August 5, 2008
Six-Year-Old Girl Dies from Overdose
The Examiner has word of the death of another child who had been recently brought to the attention of the District's troubled Child and Family Services Agency. A 6-year-old girl, identified only by her initials, DHB, swallowed a handful of antidepressants prescribed to her father. She was taken to a hospital last week, and later died. Two weeks before, someone called the city’s child welfare hot line and reported the family was having “a housing issue,” Interim Attorney General Peter Nickles told the paper. A social worker assigned to the case, but who never saw the child, has been suspended and might be fired.
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i'm thinking Fenty's going to find some more money somewhere to "deal" with this, right?
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I never say this, but this might actually be unfair to the CFSA. Being on notice that the family might have "a housing issue" is hardly being on notice that they need to check and make sure the medicine cabinet is locked. That sounds more like there was some fear the family would be evicted. The social worker had not gotten around to seeing the children yet, but another social worker had been to the home and no one had reason to think they were in danger.
Accidents happen, even to good parents. I venture to say most parents have, at some point, left a medicine bottle out for awhile or a cleaning supplies cabinet unlocked or something similar. Let's just say I'm not rushing to judge this social worker. For a change. God knows they are a bunch of useless numbskulls over there.
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That is sad... If only there were a readily convenient way to keep medicine out of kids' handfuls... Hmm, oh yeah, child proof caps.
Store your medicine, especially if it looks like candy, properly. Fire the social worker? no.
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Still looking for a way to link urban crime to failures at CFSA, so we can just fire someone with a 50+ case backlog and claim to be fixing the problem.
Oh, I got it! The Trinidad crime sprees are failures of CFSA outreach. Have Nickles fire whoever's in charge and claim this bold leadership initiative should curb future violence.
QED.
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Shouldn't the irresponsible parents be suspended and fired from their parenting jobs? I mean, is it a social worker's fault and responsibility that parents don't know enough to lock up their medications or otherwise keep them out of reach of children?
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if they keep firing the social workers, who will be left to handle the cases?
it's one of those vicious circles. more cases are being reported, overloading the social workers. they can't physically see every single child because they're overloaded. something happens to one of their cases, and they're fired. now all those cases they were working on get shuffled among the remaining social workers, increasing the overload. stuff like this hits the press, and now everyone feels more compelled to report cases.
unless they're immediately hiring replacements (and then some!), things are only going to get worse.
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How is that all reasonable people can see that CFSA's problem is management rather than a few bad eggs...
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So everyone acknowledges that CFSA's problem is that they don't have enough social workers. Tell me again how firing social workers solves, rather than exacerbates, that problem.
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I totally agree with the other posters about backfill versus firing. I know at my old job, I was completely overworked etc. I moved jobs, and they haven't backfilled MY overloaded job, making my former co workers even worse off. If Fenty isn't immeadiately replacing every fired social worker with two more, I don't see how this is going to get any better.
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Fenty's basically screwed either way. If he doesn't fire someone, he's not being proactive. If he does, he's contributing to the problem of excess workload. The great unwashed demand instant gratification. This is exactly why Marion Barry was never in town when anything happened. With a 24-hour news cycle, this story would have played itself out and nobody would have remembered it by the time he got back from Cancun.