Colorado legislators will get a pair of proposals next year to reform the state child-protection system.
One would create committees of state and county experts to review all child fatalities in Colorado and recommend ways to prevent avoidable deaths.
The other would change Colorado’s foster-care system by encouraging counties to keep biological parents involved with children removed from their homes and communicating with the foster parents.
Both bills will be offered by Rep. Debbie Stafford, R-Aurora, who convened a commission of officials and child advocates hoping to improve child-protection programs.
She did so in response to a Denver Post series that reported that calls to child-protection agencies preceded 41 percent of child-abuse and neglect deaths in Colorado.
At a news conference Friday, Stafford said she has been “absolutely bombarded by frustrated families” with complaints about child-abuse cases.
She said she hopes “to bring a very major reform to our child-protection system in Colorado.”
Stafford did not revive her previous legislative proposal to create a state ombudsman’s office to investigate complaints concerning child-protection agencies. That bill died in committee this year.
But she said she hopes to keep that concept alive by creating “customer care” offices in the county agencies that respond to child-abuse calls.
Colorado already has child-protection teams in some counties, and a state committee has investigated and reported on some child-abuse deaths that followed repeated warnings to social service agencies.
But there is no state requirement to investigate child deaths, and practices vary from county to county.
Stafford’s bill to investigate all child deaths is based on a North Carolina model, which establishes county and state child-fatality prevention teams.
Its draft version calls for a 37-member Colorado child-fatality task force with medical, law enforcement, social services and mental health experts, as well as legislators and citizens.
Its tasks would include a study “of the incidences and causes of child deaths in Colorado,” with particular attention to child-abuse deaths.
The new child-protection team would assess “all community and private and public agency involvement” before a child’s death. It would also examine selected cases of children currently served by child-protection programs. Similar teams would be set up in each county to review child deaths and provide information to the state team.
The overall goal is “a greater involvement from the community” in a campaign to reduce deaths of children, Stafford said.
The foster-care proposal, which has not yet been drafted, would legislate a “family to family” model from the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
That model encourages “team decision-making” that brings birth parents, foster parents and caseworkers together in meetings to discuss the needs of children in the system.
Stafford traveled to Cleveland to study one family-to-family program. In Colorado, Denver and El Paso County have begun similar pilot programs.
Roxane White, Denver’s human-services director, said that in 85 percent of its cases, birth parents are now involved in decisions concerning their children. She said the program seems to help reunite families.
“We’ve been able to reduce our out-of-home placements 30 percent in the last year by having families at the table,” she said.
