D.C. Council members challenged whether Mayor Adrian Fenty’s response to the deaths of four sisters has gone far enough during a day of heated probing into the city’s failure to respond to the family’s plight.
“Here’s all these agencies of the government that were supposedly involved, yet no one was involved,” said at-large Councilwoman Carol Schwartz during an oversight hearing of the Human Services Committee.
Banita Jacks and her family were touched by at least five D.C. agencies in a span of two years.
But Fenty has focused his reform efforts on one — the Child and Family Services Agency, whose social workers and child neglect hot line call takers punted their obligation to the case.
Fenty has charged CFSA Director Sharlynn Bobo with fixing the agency. But Ward 3 Councilwoman Mary Cheh questioned whether Bobo should remain in power: “I’m skeptical and I do think we maybe need new leadership over there,” she said. “What kind of shop are we running over there?”
U.S. marshals discovered the decomposing bodies of Jacks’ four daughters, ages 5 to 17, in their Sixth Street Southeast row house last week. Jacks has been charged with murdering them.
Social workers “just walked away” from the family, acting Attorney General Peter Nickles told the committee.
Wrongly assuming the family had left town, CFSA closed the case on May 16, three weeks after a charter school social worker reported via hot line that Jacks was suffering from mental illness and holding her children hostage.
That cry for help was ignored, Nickles said, “not necessarily because of lack of procedure, but because a lack of caring, a lack of urgency.”
Fenty has fired six CFSA employees for their role in the case, and the jobs of at least two more are on the line.
Jacks, 33, had contact with CFSA, police, health, human services and public schools over two years. The warnings about her instability first came in July 2006, but were never pursued because the family had no fixed address — they were living in a van.
More alerts followed in late April 2007, when 16-year-old Brittany Jacks was absent from Booker T. Washington Public Charter School for 33 straight days. The three youngest daughters were disenrolled from Meridian Public Charter School by their godmother.
That Meridian didn’t advise the District of the girls’ absences represents a “chasm in our safety net,” said Ward 6 Councilman Tommy Wells, who called the hearing.
The social workers assigned to the case performed poorly and didn’t follow protocols, Bobo told the council, but the answer isn’t an agency overhaul, rather to “make sure that people follow the policy that’s alreadythere.”
Examiner Staff Writer Bill Myers contributed to this article.
