PHOENIX โ Nearly 600 children who were the subject of ignored child abuse complaints were removed from their homes after the state finally got around to looking at their cases.
Thatโs the final report of a special team created last year to figure out why and deal with the fact that almost 6,600 complaints to Child Protective Services over several years never were investigated.
It took months, but caseworkers eventually made direct contact with 12,879 children, which includes not just the kids who were subjects of the 6,596 ignored complaints, but also children born or introduced into the same homes since the initial report.
But a lawmaker key in creating the new Department of Child Safety, which took over the child welfare duties from CPS earlier this year, said Thursday none of this means the problems are resolved.
โWeโre just not out of the woods yet,โ said Rep. Kate Brophy McGee, R-Phoenix, noting there is still a backlog of cases.
In its last formal report to the Legislature this summer, the DCS put the backlog at 13,024. But agency spokeswoman Jennifer Bowser said about 11,500 have since been โactivated.โ
However, that just means they have been assigned to a caseworker, not that anything more has been done.
Brophy McGee said much more needs to be done to ensure new complaints coming in the door daily โ at the rate of about 45,000 a year โ are handled promptly, and that there is no repeat of what happened before.
Although the new agency got an infusion of cash from the Legislature to hire more workers, she said it is yet to be seen if they are up to the task that the state Department of Economic Security let fall by the wayside.
And Brophy McGee said it will be up to the next governor and a fresh crop of lawmakers to keep the heat on to prevent the problem from reoccurring.
It was discovered last year that about 6,600 abuse reports to a state hot line since 2009 were summarily dismissed by a screening team. In 2012 alone, more than eight percent of abuse complaints were never investigated.
Brophy McGee said the work of the Child Advocate Response Examination team is significant.
โThe fact that we were able to go out and find these kids and refocus the agency and the state on making sure these kids are safe, you canโt underscore how important that is,โ she said.
But Brophy McGee said the work of the team in clearing up those cases is just a beginning. โItโs important that kids falling through the cracks not become the norm,โ she said.
Lawmakers voted not only to create DCS as a new freestanding agency but also provided it with $845 million in spending authority. Five years ago, in the middle of budget-cutting maneuvers, the old CPS was operating on less than $450 million.
Brophy McGee, a veteran lawmaker who has been at the forefront of focusing on child abuse and neglect issues, said one of the first things that needs to be monitored is whether the new agency is set up to deal with the problem.
โThe work involved is enormous,โ she said, ranging from the mundane questions of office space to putting together a management team and โputting in place processes that actually work and making sure youโre not slipping back and starting to make the same mistakes as resulted in the โnot investigatedโ cases.โ
And all that time, she said, new complaints continue to come in the door.
โItโs like building a plane in a combat zone,โ Brophy McGee said.
Andrew Wilder, a spokesman for Gov. Jan Brewer, said his boss does not disagree with that assessment. He said the CARE team was just one part of the whole effort to address problems in handling abuse complaints โto ensure that issues such as this ... never happen again.โ
Charles Flanagan, tapped by Brewer to head the new agency, is working to build an organization that functions better than the old CPS.
To do that, six managers and executives who had a hand in ignoring the complaints were fired.
Flanagan said the resolution of those nearly 6,600 cases did not come at the expense of ignoring new complaints.
โThis effort came at a significant cost to employees who are already overburdened with high caseloads,โ he said in a prepared statement.
โAnd yet they came forward to assist with these investigations in addition to the challenges they were already facing.โ
