The killing of 9-year-old Omaree Varela in Albuquerque has done what hundreds of other tragedies and at least three other deaths have failed to do: force the public and the state to reexamine the way the Children, Youth and Families Department handles cases involving abused children.
Almost everyone from legislators to those who themselves deal with abused children believes something is terribly wrong with the system.
But not quite everyone. A week after Omaree’s tragedy, Gov. Susana Martinez said nobody did anything wrong except the mother, Synthia Varela-Casaus, and then the governor proceeded to convict the mother of murder before the woman has been tried or even indicted. (The governor’s statement apparently was based on press reports of a police statement alleging that the mother had confessed to kicking Omaree to death. As a former district attorney, the governor must know how much confessions are worth.)
To try to understand how the present system works (or doesn’t work) and what can be done to fix it, I spent a couple of hours last week with a man with 8 1/2 years of experience in a CYFD office devoted to child protection services—the Eastern Bernalillo County Investigations Unit, which is the largest in CYFD and the same one that handled Omaree’s case. He said it would be illegal for a current employee to talk to me, and that even as a former employee, “There is some risk in talking to you.” He is afraid the state would retaliate against him financially if I used his name. I promised not to. Let’s call him George Ortega.
Ortega said the Omaree case and at least three other deaths of children involved with CYFD profoundly upset those who work in the Protective Services Division. “Case workers felt horrible,” he said, “it’s a horrible thing. Everybody at CYFD, no one wants to see a child die. It affects everybody.” He is crying now. “We’re there to prevent child abuse as much as possible….When I heard about the Omaree story it was awful. It stays with you.” He is still choking. “I know some workers who did work with Omaree and they’re feeling horrible.”
There is nothing blasé about such workers or their reactions. Omaree had been on the CYFD radar for four years before he died, and the department had twice opened a file on him, once when his mother went to prison on drug charges and again in 2012 when Omaree showed up at school with wounds he said his mother had inflicted on him.
Although the governor insisted nobody could have prevented the boy’s death, the former CYFD worker disagrees. CYFD had options, he says, and he doesn’t understand why they were not utilized. He said there needs to be a full investigation of this failure.
“I don’t think the system is working the way it should,” he concludes. “I saw the system work for six years, and then not work for 2 1/2 years. The difference was management and how they care about their employees. Upper management doesn’t seem to care about that.”
Initially the governor had said no investigation was necessary. Last week she reversed herself and asked CYFD to review its own actions.
Meanwhile, Attorney General Gary King asked that an independent commission be set up, with membership from the judiciary, to deliver an impartial report on what went wrong at CYFD and the other agencies involved in the case, including the Albuquerque Police Department, Albuquerque Public Schools and the Bernalillo County District Attorney. King said the main point would be to prevent a recurrence of such a tragedy.
The governor rejected King’s initiative and accused him of politicizing the boy’s death.
In Ortega’s view, “The big problem with CYFD is they don’t know what needs to be done so they are trying all those mini-solutions that make things worse. They aren’t addressing the real problems, and it all comes down on the workers and that’s why there’s such a high turnover.”
In Ortega’s office, the turnover was approximately 100 percent in less than three years. He describes his office as having been a model for the entire system, with a caring director and close collaboration and mutual support among the staff. A new director, he said, brought in an attitude of indifference to his workers, and the workers lost their cooperative spirit. Minimal turnover became a flood of resignations and transfers. The office went from being a “model” to a “disaster.”
But bad management is not the whole story. The department has not been able to spend all the money the Legislature appropriated, apparently because it cannot find enough employees to fill its vacancies. It’s not clear what the governor’s suggestion of hiring 10 more employees and raising salaries by perhaps a couple of percentage points will do to solve the problem
The reasons people don’t want to work at CYFD seem to begin with problems of salaries and management but focus even more heavily on the huge caseload. The typical caseload in one office is 30 to 45 clients a month, and many of those are emergency cases that must be resolved within six hours. In other words, the typical case worker has to deal with about two new cases every working day. When a child’s home is put under a court-ordered plan of improvement, the case worker is required to follow up and visit the home to check on conditions—once a month for six months. No one I know believes that is sufficient, but that is the system.
“The obvious solution,” Ortega says, “is to double the number of case workers, but they can’t even fill the positions they have. So they need to have higher salaries and fewer clients to attract and keep workers.” Private in-home child services agencies contract with CYFD to help families under court order to improve. A case worker at such an agency handles six to eight clients, a fraction of what state workers carry, and visits a home two, three or even four times a week, instead of once a month. “The Omaree case should have been dealt with by in-home services but wasn’t,” Ortega says.
Many of those I have known who try to help abused children, including foster parents and adoptive parents, criticize CYFD for its strong emphasis on keeping a child with his birth mother no matter how bad the home is, as long as the child can be protected from abuse. Sometimes, CYFD faces the almost irresolvable moral dilemma of deciding when a mother is hopeless and the mother-child bond has to be severed.
According to the CYFD web site, the mission of the Protective Services Division (PSD) is “to receive and investigate reports of children in need of protection from abuse and/or neglect by their parent, guardian or custodian, and to take action to protect those children whose safety cannot be assured in the home. PSD is committed to providing for the well-being of the children in its care and to securing permanency for those children as quickly and as safely possible.”
Part of the problem, a big part, is that kids who are brought to Protective Services come almost invariably from poor families with a history of drug and alcohol abuse, whereas foster and adoptive parents have middle-class homes without substance abuse.
When should a child be given a better style of life at the cost of destroying the kid’s relationship with his family? Ortega poses the question, but neither he nor I can find a simple answer. In reality, it comes down to weighing and balancing competing demands of family and safety.
Moreover, it is government, the contemporary bogeyman, that has to make this morally fraught judgment. “The heart of CYFD is families,” Ortega says, and the double meaning of heart is clear to both of us.
(Martinez photo by Steve Terrell)
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