Denver adding 40 child-welfare workers

Move comes after calls to hot line on abuse soar

By Ann Imse, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published February 27, 2008 at 7:33 p.m.
Updated February 27, 2008 at 11:13 p.m.

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Denver is adding 40 child-welfare caseworkers because calls to its abuse-and-neglect hot line have soared in the past two years, largely because of a jump in calls from Denver Public Schools.

The rise in calls from the schools followed the story of 7- year-old Chandler Grafner's being starved to death despite warning calls from his school to social workers.

Then a principal was charged with failing to report abuse in an incident among students at a middle school.

Now, "The schools are calling in any incident they feel bears investigating," said Carmen Carillo, deputy manager of Denver Human Services.

A significant number of the calls do not prove to be abuse, but "when in doubt, err on the side of safety," she said. "By law, we have to look at them."

The staff increase, at a cost of $2 million from emergency reserves, comes shortly before the expected release of two studies of recent deaths of children who had been reported to human services before they died.

Carillo said she did not know what the reports would say. But she said, "Everyone is distressed, and trying to figure out what to do."

Hot line callers also appear to have been spurred by publicity over a number of recent child deaths.

In 2007, calls spiked during publicity about the deaths of the emaciated Loreyna Barea and Chandler Grafner in March and May, during the trial in the Barea case in August, and again in September and October when the Grafner report was released and the body of 3-year-old Neveah Gallegos was found in a park. Calls peaked at 512 in October and dropped to 266 in December.

All of this means more work for social workers because they must check out every call. They did 58 percent more intake assessments in 2007 than two years earlier, with only an 8 percent increase in staff.

Richard Wexler of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform warned that Denver and Colorado could be going through "a classic foster-care panic." That happens when publicity spurs more calls warning of child abuse, and then overworked social workers "have less time to make a decision on every case."

"That means they are going to make more bad decisions in both directions, taking away more children needlessly, and they will overlook children in real danger," Wexler said.

In Denver, all of the checking has not resulted in a large jump in the number of children removed from their homes for the first time.

That figure rose 5 percent last year, to about 1,000, even though the number of court cases increased 41 percent, from 395 to 557, said the department's in-house evaluator, Corey Johnson.

Often, social workers need court orders, not to remove a child but to get parents to go to substance-abuse treatment or parenting classes, or to take care of a child's medical care or other needs, said Barbara Shaklee, assistant city attorney.

Calls of concern

Year Hot line calls Assessments Services provided Court cases

2005 9,739 2,925 4,505 336

2006 10,050 3,928 7,150 395

2007* 11,500 4,622 7,500 557

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