SUSTAINED POLITICAL WILL IS THE WAY TO BREAK THE ENDLESS CYCLE OF CRISIS IN CPS AND THE NEGLECT OF ARIZONAS MOST VULNERABLE CHILDREN. Now is time to fix CPS The Republic | azcentral Tue Dec 3, 2013 6:53 PM Beware. This is where the fog starts to form. This is when opportunity slips away and children suffer. Again. There are now three investigations into why thousands of reports of child abuse and neglect went uninvestigated by Child Protective Services. It’s not enough. We need one big investigation into what’s wrong with this agency. The three investigations are all focused on the question of the moment: Who is to blame for the latest outrage? They are not designed to answer the real zinger: How do we fix Arizona’s miserable excuse for a child-welfare system? The answer to the first question will tell us whose heads should roll for deciding to ignore more than 6,000 calls for help. But if that’s as far as it goes, the fog will close in again and CPS will return to its addiction to clandestine incompetence. Until the next crisis rouses the public to a fit of momentary outrage. Really, people. The kids deserve better. This is not just about bureaucrats and bungling. It’s about tiny bodies. Broken bones. Children whose lives are threatened by abusive parents. Children whose futures are endangered by a clumsy child-welfare agency with failings that go beyond ignoring calls to the child-abuse hotline. More than 15,000 children are in foster care in Arizona. Other states are finding safe ways to keep families together, but Arizona isn’t. We have the highest removal rate in the nation. Why? That’s a question that goes beyond the scope of the trio of investigations. The high removal rate is a symptom of a system in serial crisis. Former Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley, who made recommendations more than a decade ago to reform CPS, says the governor needs to appoint a committee to look at the agency in its entirety. He wants CPS spun off from the behemoth Department of Economic Security, an idea worth considering. The Children’s Action Alliance is also calling for a big-picture study by local and national experts. There’s plenty to look at. In addition to the swollen ranks of foster-care kids and the 6,000-plus unexamined reports of maltreatment, there is also a 10,000-case backlog — children whose cases have been “inactive” for 60 days. Gov. Jan Brewer brags that a change recommended by her 2011 Child Safety Task Force resulted in the creation of the Office of Child Welfare Investigations. It was this law-enforcement-led agency that discovered thousands of reports of abuse and neglect were being quietly set aside. Give her credit. But Brewer’s task force made 70 recommendations. Only a handful have been implemented. One of the three investigations into the current crisis, the Child Advocate Response Examination team announced by Brewer on Monday, is supposed to make recommendations on how to avoid a repeat of this problem. If experience tells us anything, it is that convenient, politically popular recommendations will be implemented. The tough stuff will grow little cat feet and walk off into the fog. Until the next crisis. That’s why three investigations into one crisis are not enough. Investigations by Brewer’s team, the DES and the Department of Public Safety are narrowly focused. Their recommendations will be easily forgotten as we move into the inevitable next crisis. The governor needs to appoint a group of local and national experts who will take a look at the whole mess. This group needs to be high profile enough to blow through the fog and generate robust public discussion that goes beyond a single crisis. It needs to make recommendations that transcend politics and engage the people of Arizona in rebuilding our child-welfare agency so it has the incentives and the resources to do the job right.
Posted on: Wed, 04 Dec 2013 13:32:14 +0000