Within days of 4-year-old Jahmaurae Allen's beating death last summer, the leadership of Sacramento County's Child Protective Services laid the blame for the troubled investigation on a single social worker who operated "in isolation."
Her work was described by top CPS management as "shoddy" and "totally inadequate," according to internal e-mails obtained by The Sacramento Bee.
But those documents and recent interviews reveal a broader failure of the county's child protection system that reached into CPS management ranks – before and after the boy's death.
* a supervisor of social worker Adriane Miles did not scrutinize Miles' work as required
* the supervisor did not review any case documentation until the boy was dead – five weeks after the emergency referral
* at least two CPS supervisors went into the boy's case file after his death and altered the records before they were publicly released, a violation of the government code and Child Protective Services' written policy
* the CPS investigation into Jahmaurae's household was so cursory that the agency's top four managers debated by e-mail three days after the child's death how to massage the case file to more closely reflect reality
Ed Howard, senior counsel for the Children's Advocacy Institute: "It sounds as though CPS – instead of taking top-level responsibility for the systemic, stubborn and ongoing failures of its supervisors and leadership – has adopted a policy of trying to throw individual social workers under a bus."
Full Article and Source:
Sacramento County child protection woes extend into management, critics say
See also:
Boy's CPS record altered after death to reflect likely abuse
Critics say Sacramento County child protection managers share blame
Her work was described by top CPS management as "shoddy" and "totally inadequate," according to internal e-mails obtained by The Sacramento Bee.
But those documents and recent interviews reveal a broader failure of the county's child protection system that reached into CPS management ranks – before and after the boy's death.
* a supervisor of social worker Adriane Miles did not scrutinize Miles' work as required
* the supervisor did not review any case documentation until the boy was dead – five weeks after the emergency referral
* at least two CPS supervisors went into the boy's case file after his death and altered the records before they were publicly released, a violation of the government code and Child Protective Services' written policy
* the CPS investigation into Jahmaurae's household was so cursory that the agency's top four managers debated by e-mail three days after the child's death how to massage the case file to more closely reflect reality
Ed Howard, senior counsel for the Children's Advocacy Institute: "It sounds as though CPS – instead of taking top-level responsibility for the systemic, stubborn and ongoing failures of its supervisors and leadership – has adopted a policy of trying to throw individual social workers under a bus."
Full Article and Source:
Sacramento County child protection woes extend into management, critics say
See also:
Boy's CPS record altered after death to reflect likely abuse
Critics say Sacramento County child protection managers share blame
The supervisor is every much as much to blame as the worker.
ReplyDeleteThe whole darned bunch is GUILTY!
ReplyDeleteI suggest these inept people return be terminated and ordered to return their paychecks, immediately.
What are they doing? And, what steps are being taken by the authorities to ensure that this won't happen again?