MAKING THE TOUGH CALLS

By Jill Smolowe

AL DAVIS STARES, HIS EYES UNblinking, as Diana Roper talks herself into a frenzy. "I don't know why the tests came back that way. There's no way I'm using now." Already under scrutiny by California authorities for drug possession and leaving her two young children unattended, Roper, 36, knows that her latest drug test, with its traces of methamphetamines, could land her in jail and her two kids in foster care. "They got CHILD ABUSE stamped on my file, and that is not true. I neglected my kids, I'll admit that, but I never abused them." Sitting in a cramped second-floor apartment in East San Diego carpeted with dirty laundry and food remnants, the single mother abruptly changes tack. "What if I go to jail? Who'll take care of my kids?" Davis breaks into Roper's panicked monologue. "I gotta think about this and make some calls, Diana. I'll get back to you."

"Shoot," he mutters as he walks back to his beat-up Toyota. "See, these are the ones." Davis means the cases that despite his 13 years of experience investigating child-abuse cases in San Diego County still poison his sleep and send him off to a therapist periodically. "The ones where the kids have broken bones are easier," he says. In those cases, Davis has little difficulty deciding that the children would be better off in the custody of strangers. But what to make of a case like Roper's? Her seven-year-old son is attending school regularly. Her two-year-old daughter seemed content as she perched on the Naugahyde couch, watching cartoons. And Roper appeared genuinely distraught at the prospect of losing her kids. But what about the drug test? And the presence of a new boyfriend in her apartment? "I don't know who this 'Doug' guy is," Davis says. "The kids are O.K. one day, but what about the next day? I can't predict human behavior."

Yet that is exactly what Davis and the nation's other 33,000 caseworkers are required to do. Dispatched into unfamiliar, often dangerous surroundings, they are expected to make instant predictions about tomorrow, based largely on a sixth sense about the data their five senses gather today. Certainly many people outrank them in the child-welfare hierarchy, yet their views carry the greatest weight. Only they "walk up the drug-filled staircase, sit on the dirty couch and talk to the teenage mother," says Marc Parent, who spent four years as a caseworker in New York City. As the Elisa Izquierdo case demonstrates, "if you get a caseworker who goes to somebody's home and says it's fine, then it's fine," notes Parent. "That's how important their voice is." They get no public recognition when that voice is right and they help mend a broken home or rescue a child from harm. But when a child is killed or injured, they are the first to be second-guessed and blamed.

The neglect and abuse of children is the "nation's shame," says Donna Shalala, Secretary of Health and Human Services. There has been an alarming 25% rise in cases between 1988 and 1993, a year when 2.9 million incidents were reported to child-welfare agencies and 1,028 kids died of maltreatment. At the same time, burnout and budget cuts are steadily thinning the ranks of child-welfare workers, and those who remain are juggling unwieldy case- loads with dwindling resources. In 22 states and the District of Columbia, child-protection systems have been ruled inadequate by the courts and now operate under some form of judicial supervision. Despite that, each Washington caseworker still carries double the 17 cases recommended by the Child Welfare League of America, and at least two dozen caseworkers in one of the department's divisions still wrangle over five cars. In Georgia's Barrow County, the general emergency funds to pay rent deposits, buy milk or fill a prescription usually run out by the middle of each month, and all the mental-health programs have waiting lists. Caseworkers in New York City lack computers; pens, white-out and photocopying paper are also limited. Sometimes, as a matter of policy, they put the phones on hold to reduce the volume of calls.

Training budgets have also been slashed in many jurisdictions, though a grounding in child development, substance abuse and human behavior is essential to making informed judgments. (Some states require caseworkers to hold a degree in social work, but others, such as New York, do not.) Says Richard Gelles, a family-violence expert at the University of Rhode Island: "It is only mildly facetious to talk about child-protective workers being 26-year-old art-history majors with 20 hours of training who do risk-assessment based on how the toys are lined up."

Yet even for seasoned workers such as Davis, the job is a high-wire act. "People who work in emergency response are like the first Marines on the beach: you don't know what kind of situation you're walking into," he says. "You're in a gang neighborhood. You knock on a door and you can find yourself in a room full of people. Maybe the woman has a black eye. Where are the kids? You're keeping real cool, trying to assess the situation." Bernadette Boozer, who works some of the toughest housing projects in Washington, explains that because so many of the families she visits are on federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children, "when you identify yourself as a child-protective person you immediately pose a threat, not only to the children, but a threat to the person's income." Says Davis: "One day one of us is going to get killed out here."

