officials said they’re making incremental changes to prevent more child abuse
deaths but added that legal and financial restrictions keep them from acting
more aggressively.
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The changes include how the Department of Human Resources responds to phone
calls about suspected abuse and trying to pay more attention to foster care
runaways.
The state House Appropriations Committee held a hearing in Annapolis
yesterday that focused on the state’s response to the May 11 beating deaths of
twin infant girls Emunnea and Emonney Broadway.
Police have charged the twins’ 17-year-old mother, Sierra Swann, and her
boyfriend, Nathaniel Broadway, 24, in the deaths. But critics say the system
ignored obvious warning signs — such as Swann’s documented abuse of a
previous child — and allowed her to bring her newborns home from Johns
Hopkins Hospital to a basement apartment lacking electricity or running water.
A phone call from the hospital to the Baltimore Department of Social
Services after the twins’ births did not trigger a visit from a state social
worker, as should have happened because there was a warrant out for Swann as a
runway foster child, state officials said.
“In our state, the child welfare system is facing some of the biggest
challenges that I’ve ever seen. The death of the twins triggered some
disturbing reports about child welfare services in the city,” said Del. Norman
H. Conway, an Eastern Shore Democrat and chairman of the committee. “We need
to have open dialogue about systems that are broken.”
Floyd Blair, interim director of the state-run Baltimore Department of
Social Services, said his agency has taken steps in response to the twins’
deaths to make sure similar communication breakdowns don’t recur.
“This case represents for us an opportunity to look at the gaps in
service,” Blair said. “Based on the Swann case, we are instituting systemic
changes. … We are making progress.”
The agency is creating a written protocol for how to handle calls about
children such as the call from Hopkins, Blair said. All such calls will be
routed through a central child abuse hot line, and the “backdoor” number that
was improperly used by the hospital social worker to reach a state data
processing clerk will no longer take calls from people who aren’t authorized
state employees, Blair said.
The agency will also add staff in the screening unit that evaluates
incoming reports, and it will try to do a better job of prioritizing calls and
identifying runaway foster children such as Swann, Blair said.
Clerks who take calls will also be directed to transfer calls to qualified
caseworkers. The social services computer worker who took the call from
Hopkins Hospital in the Swann case should have referred it internally to a
foster care caseworker, who could have gone out to interview Swann, said
Stephen Berry, program manager for child protective services at the state
Department of Human Resources.
The budget for the city Department of Social Services is set to shrink from
$549 million this year to $546 million in the fiscal year starting July 1, and
staffing levels are below those recommended by the Child Welfare League of
America, according to state figures.
Del. Richard S. Madaleno Jr., a Montgomery County Democrat, told state
officials that he is skeptical about the department’s plans. “I don’t see
actions. I see nice terminology to continue thinking about actions, but I
don’t see actions,” he said.
Del. Peter Franchot, another Montgomery Democrat, demanded to know why the
agency doesn’t remove — or at least closely monitor — children born to
mothers who, like Swann, have lost previous children because of documented
abuse.
State Human Resources Secretary Christopher J. McCabe said that after the
agency closes a child abuse case by removing a child, it cannot act on the
presumption that the same parent will abuse children born later.
“You could say that the department should be proactively acting,” McCabe
said. “But I don’t think Maryland case law says that Maryland should take a
child away because something has happened in the past” to another child in the
same family.
McCabe and Dr. Peter L. Beilenson, the city health commissioner, told the
committee that Hopkins could have done a better job. Although the state made
mistakes, too, the hospital should have pressed for more facts about Swann’s
background before releasing her newborn babies to her, Beilenson said.
Joanna Downer, spokeswoman for Hopkins Hospital, said yesterday: “While we
believe our staff took all reasonable measures at the time, Johns Hopkins is
committed to continue to work with the city and state agencies to improve the
process intended to identify and protect the children of Baltimore from abuse
and neglect.”