In an ongoing series, the AJC is examining the failures of Georgia’s child welfare system. Read our coverage at MyAJC.com.
Coming Sunday: Teachers concerned that too many child abuse reports go nowhere because system is broken.
Gov. Nathan Deal plans a cash infusion into Georgia’s error-prone child-welfare system following two recent deaths that underscored its recurring failures.
On the same day as the funeral for a 10-year-old abuse victim, Deal’s office said Wednesday he will propose spending $27 million over three years to hire 525 new child protection workers. If the General Assembly concurs, the number of state caseworkers would increase 26 percent by 2017.
The governor’s plan emerged as the Division of Family and Children’s Services fired two managers involved in one of the recent death cases. The managers, based in the agency’s Cobb County office, were accused of mishandling abuse reports involving 12-year-old Eric Forbes, who died last month. His father, Shayaa Yusef Forbes, was charged with murder.
DFCS said it continues to investigate employees who oversaw the case of Emani Moss, 10, whose emaciated, burned body was found in a trash can outside her family’s Lawrenceville apartment earlier this month. DFCS workers “screened out” an abuse report from Emani’s teacher, despite a history of maltreatment in the girl’s family. Emani’s father and stepmother, Eman Moss and Tiffany Moss, face murder charges.
Even while discussing the new spending proposals, Deal’s staff took care not to predict a transformation for DFCS. The agency’s shortcomings, which have contributed to dozens of children’s deaths, have been underscored in a recent series of articles in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“There is no cure-all,” said Brian Robinson, a spokesman for Deal. “But when there are numerous red flags, we want to have a screening process, to have the manpower there, to see the real story.”
Deal’s plan would take effect next July when the state’s 2015 budget year begins. Robinson said the governor would ask lawmakers to initially allocate $7.4 million to hire 146 caseworkers and 29 supervisors. About $1.5 million more would come from federal grants.
The Legislature would have to approve similar expenditures each of the two following years to hire all the new workers.
The spending proposal was not a response to the recent disclosures, Robinson said, but rather is an effort to restore budget cuts of recent years. The plan, he said, has been in the works since summer.
State tax collections are up about 5 percent in the current budget year, and reserves are likely to hit their highest level since before the financial crisis and economic recession that began in late 2007.
Deal still wants to “keep government lean and mean and keep taxes low,” Robinson said. But “when we are able to backfill our most important services, such as keeping children safe and healthy, we want to do that. We’re slowly trying to get back to a place where they’re more fully staffed.”
Before the spending proposal became public, Deal had avoided sweeping statements condemning the recent deaths and other disclosures about DFCS’ troubles.
“Any time a child dies, it’s certainly a grave concern to us,” Deal said last week. “It’s very difficult for a caseworker to try to predict what’s going to happen in an environment.”
Earlier Wednesday, he told reporters that the DFCS director, Sharon Hill, had “undergone rather rigorous examinations of what happened” in the two recent deaths. He added: “I am going to be in constant consultation with her and the people she works with to see if there are changes that need to be made.”
Deal did not comment on the firings of the two DFCS workers.
Ashley Fielding, a spokeswoman for the agency, identified the workers as Christine Brooks, a child welfare services supervisor, and Neta Bailey, a social services administrator. Both were manager-level employees.
A summary of Eric Forbes’ death, released last week, said the Cobb County DFCS office failed to investigate an April 2012 report by the boy’s school that he had bruises, welts and abrasions and “looks to have been badly beaten.” The boy and a sibling said he fell on stairs – but gave divergent accounts of whether he fell up or down the steps. DFCS referred the family for what the summary described only as “services.”
Between August and November last year, DFCS received three more reports concerning the boy. In one, the school said Eric had burn marks on his body, purportedly from a trampoline. But a parent had also told school officials that if the boy misbehaved, he would “put an end to it.”
When a DFCS worker visited the family’s home, Eric and other family members denied abuse had occurred. The agency closed the case.
The DFCS summary suggests the Cobb County office may not have taken Eric’s case seriously because it had received an unusual number of calls from schools following the arrest of a Cobb principal for failing to file a mandated abuse report.
In an interview last week, Hill said it wasn’t clear that agency employees asked Eric the correct questions about inconsistencies in his stories. Caseworkers and supervisors, she said, did not detect “subtle red flags.”
In isolation, “they mean nothing,” Hill said. “But when taken together, they mean a lot.”
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