"I know what I'm doing is right and good," says Victoria Case, 26, of Shelby County, Kentucky. "But it's a lonely life as a social worker, because people have a skewed idea of what we do. They think we're baby snatchers." Yet the 1993 case that has left child-welfare workers in her state embittered and defensive was just the opposite: social workers failed to snatch 22-month-old Daniel Reynolds and were subsequently charged with complicity in his murder.

According to court documents, four caseworkers in Wayne County were confronted at least four separate times with evidence of physical abuse yet failed to remove Daniel permanently from the home. In one instance, when he was found to have a leg broken by twisting and marked with a handprint-shaped bruise, frustrated hospital staff testified that the Wayne County caseworkers only reluctantly ordered the boy placed in foster care. Yet within two months, Daniel was back with his violent stepfather. Around the time that new bruises darkened his face, a caseworker wrote in Daniel's file that "everything was fine." The month before the boy was fatally bashed in the head with a force that the medical examiner likened to being dropped from a three-story building, a caseworker acknowledged that the stepfather had failed to attend court-ordered parenting classes but that Daniel appeared "well and active."

It took a jury only 90 minutes to exonerate the caseworkers. (The parents were convicted in a separate trial.) Outside the Monticello courthouse, a crowd of their colleagues burst into cheers. But the state Secretary of the Cabinet for Human Resources, Masten Childers II, was less partisan: within hours of the verdict, he launched his own inquiry into Kentucky's protective services. While the investigation found understaffing and other systemic inadequacies, its vice chairman, David Richart of the private-sector Kentucky Youth Advocates, acknowledged that the Wayne County workers "missed the obvious signs and pushed family reunification at all costs."

In fact, agencies are mandated by federal law to make "reasonable efforts" to keep children in the families whenever it is safe to do so. This is a sharp departure from the 1970s, when the favored strategy was to remove children quickly from potentially dangerous situations and place them in foster care. But as the national pool of foster homes shrank and the bill for long-term foster care continued to mount, the pendulum swung back toward helping the family rather than breaking it up.

It remains a controversial policy, however, both in the field and among child-welfare experts. "We're not able to do as much as we'd like to protect the child," says Kentucky's Case. "Even though there are cases where we would never want to reunite the family, that has to be our first goal because of the federal mandate. That's just not appropriate when you have severe physical or sexual abuse." Adds Gelles of the University of Rhode Island: "The principle of human behavior is that you predict what they are going to do tomorrow on the basis of what they did yesterday. If somebody has a substance-abuse problem, you don't give him five years and 16 trips in and out of rehabilitation to clean it up while a kid is held hostage in a foster-care system." Dr. Michael Baden, a forensics expert with the New York State Police who has seen too many corpses of battered children, takes an even harder line: "Why do we treat the beating of a spouse as a crime and the beating of a child as something that doesn't require police intervention?"

Even when "family preservation" is the right goal in theory, caseworkers say, it is becoming increasingly difficult to enact, owing to wholesale cuts in the programs they use to shore up a household in crisis. Drug and alcohol counseling, mental-health services, emergency housing funds, day care, homemaker assistance and parenting courses have already been scaled back in most places, and may disappear entirely under the legislation that Congress is considering, which would also slice up to $2.9 billion more from child-protection services nationwide. Republican cost cutters insist that the states can do more with less. "A lot of these agencies built the bureaucracy and have trouble dismantling it," says Florida Republican Representative Clay Shaw, "but the states can't keep up with the red tape, the regulations and the reports they have to file." Child advocates disagree. "What do you think it means to cut back on protective services?" asks Gail Nayowith, executive director of the Citizens' Committee for Children in New York. "It's like calling 911 and having the ems dispatcher tell you, 'I'm sorry, but we've already come to your neighborhood once this week. You'll have to wait.'"

