jonetta rose barras: Many of DC’s children remain an endangered class

When Ward 5 Councilmember Zachary Parker, chair of the newly constituted Committee on Youth Affairs, conducts his performance oversight of the Office of the Ombudsperson for Children and the Child and Family Services Agency (CFSA) this week, he will be confronted by this reality: Four years after a federal judge agreed to release the DC government from a three-decades-old lawsuit, thousands of the city’s youngest and most vulnerable residents continue to be endangered.

New layers of bureaucracy have been created. Millions of dollars are being spent. Equally egregious, DC officials flagrantly violate local and federal laws. 

CFSA social workers carry caseloads that exceed acceptable standards. The agency has circumvented established foster care placement procedures and does not adhere to mandated investigation timelines.

“You can’t stop a crisis if you’re in a crisis,” said child welfare expert Christian Greene, a former CFSA ombudsman who currently has a whistleblower lawsuit against the District.

“Who’s holding CFSA’s feet to the fire?” asked Marla Spindel, executive director of the nonprofit DC KinCare Alliance, which has filed eight lawsuits against the city for its continued practice of maintaining a hidden foster care system via questionable informal custody arrangements. 

“Are [investigators] going out in a timely fashion when they get a call that’s an emergency situation? Are they actually able to do a meaningful investigation and implement whatever needs to happen to make sure the child is safe? 

“Or are they having to sort of slap a Band-Aid on it because they don’t have the time?” wondered Spindel.

Answers can be found in the city’s handling of children’s deaths. In 2023, a total of 41 deaths were reviewed by CFSA, according to its Annual Child Fatality Review Report published last month.

I was most appalled by DC’s reaction to the deaths of three teens — ages 15, 16 and 17. Each died of a fentanyl overdose.

DC Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Francisco Diaz ruled their deaths “accidental.” He similarly labeled the deaths of four other young people between the ages of 19 and 24 from fentanyl mixed with other drugs. 

When I sent Diaz an email questioning his determination, the office’s general counsel, Rodney Adams, replied: “The OCME is in the midst of managing a mass fatality event,” referring to the collision between an American Airlines jet and a Black Hawk military helicopter in which all 67 passengers and crew members died.

Adams passed on the guide for determining the manner of death used by Diaz and medical examiners nationwide. “Please keep in mind that each of the District’s fatality committees write their own reports based upon their review of all of the information available to them,” he added. 

“Any death of a child is unfortunate,” said Tanya Torres Trice, CFSA’s interim director since August 2024. “We are troubled by the uptick in drug usage that we are seeing, and we want to be part of the solution. 

“The three teenagers who did die were not involved at CFSA during the time of their death, and the [OCME] makes the determination of death,” Trice added during an interview with me earlier this week. Under DC law, the CFSA report must include a review of the death of any child who had involvement with the agency in the previous five years.

The accidental death determination suppressed the overall homicide rate for 2023. Further, though Mayor Muriel Bowser had declared a public emergency opioid crisis that year, DC’s Metropolitan Police Department apparently did not track down the persons who had sold or given the drug to the three children.

The OCME could have labeled the teens’ deaths as homicides. The guide notes, “Intent to cause death is a common element but is not required for classification as homicide.”

Trice said CFSA has a substance use disorder unit that works closely with the DC Department of Behavioral Health, “so when we see signs or suspect young people are engaged in using illicit drugs, we are able to refer them for support and assessment.” She also said twice yearly MPD conducts sessions with social workers to help them understand any trends police are seeing.

The OCME and the Office of the Attorney General are members of the CFSA fatality review committee. Petrina Jones-Jesz, who was appointed the DC ombudsperson for children in January 2024 and who reports to the DC Council, also serves on the panel. 

She demurred when I asked her about the medical examiner’s “accidental” determination, offering that members of the committee all care about children and are committed to protecting them.

It’s jargon all the time with a side helping of impotent policies and empty political gestures. Children are killed in the nation’s capital with impunity.

“I think that that is a reaching statement with the assumption that nobody cared, and I don’t believe that to be the case,” Trice pushed back in my interview with her. 

Judge for yourself.

Last year, DeAndre Pettus was arrested and jailed in connection with the death of his 5-year-old son. The father was charged by the Office of the U.S. Attorney for DC with cruelty to a child but then released from jail. Diaz ruled the manner of that death “undetermined.” Adams said in an email that the cause and manner of death are “still pending” and the “final determination has not been recorded yet.”

When a child in DC dies, it’s often preceded by myriad incidents of abuse, neglect or maltreatment — a punch in the chest, a beating that draws blood but doesn’t take the last breath. 

In fiscal year 2024, the CFSA hotline received 20,978 calls. Only 4,084 of those calls were accepted for investigation. Of the others, 714 were already linked to open investigations and 936, categorized as informational and referrals involving missing, absent or abducted children, were directed to other agencies or organizations. The majority of the calls, 15,244, were “screened out” because they reportedly didn’t meet requirements to open an investigation.

Last year, DC law required that abuse and neglect complaints be examined within 30 days. Then last month, the council approved mayoral legislation that changed the mandated time limit to 45 days. Investigations involving a fatality or sex trafficking may take up to 60 days under the new statute.

