MAKING THE CALL

Holmes Elementary School counselor Stephanie Leek remembers the first time she had to report a case of child sexual abuse.

A mother had found her teenage son having sex with a child from the Spokane school.

Leek went home that night after making the required call to Child Protective Services, and while preparing dinner she dumped cinnamon into the gravy instead of salt and pepper.

“I was a mess,” she said. “It was the hardest reality that this really does happen.”

That was 20 years ago. Since then, she has seen more than she cares to talk about, but the laws and expectations for teachers and school employees have remained basically unchanged when it comes to child abuse.

“We are mandated reporters; no questions,” Leek said.

Educators are among a long list of those required by laws in every state to report child abuse and neglect. In Washington, the list also includes nurses, coaches, police, social workers, coroners, counselors, doctors and even pharmacists. In Idaho, the list is even more inclusive.

Given that school is such a major part of children’s lives, teachers, counselors and principals are on the front lines when it comes to responding to abuse.

“It’s a critical role, because teachers and staff have such a strong relationship with the students they serve,” said Maureen Schneider, a retired counselor and administrator for Spokane Public Schools. “They are a key person of trust.”

According to the federal Department of Health and Human Services, 17 percent of child abuse referrals in Washington came from educators in 2004. In Idaho, 18 percent of reports were initiated by school personnel.

The largest number of reports in Idaho came from law enforcement, and the lowest, 3 percent, came from social service agencies.

Child Protective Services officials in Washington said the largest group making child abuse referrals to the agency are caseworkers, followed by schoolteachers. Law enforcement reported 12 percent of cases in 2004.

Under Washington law, those mandated to report suspected abuse must do so within 48 hours of discovering it.

Educators say child neglect is more prevalent than physical or sexual abuse, but it also is the most difficult form to address.

“It’s always been a gray area,” said Bonnie Ducharme, who works in school support services for Spokane Public Schools. “It’s really important for all teachers and all staff to have training and to be able to recognize signs and symptoms, even if it’s not so blatant.”

Detecting abuse

“Blatant” describes the abuse Teresa Mathers saw 11 years ago as a counselor at the old Hayden Lake Elementary.

A second-grade boy checked in with her every morning – a red flag in itself – and came in one day with bruises on his neck and wrists.

“The reason he had bruising on his neck was because he was held down and choked,” said Mathers, now a counselor in private practice in Coeur d’Alene. “You could literally see that type of bruising on his neck and little wrists.”

Most cases aren’t as obvious; they take careful attention to small details to detect, Mathers said.

That’s why teachers are trained to notice the signs and are required to receive some formal training for certification.

Mathers, for example, noticed when a third-grade boy started leaving class every few minutes, asking to call his mother, a telltale sign of child abuse and neglect, according to social workers.

“That wasn’t normal for him. He wasn’t a fear-driven child,” she said. “I pulled him into my office and said, ‘This is so not like you, to come in from recess all the time and call.’ That’s all he needed to break down and share what was going on.”

The boy told the counselor his mother had been severely beaten, and he feared for her life.

The mandatory phone call from Mathers got the boy help. He and his mother went to a shelter, and the abuser left their lives.

But when kids show signs of possible neglect, such as coming to school in dirty clothes or with unwashed faces, it isn’t as clear what should be done.

Harry Amend, superintendent of the Coeur d’Alene School District and a former high school counselor, said detecting abuse is similar to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s comments on pornography: “I know it when I see it.”

“You can tell who’s OK and who’s not,” Amend said. “You can tell it when they’re a kindergartner, and you can tell it when they’re a senior.”

Skip Buchanan, a counselor at Evergreen Middle School in the Central Valley School District, said abuse reports tend to drop as kids get older. That’s partly because elementary students spend all day with one teacher, who is more likely to notice behavioral changes. Middle school and high school students may have as many as five teachers a day.

And “older kids are more apt to hide it,” said Buchanan, who started in Spokane Valley in 1974 as an elementary teacher. “They’re more independent and, in some ways, they can protect themselves a little better.”

They’re also able to leave abusive homes or situations, said Schneider, of Spokane Public Schools.

