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The bruises on Zoe Garcia’s face, arms and shoulders were yellow and faded.
During a substance abuse class, Aldrich Leathers’ mother appeared drunk when she said she didn’t want her son anymore. She did, however, pass a drug test.
Andres Estrada was missing school. When he did make it to class someone at the school said he was dirty and smelly, but that wasn’t much information to go on.
Those are the reasons child welfare workers chose not to fully investigate reports that the children lived in dangerous homes.
Within a year of those calls, Zoe had been beaten to death, Aldrich drowned in the bathtub while his mom was in the next room, and 6-year-old Andres rode his tricycle out of the parking lot and into traffic, where he was hit and killed.
Of the 72 children who have died since 2007 after their families or caregivers came to the attention of social services, 14 had every call made to child welfare workers screened out, or left unassigned and uninvestigated.
The calls were the only warnings caseworkers would get before the children wound up dead.
An additional 20 deaths were in families where caseworkers investigated at least one allegation but also screened out at least one complaint.
In eight of the deaths, the decision not to investigate violated state policies on when to open a case, according to a Denver Post review.
In Zoe’s case, the bruises should have been enough evidence to investigate whether she was abused. In other cases, child protection workers improperly ignored reports that included a mother threatening her children in the emergency room and an 8-year-old watching his mother’s boyfriend beat her , according to the state reviews of the children’s deaths.
State law dictates when county child welfare departments are supposed to investigate allegations of abuse and neglect: there is evidence of abuse, the child is under 18 and the location of the family is known. But in practice, counties have wide discretion in determining if a call has enough information and the right details to warrant further investigation. Those decisions are seldom examined by state officials.
“It almost has to be a crisis before the state is aware of a child’s situation,” said Debbie Stafford, a former state representative who has worked to improve practices and transparency into decisions about child welfare cases.
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For child welfare advocates who favor a more consistent approach in how cases are evaluated, a policy change this year is troubling.
Until this year, state rules required an automatic child abuse investigation after social services received a third call about a family within a three-year period. The so-called “third-referral” rule had been in place since Gov. Bill Owens’ administration.
In April, a nine-member policy board at the state department of human services voted unanimously to change the rule after counties complained. The state determined implementation of the rule was inconsistent across Colorado’s county-run child welfare system.
Now, there is no limit on the number of screen-outs allowed per family.
“Right off the bat there were inconsistencies about how it’s done because there were two different schools of thought about what the rule meant,” said Ruby Richards, child protection manger for the state Division of Child Welfare Services.
The one-sentence rule said child welfare workers “must assign for investigation reports that are the third in two years, if the first two were not assigned for assessment.”
A study by the state department of human services showed that in 2011 there were 7,039 third referrals of abuse or neglect that should have automatically been investigated under the policy. Less than half — 47 percent — were investigated.
County departments said the rule was not only confusing, but time-consuming, forcing caseworkers to use limited resources when they could have focused on more serious cases.
“It was sending workers out on things that really didn’t meet the criteria for abuse or neglect and invading in families’ privacy to raise their children when we really didn’t have the authority to do that,” Richards said.
Youlon D. Savage, chairman of the State Board of Human Services, said a heavy push for the rule change came from the three county commissioners serving on the board — Stephen Johnson in Larimer, David Long in Weld and Sam Pace in Saguache.
“It didn’t make sense to make a county worker go out on something that was obviously a frivolous call,” Stephen Johnson said. “My perspective is that picking a certain number of calls arbitrarily, without any knowledge of the case, is not really protecting kids.”
The rule change gave caseworkers more flexibility in handling cases, instead of requiring them to follow an additional mandate, Johnson said.
“Our county commissioners are very vocal and I think they exercise a great deal of influence and respond to how a rule is put together, how it is changed and so on,” Savage said.
REAL Colorado, part of the lobbying group Colorado Counties Inc., suggested the rule change to state officials. The revision requires child protection workers to only examine prior contacts with the family when deciding whether to open the third referral.
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One ongoing concern for caseworkers trying to decide whether to open a child welfare case — and in Colorado they get about 80,000 calls reporting abuse or neglect every year — has been the inability to intervene in a family without launching a full investigation.
State officials hope a new approach called “differential response” will allow caseworkers more flexibility and prevent certain low- to moderate-risk cases from getting screened out.
In contrast to a traditional investigation in which caseworkers have to speak with the alleged victim away from the suspected abuser, caseworkers can meet with whole families.
“It’s a very different approach to engaging with the family and to identify with the family what the concerns are,” Richards said.
Five Colorado counties are using the differential response method as part of a pilot program.
“It is a great opportunity for Colorado,” said Angela Lytle, division manger of Children Youth and Family Services at the Arapahoe County Department of Human Services, one of the pilots. “It’s based on the premise that if we engage families much quicker and on a deeper level, resolution can be reached and sustained.”
About 75 to 80 percent of the families Arapahoe County serves are in the low- to moderate-risk level, Lytle said.
Legislation was passed this year to begin implementing differential response into other counties in 2013, but child welfare advocates are concerned it is too early to tell if the approach is the best fit for Colorado’s state-supervised, county-run system.
“Differential response has its place, but I also think that it needs to be limited in duration and there needs to be a high level of supervision so we aren’t creating more resistant families,” said Stephanie Villafuerte, director of the Rocky Mountain Children’s Law Center.
State officials said they don’t believe differential response would have saved any of the 72 children who have died in Colorado since 2007 after they came to the attention of child welfare services.
They noted caseworkers in Arapahoe County chose to use differential response in handling the case of Timothy and Alivia Ramirez , who ultimately died in a fire while their mother left them alone to party with her friends.
Still, the method provides one more option to consider individual circumstances within a family’s situation, one of the most crucial and difficult tasks in child welfare, Richards said.
“You get one situation, one time,” she said.
Jordan Steffen: 303-954-1794 or jsteffen@denverpost.com
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