These Guardians Are Serving Us All

In courtroom legalese they’re known as guardians ad litem.

In the language of childhood make-believe, they would be called guardian angels.

“They” are the volunteers who dedicate heart-wrenching hours to making sure abused and neglected children are fairly represented when lawyers, parents and government agencies fight over them in court.

Unfortunately, such volunteers aren’t stockpiled on a shelf, ready to jump down and start visiting homes, interviewing teachers, neighbors, counselors, parents, foster parents and children, and compiling detailed reports.

They have to be recruited. They have to be screened. They have to be trained. And when they have absorbed as much emotional bombardment as the job can dish out, they sometimes have to be replaced with new volunteers to be recruited, screened and trained all over again.

That costs money.

Fortunately, the Legislature appropriated $600,000 to fund pilot programs in three counties - one of them Spokane - to pay for that training in the coming year.

Spokane County already had scoured up local funds for 178 volunteer guardians who serve 360 children. But that left 400 children unrepresented. State money now will pay for 200 more volunteers.

From a standpoint of compassion and justice, the program ensures that someone is gathering information and presenting the child’s outlook. Not the state’s and its social workers’, not the parents’ and step-parents’, but the child’s.

“The person who holds the child’s life in their hands hasn’t held the child in their hands,” says Superior Court Judge Tari S. Eitzen, a onetime social worker who is wrapping up a year in charge of juvenile court.

The court-appointed special advocates, or CASAs, make up for that shortcoming. Deciding whether, when and how to remove a child from a family - picking the least-harmful from a menu of uninviting options - demands insights the judge can’t count on from the lawyers and their clients, but can from the guardians.

Even if compassion weren’t an issue, the state expenditure is a sound investment in prevention. Today’s prisons are populated with too many offenders who were failed by the system that first saw them as abused or neglected children.

That alone should help lawmakers decide whether to keep helping children when the pilot program is completed. Expensive? Perhaps. But it is, in Eitzen’s words, “incredibly expensive not to help them.”

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Doug Floyd/For the editorial board