Come springtime, it will have been four years since 7-year-old Chandler Grafner was found starved to death in a Denver apartment.
His horrifying death, along with the deaths of a dozen other children who were supposed to be protected from abuse by local counties, prompted what was billed as a top-to-bottom review of Colorado’s child protective services system.
Colorado’s child welfare system has been tweaked and improved, but serious questions about the very foundation of protective services remain unanswered despite years of study.
Frankly, we’re beginning to think no one wants to know the answers.
Why? Because a meaningful overhaul of the system probably would mean hiring a whole bunch more caseworkers and other employees, an expense that no one even dares bring up with taxpayers.
The latest development in this sorry story took place last month. The day after the general election, the Ritter administration released a report from a group that was supposed to look carefully into two important suggestions from a prior study group.
The committee was supposed to figure out whether it was a good idea to restructure Colorado’s two-tiered child protection system, and whether there ought to be a centralized child abuse call center.
The committee did nix the idea of the call center, but not because it was a bad concept, necessarily. It didn’t think there was enough money for such a initiative.
Then, the committee punted on the restructuring question, saying it didn’t have enough time to look at such a complicated issue.
Not enough time? Well, it turns out that even though the governor had said last December that he would form a second study group, he did not issue the executive order creating the group until May.
The group did not begin meeting until June, and then it had less than two months to work.
As a fallback position, the group suggested the state do what is called a workload study. Such a study would look at what social workers are expected to do in handling a case — involving everything from court hearings to home visits — and decide how many cases a social worker could reasonably be expected to handle.
It is the third time such a study has been called for, and yet one has never been done for this state. We suspect it would show that child protective services units are vastly understaffed.
In a budget climate where funding for higher education is being decimated, there isn’t enough money to pave roads, and K-12 education is taking financial hits, what would happen with that information?
We suspect it would land in the circular file.
As we said, the system has been tweaked in the wake of well-publicized tragedies, and we do not dismiss the efforts of those who worked to pass bills in the legislature to reform the system.
One bill created a child ombudsman office, where people can report abuse or problems with the system. Another mandated that people who have jobs requiring them to report suspected abuse be informed of the results of the cases. A third was designed to help the courts and social services agencies keep track of children when they move from one jurisdiction to another.
These are helpful measures, to be sure. But they do not comprise the sort of sweeping overhaul that has been suggested year after year in study after study.
For that, Coloradans probably would be looking at a seriously large expenditure for lots of labor-intensive work.
How many more 7-year-olds will have to starve to death in front of our very eyes before Colorado has that conversation?