The Examiner has a disturbing story today citing a recent report by the Child Fatality Review Committee showing that 59 of the 157 young people who died in the District in 2006 were from families that were known to child welfare agencies.

The report comes on the heels of the murders of the four daughters of Banita Jacks, allegedly at the hands of their mother. After the discovery of their bodies, Mayor Fenty quickly fired six child welfare employees and vowed to reform the agency. A social worker from a school where two of the girls had attended had tried to get police and the city’s Child and Family Services Agency to intervene on the girls’ behalf when she suspected they were being abused, but the agency failed to help before the girls died.

While the report shows that the majority of youth deaths in 2006 can be blamed on natural causes, the Examiner is right to suggest that this report shows the Jacks case may be indicative of a much larger problem. More than a quarter of the deaths listed in the report were from families that had been accused of abuse or neglect multiple times.

It’s heartbreaking to consider it took a crime of the magnitude of the Jacks case for the city to get serious about overhauling its child welfare agency — let’s hope Mayor Fenty, who was actually in charge of the committee that had authority over the city’s health and child welfare agencies when we served as Ward 4’s Council member, has now been shamed into making sure his planned reforms are meaningful and productive.

Photo of Mayor Adrian Fenty at the Jacks crime scene by the Associated Press