Sixteen months before administrators began an internal review that found the Rockbridge Area Department of Social Services turned a blind eye to reports of child abuse and neglect, there were signs something was amiss.
In October 2014, an official in the social services’ Piedmont Regional Office, which oversees the Rockbridge agency, spotted a pattern.
More than half of the reports made to the department’s Child Protective Services unit were “screened out, ” which means the department found no reason to investigate complaints it received about children who might have been neglected, assaulted or molested.
Calling the rate “rather high, ” Child Protective Services regional consultant Chad Alls emailed a supervisor at the Rockbridge department advising that he planned to review the cases “in order to provide some feedback and guidance on any I find concerning.”
A year-and-a-half passed – during which one child died and four were allegedly sexually assaulted in homes that had been reported to Child Protective Services – before a more detailed internal investigation concluded the agency failed to do its job.
Whether the Piedmont Regional Office should have acted sooner and done more is a question on the mind of Rockbridge County Commonwealth’s Attorney Christopher Billias, who plans to convene a special grand jury to investigate.
“Typically, when something reaches this scale, there are LOTS of people potentially culpable, not any single individual, ” Billias wrote in an email. “Each agency has oversight, and if each layer failed to do their job, this is something we need to know about.”
The issue of oversight was raised publicly Thursday, when about 30 people gathered at a community meeting in Lexington to discuss a damning report from the Piedmont Regional Office, which blew the lid off a controversy that had been simmering for years.
An investigation by the regional office, begun in February and completed in May, revealed that complaints of child abuse and neglect were ignored by the Rockbridge agency. Much of the blame was leveled at a former supervisor who shredded some reports before they could be passed on for further assessment.
Calvitt Clarke of Lexington wanted to know why the regional office didn’t catch those problems sooner.
“It is a rather confusing system,” said Susan Reese, who heads the regional office, referring to a structure under which her agency oversees 24 social services departments in an area stretching from Mecklenburg County in Southside Virginia, north to Charlottesville and back through Roanoke to Martinsville.
Each of the 24 social services departments is supervised by a local board. The boards, appointed by the governing bodies of cities and counties served by the departments, hire directors to whom day-to-day operations are delegated.
Data initially looked OK
Details of how administrators in the Piedmont Regional Office responded to problems in Rockbridge County are contained in emails obtained by The Roanoke Times through the Virginia Freedom of Information Act.
In correspondence dating to January 2011, the first hint of systemic flaws appears in an Oct. 10, 2014, email from Alls, the Child Protective Services consultant in the regional office.
The email is addressed to Reese, now-retired department Director Meredith Downey and the supervisor accused of shredding documents. (The supervisor, who is no longer employed by the department, is not being identified by The Roanoke Times because she neither has been charged with a crime nor named in a court document.)In his email, Alls raised concerns about a complaint made to the regional office. The case involved an earlier report, received by the Rockbridge Child Protective Services unit, that a mother was giving her child un-prescribed medication. The Rockbridge office decided not to validate the report, meaning it received no additional scrutiny after it was received.
That decision, also known as a screen-out, “did cause me some concern as I feel this should have been validated, ” Alls wrote.
Later in the same email, Alls wrote: “I was also looking at some data related to the number of screen-outs being made by the agency and I find the rate for the last three months has been in excess of 50 percent, which is rather high.”
Alls said he planned to take a closer look at the numbers. He asked the former supervisor if she was responsible for deciding whether the reports were screened out, or if that decision was made by other Child Protective Services workers.
Ten days passed with no response.
On Oct. 20, Alls sent another email to the supervisor, reminding her of his earlier questions. “I am the person who routinely validates/invalidates reports, ” the supervisor replied. “If I am not here, the 2 CPS workers make the decision jointly.”
When Alls later called the supervisor to discuss the matter further, she angrily accused him of being “hateful” for raising questions, Reese said.
The supervisor “was notoriously difficult, ” Reese said. “I think she had a reputation for being difficult.” According to the later internal review, staff members complained about being bullied and harassed by the woman.
Alls then turned his focus to the data. A closer examination of records entered into a central computer system, covering a longer time period, showed the Rockbridge agency was not screening out complaints at a rate higher than the norm, Reese said.
