Washington City Paper: To Escape Court Oversight, D.C.’s Child Welfare System Is Cutting Corners
CLC Executive Director Judith Sandalow spoke with Morgan Baskin of the Washington City Paper about the disparity between the public persona of DC’s child welfare system and the serious problems that have gone unchecked on their watch.
“Rather than acknowledging [CFSA’s] problems, there’s, ‘Oh no, we’re doing great. Oh no, we’re headed in a great direction,’” Sandalow says. “But in the past couple of years, we’ve seen things get worse, not better.”
Sandalow from the Children’s Law Center says that her organization has “had social workers express frustration that senior folks, senior agency staff, overrule them and their clinical judgment, and we’ve witnessed that in ways that raise concerns for us, that senior staff is feeling the pressure to close cases or make their statistics, and they are not listening to the line staff … who actually know the child and are spending time with the child.”