jonetta rose barras: Battling a whistleblower and failing to protect children
On April 24, 2017, after months of fighting to prevent officials at the DC Child and Family Services Agency (CFSA) from violating the city’s Foster Youth Amendment Act of 2012 and pushing them to publish the mandatory report about complaints and investigations, Christian Greene was fired by the newly appointed director, Brenda Donald. Greene, CFSA’s ombudsman, filed a lawsuit in response. She described the termination as retaliatory and a violation of the DC Whistleblower Protection Act.
For the next nearly eight years, Greene has battled the city’s mammoth law firm known as the Office of the Attorney General, which is representing CFSA. In court documents, OAG characterized her firing as, among other things, a reasonable response to an employee unsatisfied with the contours of her prescribed duties and responsibilities; it also said she had been insubordinate, refusing to follow directions and mandates of her supervisor — that alone was justification for her firing, according to OAG.
“I was really focused on child safety, and I was not going to sacrifice child safety for adults’ feelings. In the District, we often put how the adult feels over child safety; that became a huge issue in my case,” Greene told me earlier this week during a virtual interview with her and her lawyer, F. Douglas Hartnett of Elitok and Hartnett at Law PLLC.
While Greene had worked for CFSA since 2009, first as a child protective services investigator, she wasn’t appointed as ombudsman until March 2015. She said she was “purposely used to [create] a façade.”
“I had a very good reputation. I was known for holding people accountable. … They wanted people to come to me and trust me because of the relationship I had built in the community, within the courts, within OAG, within leadership, trust amongst the social workers.”
Greene, a licensed clinical social worker, said conflict developed when she began “to hold the agency accountable to the same standard we hold community members,” including whether employees and others had their mandated licenses. “The law is very clear. You can’t even sign a document without a clinical licensure,” explained Greene.
When she refused to follow the game plan that included breaking rules and laws, Greene said, officials “started targeting me” and switched the line of reporting authority for her “from the director to the general counsel” and “took a variety of steps to strip my position and strip me” of certain authority. “It was definitely high-anxiety, but I kept on reminding myself the worst they can do to me is get my job,” said Greene.
Eventually, that’s what happened.
“I filed the whistleblower lawsuit because that was the only way to out the information in a public setting because [in] child welfare, there are so many confidentiality laws,” continued Greene.
Initially she wrote her own legal complaint, hoping to provide a “roadmap for the DC Council to fix” the Foster Youth Amendment Act by pointing out “why it hasn’t been working and what we needed to do to shift it,” said Greene, adding that her lawyer also encouraged her to advocate for herself, for her “own individual rights.”
“This is my career; this isn’t my life. And yes, it was painful losing my career, but the loss that I sacrificed is nothing in comparison to the people that I was representing and advocating for,” added Greene.
The attorney general is elected by DC voters. His salary is paid by DC taxpayers. Shouldn’t he also protect the children of the city?
My answer is yes. Except in 2018, the OAG, then led by AG Karl Racine, apparently said no.
The office ignored Greene’s disclosures — although at the time, the CFSA had been under a federal court order for 30 years due to its failure to provide adequate services and its repeated violations of local and federal laws. Donald had been DC’s deputy mayor for health and human services and was essentially reassigned to help move the city out of the court’s jurisdiction. Her strategy seemed to be rearranging the deck chairs, implementing a public relations campaign, and pushing most of the agency’s work to third-party contractors — a cadre that could be blamed when things didn’t end well.
Many of the improvements touted by Donald were, in my view, window dressing. As CFSA’s ombudsman, Greene knew the fake from the real. My investigative series — Still Broken — published by this news site in 2020 and 2021 confirmed that massive problems remained even after CFSA persuaded a federal judge to end the court’s control over the agency.
In round one of Greene’s whistleblower litigation, DC Superior Court Judge Florence Pan ruled in June 2021 in favor of the city’s request for summary judgement. Greene and Hartnett took the adverse decision to the DC Court of Appeals.
In September 2024, Greene won round two. A three-member judicial panel — Chief Judge Anna Blackburne-Rigsby and Associate Judges Corinne A. Beckwith and Joshua Deahl — wrote in their ruling that, “We hold that Ms. Greene’s disclosures were protected under the WPA. Because we conclude that … we reverse, in part, the trial court’s grant of summary judgement on the basis that Ms. Greene’s disclosures were mere policy disagreements.”
