In a shocking investigative report from the Staunton News Leader it appears that from April to October 2014 over 200 reports of potential abuse or neglect were made to Shenandoah Valley Social Services, ignored, and deleted with the approval of a supervisor.[read_more]
Child Protective Services [“CPS”] in smaller Virginia jurisdictions is often consolidated across a handful of local jurisdictions. Shenandoah Valley Social Services covers the areas of Staunton City, Augusta County, and Waynesboro City.
According to the New Leader:
Teachers, doctors or neighbors who suspect a child is being abused and call a hotline expect that a caseworker will investigate and rescue the minor from harm. Or look into it and decide the suspicion was mistaken…
Call after call went unanswered and stacked up on an automated answering system at Child Protective Services.
The caseworker who monitored the message line had left the agency in April. The team’s new rotation approach to checking daytime voice mails quickly fell apart, the agency’s director admitted during a News Leader investigation…
A CPS staffer in the Verona office did discover more than 200 ignored voice mails in October…
But Child Protective Services didn’t do that. Instead, according to an official account reconstructed by the News Leader and documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act, they listened to a few calls and erased the rest…
A supervisor approved deletion of the messages…
The public never was notified. All the abuse reporters who left their stories on voice mail and never called CPS back may have wrongly thought the children involved were being protected…
The average caseload in Virginia is 17 cases per worker at a time. The Child Welfare League of America recommends 12 to 15 cases. Valley caseworkers juggle an average of 40 cases at once, three times what is recommended.
The article ends with a bevy of fingerpointing as state officials blame local officials, local officials claim ignorance, and the regional authority in charge simply says there are procedures in place to prevent it from happening again.
CPS is an imperfect system, but the primary purpose is to help children. Even if just a quarter of the messages were well founded, that is 50 children who continued to suffer. The fact the messages were ignored is a horrible travesty resulting from incompetence. The fact they were deleted upon the authority of a supervisor warrants severe repercussions.
The authority, funding, and oversight for CPS rests with all three of: 1. the Commonwealth, 2. the regional authority, and 3. the individual jurisdictions. None is blameless when it comes to a remedy. Perhaps this is an issue that can be addressed by the candidates in a certain three way Senate District Republican Primary.