Parker voted to support the change both when he was a member of the Committee on Facilities and Family Services — which then had jurisdiction — and earlier this year after becoming chair of the reorganized Committee on Youth Affairs. He promised a few weeks ago to respond to my request for comments about the state of the city’s child welfare system. He did not follow through, however. 

“Changing legislation is a façade,” said Greene. “It just makes adults feel good about the mess they created.”

The better solution, she said, would be ensuring the agency has the resources and wherewithal to meet the original deadlines for completing investigations.

During FY 2024, 38% or 1,442 of CFSA investigations were listed as incomplete; 41% or 1,538 were considered unfounded; and 16% or 606 were substantiated. 

Trice said many of those incomplete investigations are “sitting open for documentation reasons only. And I will always, always, always prioritize safety and being in the community before I will prioritize documentation.”

But isn’t the documentation critical to the outcome of the investigation?

Truth be told, the timetable for investigations has become entwined with the shortage of social workers and the fact that caseloads have exceeded the established standard of 12 to 15 cases per person. In July 2024, more than 20 workers were carrying between 20 and 46 cases, according to government sources.

Trice asserted that DC isn’t the only government facing a personnel shortage. She said after the pandemic many social workers left the field, choosing “more flexible jobs.” 

To compensate, Trice said, she reassigned social workers from CFSA’s in-home foster care administration, bringing in 30 people who had been managing low caseloads in their prior positions. Last year, however, the foster care population began to increase. “We hover around 550 children now and about 900 or so in our in-home. 

“In the month of December, we took a huge hit. So, in addition to already being short with our workers, people were on vacations, people got sick, we saw the flu come and take us out,” said Trice. 

In her 2024 annual report, Jones-Jesz highlighted complaints her office received that year, including “two constituent complaints where there were reasonable grounds for the removal of the child/children from the home.”

“The removals did not occur until in one CFSA In-home case, a child was seriously injured by the caregiver, requiring hospitalization,” according to the ombudsperson’s report. “In another [child protective services] investigation, a 1-year-old was being supervised by the mother who was under the influence of substances and clearly unable to care for the child.”

That report also called attention to several constituent complaints that necessary documentation in their cases “was missing … and not entered per CFSA policy, within 24 hours.”

The complaints filed with the ombudsperson make clear, I think, that a solution may seem adequate initially but then create its own challenges — particularly in the absence of adequate resources.

“A safety plan [for a child] put on paper means nothing if the case count for a social worker is up to 42,” Greene said.

It’s all deceptive, said some advocates, who continue to talk about DC’s hidden foster care population, which I exposed more than three years ago in my investigative report for The DC Line, “Still Broken: DC’s Child Welfare System.”

Last summer, DC KinCare Alliance and Ropes & Gray LLP filed two federal lawsuits accusing the city and CFSA of “violating the rights of multiple low-income D.C. children and their relative caregivers under federal and D.C. laws.” There were already six other such cases, all of which are still pending.

DC KinCare — a nonprofit that provides legal representation and other supports for children and relative caregivers — has complained that District officials have “consistently and repeatedly engaged in the custom and practice of kinship diversion.”

Spindel said that in such cases, CFSA determines that “the child can’t safely remain in the home even with services with their parent, because the safety issues in the home are so acute.”

“Then they divert the children to live with a relative and sort of wash their hands of the case. The relatives are left holding the bag with no supports, no services, no documents, no right to even care for the child,” continued Spindel.

In their complaints filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, lawyers for DC KinCare wrote that, “By ignoring the legally required removal placement procedures, the [city] averts the legal and financial responsibility to support the children and their relatives.” The most recent lawsuits contend that DC withheld more than $40,000 that should have gone to children and their relatives acting as foster parents.

Trice declined to comment, citing ongoing litigation.

The people who promised to ensure the city adhered to the standards established in order to resolve the federal lawsuit — former CFSA directors Brenda Donald and Robert Matthews, as well as court monitor Judith Meltzer — are all gone. Trice was Matthews’ chief of staff.

Advocates had a hunch the city couldn’t be trusted to keep its word. They pushed long and hard for the creation of the Office of Ombudsperson for Children, which occurred in 2022. Jones-Jesz is already the second person to hold the job. 

“We have a pretty broad mission for the office. We’re an independent agency,” she told me. “I see our role as to be a part of the community to help improve outcomes for children and families, specifically children who have been involved with [CFSA].”

This year her office will review “child protective services (CPS) caseload sizes and caseload counts for individual case workers. We will also begin to monitor for [CPS] investigation backlogs, past the 30-day requirement for case completion and closure.”

Jones-Jesz also said that she will focus on child fatality reviews. “We’re launching our own review of those particular cases in hopes to, at some point, generate a very focused child’s fatality report.” 

Reports are good. Solutions and actions are better — like finding out how three teens got their hands on fentanyl and died from an overdose.

jonetta rose barras is an author and DC-based freelance journalist, covering national and local issues. She can be reached at thebarrasreport@gmail.com.