Victoria Case knows that family violence demands immediate action. Last week she was trying to ensure the security of a woman named Sandy and her three children. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, Sandy's husband Bruce beat her up, blackening her eyes and breaking her nose. At Case's urging, Sandy has obtained a restraining order against him. But now, having observed many battered women, Case is worried that Sandy's resolve is flagging. "The kids love their daddy," Sandy insists. "He's really a very good person."

Yet Sandy has told Case that Bruce twice fired a shotgun in the house, once while four-year-old Charlie was seated in Sandy's lap, another time as eight-year-old Amber huddled in a closet. "I have a problem with you putting your children at risk with this man," Case tells her. "Your little girl is way too O.K. with this, and that's not O.K. She thinks this is a way of life, and she'll find a man who hurts her too." Sandy agrees to send the two youngest children to her mother's home.

After two years on the job, Case, who has a joint psychology-law enforcement degree, makes $19,100. (Caseworker salaries in big cities average about $37,000.) A single mother, she is on call 24 hours a day and gets no reimbursement for the $5-an-hour baby-sitting fees she incurs responding to an emergency. She logs more than 1,000 miles on her car each month, and the 22-c- a mile she is compensated barely covers the costs of gas, let alone the wear and tear on her 1983 Toyota Corolla. Yet she is indefatigable. "Every night when I'm driving home, I think, 'Are all my kids safe? Will they stay that way until tomorrow morning?"' Case says. "If not, I turn around and head back to the office."

Yet even the most dedicated caseworkers make mistakes. Marc Parent remembers vividly the 1990 Bronx case that finally broke his spirit. On the last call of a long night shift, Parent and his partner mounted six flights of stairs, passing drug dealers and crack addicts, in search of the mother in her late 20s who was reportedly neglecting her child. When they entered the apartment, they encountered mice and five filthy children, some naked, some half-dressed. Though Parent inspected the infant in question, he didn't unwrap the baby's blanket to look at the body or take the child to an emergency room. Four days later, the boy died of severe malnutrition. Although Parent was subsequently exonerated by an internal review board, he remains haunted by guilt. "I was holding this child," he says. "I could have done something."

"All of us have what we call the 2 a.m. conference," says Davis. "You wake up and lie there thinking, 'Were they lying to me? Kids do get bruises. There are accidents. Did I make the right decision?'" It is little wonder, he says, that "many of us are on antidepressants." Two-thirds of the 170 former Arizona caseworkers surveyed last January said they had left the job because of pressure and stress; half cited public criticisms.

One deep source of frustration, certainly, is that no solution seems adequate to the pain and suffering that caseworkers see every day. Says Parent: "As you got there to check on the safety of one child, you felt like every child, everyone in the building or in the whole block, should be removed." Marsha Hurda, a veteran social worker and Davis' colleague, used to handle only cases that were already in the court system. "Back then," she says, "I used to feel like an avenging angel. I felt good that I was able to keep a kid out of a bad home. But now I'm seeing those kids, and they've gone through five foster homes. The original home was bad, but what do you do? Do you try to reunify? You wonder if you can salvage anything from this system."

That, certainly, was the question many New Yorkers were asking last week as more and more details about the inner workings of the Child Welfare Administration leaked to the press. For the entire six years of Elisa Izquierdo's life, it appears, lawsuits, special reports and government audits had been decrying a dangerous overload at the city agency. At week's end, the New York Times published a shocking internal memo from the Bronx office, dated Nov. 15, 1995, regarding the caseload. "Please encourage your workers to follow this simple mathematical equation," it read. "For every opening you should have two closings/transfers." But children are not numbers. And their suffering cannot be stopped by bureaucratic fiat. "The system is broken and needs to be fixed, but no one has the political will to do it," says Nayowith. "What possible good does it do to call for the death penalty of the mother, string up the judge and hang the caseworker? After that's all done, the system will remain how it is."

--Reported by Ann Blackman and Ann M. Simmons/Washington, Sharon E. Epperson and Ratu Kamlani/New York, James L. Graff/Shelbyville, Elaine Lafferty/San Diego and Lisa H. Towle/Raleigh

With reporting by ANN BLACKMAN AND ANN M. SIMMONS/WASHINGTON, SHARON E. EPPERSON AND RATU KAMLANI/NEW YORK, JAMES L. GRAFF/SHELBYVILLE, ELAINE LAFFERTY/SAN DIEGO AND LISA H. TOWLE/RALEIGH