The judges sent the case back to Superior Court, ordering it to review the other relevant issues that had been left unexamined. Now led by AG Brian Schwalb, the OAG reportedly is set to file yet another brief in the Superior Court case next week.
Why must this case drag on?
“The District refuses to accept defeat,” Hartnett said somewhat facetiously.
After two emails and a telephone call, the OAG spokesperson replied to my request for a comment writing, “no comment.”
The spokesperson, Gabriel Shoglow-Rubenstein, did not verify whether the OAG will file a brief in the case before the Jan. 23 deadline. He did not offer any details explaining why the agency would continue to contest Greene’s claims, especially since most of the managers are no longer at CFSA.
Could the OAG’s continued interest rest partially in the fact that one of the principals who had been at CFSA when Greene filed her lawsuit — its general counsel, Cory Chandler — is now a magistrate judge at the DC Superior Court? Once upon a time, she also worked for the OAG.
One of several leaders in the city’s child welfare community with whom I spoke about Greene’s case was happy with the Appeals Court ruling, although the end does not seem near. But that person was frustrated by the fact that Chandler is working in the court system given her tenure at CFSA and involvement in the activities highlighted in Greene’s whistleblower lawsuit.
“She should not be anywhere near children; she shouldn’t be handling abuse and neglect cases,” said the child welfare leader.
The glide from CFSA to Superior Court may have been easy for Chandler. The fight for Greene not so much, which isn’t unusual. I have seen what DC does to whistleblowers. One individual who worked in the Office of the Chief Financial Officer was blackballed. City contractors and others were afraid to hire him. He literally left the country to find work. In the end, a jury awarded him millions of dollars in damages.
“They hope that you’ll just get exhausted because it becomes such a major fixture in your life,” Greene said.
“Whistleblowers see an issue and recognize that if they don’t speak up, no one will. It’s a very isolating and lonely spot,” she said.
Even in the middle of Greene’s battle, she was attempting to identify and pursue solutions. For five years, working with several other child welfare advocates, Greene pushed for legislation to create an independent, citywide Office of the Ombudsperson for Children that would come under the authority of the DC Council and provide real accountability for CFSA.
“I had all this information no one else knew. I felt a huge obligation to make sure the community had the information and were able to act on [it],” Greene said. “When the legislation passed, I just felt like there was a huge weight off of my shoulders, and it became more about how I was wronged.”
Some people, myself included, believed Greene would have been the perfect person for that assignment of citywide ombudsperson. Ward 1 DC Councilmember Brianne Nadeau, who had the responsibility of making the personnel recommendation as chair of the relevant committee, passed over Greene, however.
“I fully recognize that as one person, I am not responsible for government functions, and I have to respect the fact that I can’t fix this unless somebody gets brave and is tired of the same old stuff.
“I would tell our elected officials to practice courage, which is action despite fear. Whistleblowers do it all the time,” said Greene
Despite the still-troubled state of the city’s child welfare system, Hartnett, who has worked on a number of whistleblower cases, said that Greene is “one of the singular most successful whistleblowers in terms of achieving reform that I’ve ever worked with.”
“She created a structure that unfortunately is now occupied by somebody who’s not really interested in taking advantage of it, but as she noted, there’s not a lot she can do about that,” he added.
The outcome could have been better if DC officials followed the city’s own laws. In its policy brief on “Whistleblower Protections and Obligations,” the Department of Human Resources asserts, “Every employee of the District government is required to make protected disclosures as soon as the employee becomes aware of the violation or misuse of resources. Protected disclosures are conveyed to a supervisor or public body, and must relate to fraud, waste, abuse of authority, or a substantial and specific danger to the public health and safety.”
By law, a government supervisor is supposed to make known “all protected disclosures involving any violation of law, rule, regulation or contract as soon as the supervisor becomes aware of the violation,” according to the Department of Human Resources document.
“The failure of a supervisor to act upon a specific protected disclosure is a basis for administrative action, including termination.”
So, why didn’t the OAG pursue a case against Donald or Chandler or any of the other executives who were at CFSA? Why does it continue to battle someone whose only sin appears to have been following DC laws and protecting the city’s most vulnerable children?
Shouldn’t this abuse end?
jonetta rose barras is an author and DC-based freelance journalist, covering national and local issues. She can be reached at thebarrasreport@gmail.com.
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