership” for “common ground” and “better ideas.”