(5 of 5)
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