There’s been a lot more attention placed on the goings on at D.C.’s Child and Family Services Agency since the gruesome discovery of the murdered daughters of Banita Jacks, and rightly so. But two different stories in today’s edition of the Examiner paint nearly opposite portraits of what might be going wrong inside the agency.
First is Bill Myers’ story, about how the principal of Latin American Montessori Bilingual School called the city’s abuse hot line to report a child she suspected of being molested at home, only to be basically blown off by a child welfare worker on the other end. Cristina Encinas said she was told she didn’t have enough expertise to judge the situation and that the city would not investigate without more evidence. Encinas was eventually able to convince authorities to look in on the child, and relatives of the little girl are now being prosecuted for abuse.
But then there’s Harry Jaffe’s column, which chronicles the story of two parents wrongly accused of abusing their twin toddlers. Jaffe characterizes the city’s child welfare agency as being “overzealous” and having “sunk its claws” into the Caplan family, who were recently exonerated of suspicions that they shook one of their children after an ER visit revealed retinal hemorrhage in one of them. The Caplans’ children were briefly taken away from them during an investigation, and they remain on the city’s child protection register. Jaffe is outraged that something like this could happen to a family he deems to exude innocence and light, and somewhat ridiculously chalks the whole thing up to “reverse discrimination”, because the Caplans are wealthy.
Perhaps these two stories both reflect an agency struggling to cope under extreme pressure and heavy caseloads, but we’re much more disturbed by the former story than the latter. It must have been awful for the Caplans to go through the ordeal of having their children removed from their home for two weeks, but isn’t a zealous child welfare agency exactly what the city has been demanding since the Jacks murders?
