Report: Child welfare agency still inadequate

D.C. officials have stabilized the city’s child welfare bureaucracy from last year’s collapse, but thousands of children are still languishing in a backward system, federal court monitors have concluded.

In January 2008, the public learned that welfare bureaucrats had ignored desperate calls to help Banita Jacks’ four daughters, whose bodies were later found on the floor of their ramshackle squatters’ home in Southeast. After that, the backlog of abuse and neglect cases swelled to more than 1,800.