Reforms Must Be Grounded In Reality

You be Brian Barbour. Be a Washington state Child Protective Services worker who must make decisions every single day that would burn out even wise old Solomon.

Walk into the shack in north Spokane where four children and their parents live. The shack is a mess, a fire hazard. The children are dirty. Urine and feces collect in a bucket. But the father and mother do not appear to be horrible parents.

Barbour, with help from other Child Protective Services workers, must decide: Do we take the children? Or leave them and get the family some help?

The decision: The children will remain with their parents, and the state agency will try to get some help to clean up the shack.

Only time will tell if the decision is the right one.

Child Protective Services is under fire these days. The agency can do no right, it seems. Parents accuse it of using Gestapolike tactics to take away their children. But when a child dies from abuse or neglect, people criticize the agency for not interfering.

On Monday and again today in Tacoma, more than 150 people are meeting to take a look at changing Washington state’s Child Protective Services system. Gov. Mike Lowry called together physicians, public defenders, social workers from the agency, Juvenile Court officials, foster parents and children’s advocates. They are brainstorming ways to revamp the agency. A report will emerge from the symposium; then a smaller group will continue to meet to develop specific changes in agency programs, policies and legislation.

Child Protective Services performs one of society’s most important tasks. It protects children from parents who would abuse, neglect, kill them. Agency workers hear stories every day that defy belief. A sample from the agency’s hotline: A 3-year-old was given a shot of whiskey in his pop. A mother has fed her 9-month-old solid foods only two times in three weeks. Five children live in a home with a father who deals drugs and threatens to kill them. A stepfather sat on a 10-year-old girl until she could not breathe.

So we offer some recommendations for those selected to participate in the ongoing reform group.

Be sure to include in the group parents who have been through the system. Yes, Child Protective Services has its success stories. There are parents who finally took a hard look at deeper problems, such as alcohol and drug abuse, because their children had been taken from them. They got help, and their children came home.

And reformers should spend days, or even weeks, shadowing Child Protective Services front-line workers. See the problems and the challenges firsthand. Visit the shack. This will make the reforms grounded in reality - the reality of how children in harm’s way live out their days.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Rebecca Nappi/For the editorial board