According to data from Spokane schools, there were 112 child abuse referrals from the district’s five high schools from 1995 to 2005. At the elementary schools, there were 3,189.

In Coeur d’Alene, 28 referrals came from the district’s three high schools from 1997 through this year. There were 239 from the elementary schools.

In middle school, an abused child’s friends will often report the situation, school officials said.

Amend said a man recently told him he had heard his daughter and her friends talking during a slumber party about a girl at their middle school they thought was being abused. Amend notified the school, and the girl’s teachers are now aware. They’ll keep a closer eye on the girl’s behavior and look for something reportable, he said, as school employees do with any suspected abuse.

Mathers said a key question she used when trying to detect abuse as an elementary school counselor was whether the child looked forward to school vacations.

If the answer was no, “that would tell me a lot,” she said.

Community referrals

While the practice of reporting abuse has remained the same over time, what is reportable to state social workers has not.

“We used to report lice on a regular basis 15 years ago. They would laugh at me now,” said Leek, the Holmes Elementary School counselor. “They just don’t have as many resources.”

Chronic lice may be a sign of problems in the home, but it’s not a life-threatening condition.

Under law, in order for child welfare to step in, there must be proof that a child is in serious, imminent harm.

Homelessness is not reportable, nor is a child who isn’t being given his or her medication for attention deficit disorder. If a child finds a pornographic magazine at home and brings it to school, that’s not considered child abuse, either.

Although these kinds of cases can’t be reported to Child Protective Services, schools can refer families to social service agencies or doctors for help.

“In some cases that’s all we can do,” Leek said.

Kids without coats can get them. Parents looking for support groups can find them. Mathers recalled a girl who once told her she hated her home.

“I said, ‘Why?’ and she said, ‘Because that’s where I smell. That’s where I get my smell from,’ ” she said.

Mathers talked to her mother. “Single mom, overwhelmed, can’t change the sheets all the time,” Mathers said. “You just get the whole family involved in teaching really simple things … so that she no longer goes to school smelling like urine.”

Some schools will allow children to wash their clothing in laundry facilities or take a shower at school, said Nicole LaBelle, a social and health program manager with the Washington Department of Social and Health Services.

“The school systems do a lot of work for these children,” LaBelle said. “But our perspective is we can’t be rushing out to every single home for a child that hasn’t had a bath.”

Working the system

Educators say they sometimes are frustrated by what they perceive as a lack of action by child welfare workers.

The phone call Mathers made about the second-grade boy with the neck and wrist bruises didn’t get the response she thought it deserved. A representative from Child Protective Services visited the home, Mathers said, and the man who choked the boy – the mother’s boyfriend – apologized and agreed to parenting classes.

“The child was never removed,” she said. “It certainly was not sufficient.”

But social workers said it’s possible that educators don’t know about the services provided to families.

“They don’t know that we may have visiting home nurses or family preservation counselors going into the home and doing direct parent education,” LaBelle said. “It’s more obvious when children are removed from their parents.”

That wasn’t the case in the Nine Mile Falls School District, where school officials at Lake Spokane Elementary School documented repeated injuries to Tyler DeLeon, who died on his seventh birthday in 2005.

The boy weighed just 28 pounds at the time of his death – 12 pounds more than he did at the age of 6 months. Carole DeLeon is facing homicide by abuse charges for her foster son’s death.

DeLeon is accused of severely restricting the boy’s water and food intake, including instructing school employees not to allow him to have water. School employees and state social workers documented injuries including bruises, cuts, a broken leg and missing teeth, but the boy was never removed from the home.

“Until a child can come to you and show you bruises or welts, that’s the only time (Child Protective Services) will come in and do something,” said Kathy Kuntz, principal at Atlas Elementary in Hayden, Idaho.

Even then, it’s not a guarantee, educators said.

Mathers said the child services system has become so overloaded, tough decisions about priorities have to be made.

“They’re inundated with calls, so it’s kind of like, ‘What’s worse? A child being beaten, sexually abused or neglected?’ ” she said.

Said Kuntz, “We can cry about all the neglect we’re seeing – hardly anything happens. It’s heartbreaking, is what it is.”