However, the percentage of accepted cases that were formally investigated – an outcome required for the most serious allegations – was abnormally low, the later internal review revealed.
In the end, Alls’ review found no grounds for corrective action.
What the Piedmont Regional Office didn’t know at the time, Reese said, was that the supervisor was not entering many screened-out reports into the computer system on which Alls relied. It was only after a more exhaustive review earlier this year that the office discovered reports were being ignored – in some cases, records were shredded – by the former supervisor.
“I’m not trying to shirk our duties or make any excuses, ” Reese said. “Because we did have an eye on this and thought that we were doing all that we could.”
“We knew we had some issues with them that needed to be looked in to. But we did not expect to find what we found.”
Complaints not high
The review conducted in 2014 was not the only time the regional office fielded complaints about the Rockbridge social services department.
In January 2015, Reese emailed Alls after learning about a complaint made to the agency’s Child Protective Services unit from a woman who said her 5-month-old son returned from a weekend visit with his father suffering from a large knot on his head and a bad case of diaper rash.
The woman reported that the former supervisor “threatened her with legal action and hung up on her – not taking the CPS complaint, ” Reese wrote.
And in April of that year, the regional office got another call from a woman who said her 14-year-old son was being mentally abused by his stepmother, who made fun of him for wetting the bed and forced him to sleep in urine-soaked sheets.
The woman said she also told the Rockbridge department that the stepmother “was physically abusing her biological children by beating them with a belt, pulling them from room to room by their earlobes, and that these children had bruises on their arms and legs.”
The former supervisor screened out the case.
When asked by the regional department to explain, the former supervisor wrote in an email that the woman who complained had a criminal record, “serious mental health issues” and a bad attitude. “She came in the office with a guy and was dropping the ‘F’ bomb in the lobby, ” the former supervisor wrote.
Reese responded: “Just because this women was belligerent doesn’t mean something didn’t happen.” Reese instructed the department to investigate the allegations.
Such encounters were not uncommon, Reese said. “We were intervening all the time, and meeting resistance, ” she said.
However, she said, the number of complaints about the Rockbridge office from constituents – there were only a few others mentioned in the five years of emails provided to The Roanoke Times – was not high enough to raise a red flag.
Sheriff’s office involved
Still, the complaints kept coming. Eventually, the Piedmont Regional Office decided to investigate the department, starting in February.
By then, the Rockbridge County Sheriff’s Office had called at least twice to say its deputies were getting no cooperation from Child Protective Services in investigating reports of children in danger.
And officials from the Virginia Department for Aging and Rehabilitative Services were miffed when the former supervisor refused to meet with them to discuss a critical review.Yet no employees of the Rockbridge department reported any concerns to the regional office until after the investigation began, officials said.
Staff complaints in the local office fell on deaf ears, investigators from the regional office later were told. And while whistleblower protections were in place, that was not communicated to the 30-some employees in the office.
“People should have reported this earlier, but they didn’t know how or were afraid to, ” said William “Bill” Burleson, who was named interim director of the department last month after Downey, the previous director, announced her retirement.
It was only after investigators were on site in Lexington that one employee broke her silence. Investigators then learned that the former supervisor was feeding reports made to Child Protective Services into a paper shredder, Reese said.
To back up their allegations, employees showed investigators copies of reports they had saved, knowing the originals might be destroyed.
“That was the straw that broke the camel’s back, ” Alls said.
Alls has been working with the Rockbridge office since the internal review was completed to make sure all complaints to Child Protective Services are properly screened, investigated and recorded.
“It’s a new day, ” he told those who attended last week’s community meeting.
Since taking over Aug. 1, Burleson has started to mend relations with law enforcement and other agencies who for years were frustrated by a wall of resistance they encountered from social services.
Several mental health counselors spoke at last Thursday’s meeting about how their offers of help were brushed aside by the former supervisor, who, they said, shredded copies of their licenses when they forwarded them to the office.
Burleson, who was surprised by that news, immediately invited Lauren Robinette and two other counselors to set up a meeting with him to discuss how they can work with the agency in the future.
“That’s refreshing, ” Robinette said. “We’ve never heard that before. So thank you.”