By Wayne Gates
The recent case of a starving 11 year old Brown County girl and the arrest of the adults responsible for her care has caused some people to question whether she was failed by the child protective service system.
To address those concerns, Brown County Job and Family Services Director Mitch Sharp, CPS Supervisor Sheri Tabor and CPS Intake Screener Kelli Doss sat down with The News Democrat for an exclusive interview.
“This was a situation where the child ended up in the Breeze custody due to a private filing. This is something that happens frequently within families,” said Sharp.
“When a parent cannot provide good care for a child, often because of something like substance abuse, sometimes a grandparent or other relative decide to take the child. As result, those cases are brought before the court and filed privately, where those decisions are made within the family and not children services.”
Sharp said that in the case of the girl and Margaret and Charles Breeze, his agency should have been notified of her arrival in Brown County.
“There is a law on interstate placements where the receiving state, in this case Ohio, get notice from another state that a child has been placed in our jurisdiction. Therefore, we are requested to go out and provide visits and/or services and do whatever is necessary to make sure the placement goes well.”
Sharp, Tabor and Doss then explained what happens when someone calls in with an allegation of abuse or neglect.
“All of the calls that we take regarding children are screened. We look at what the person is telling us to determine whether a child is in a high-risk situation,” said Sharp.
“In a high risk situation, we look at things like who are the children in the home, who are the parents, where do they live and other information.”
Sharp said that his agency has six full-time investigators who carry up to 20 cases at any one time.
Overall, over 1200 calls are made to Brown County CPS in a given year. Sharp said that works out to about four calls a day, involving over 2000 children in a calendar year.
Doss works as the first voice that people hear when they call CPS.
“My first questions are do you have any names or ages, what is the address where they live and what are the things that you have seen that make you believe that they are being abused or neglected,” she said.
Other questions include “When was the last time you saw them, have you seen marks or bruises on them, what have you seen individuals do to these children that made you call today?”
Once a case is opened, Tabor said that action is taken right away.
“The requirement is that a home visit is made the same day if at all possible following a report,” she said.
“Our workers are very good workers. They continue to work cases, review them with Mitch or myself. They are not going to leave a child in a situation if they know they are at risk.”
Cases are kept open between 30 to 45 days, and consist of phone calls, interviews and home visits.
Sharp said that the safety of a child is the first concern.
“When workers observe injuries or feel the child needs medical attention, then we tell the parent to take the child to a doctor as quickly as possible,” Sharp said.
“I like to see children interviewed at school. In that environment, they are away from someone who might be abusing them, instead of being concerned that (the possible abuser) is in the next room listening.”
The next step is to go to the home.
“We say to them that we would like to see your refrigerator and cabinets to make sure you have a food supply or verify that your furnace works. This is assuming we are going off of a complaint that the children are not being fed or that there is no heat in the home,” Sharp said.
“We also do a walkthough in all the rooms and work to determine who else is living in the home. We want to see if anyone has any criminal record or interaction with us. That helps us assess whether there is risk to the child.”
Sharp said that sometimes people refuse to let investigators into their home, which is their constitutional right to do.
“If they say that we can’t come in their home and we feel that there is a serious problem, we will notify law enforcement to meet us at the scene,” Sharp said.
“If they still refuse to let us or the police in, our next step would be to call the prosecutor’s office and ask them what their opinion is. To get a search warrant, we would have to have some level of evidence to have a judge sign off on it.”
Sharp added that it’s important that the child protective service system operate that way.
“The system is designed to protect people’s rights,” he said.
Another way that investigators assess the situation is to consult other records.
“The system we use gives you history the state of Ohio. If someone has lived in a different county and moved here, we are able to see what the history is,” Sharp said.
How each case plays out from the initial phone call depends on the individual situation. Temporary placement of children outside the home and counseling for parents or custodial adults are common outcomes for substantiated allegations.
But what about the calls that are not substantiated? Sharp said that over half of the calls that his workers get are found to have no merit.
Most of those consist of people trying to get back at each other or gain advantage in a custody dispute.
“The brunt of the custodial calls come in friday evenings or sundays when it’s time for them to go from one place or the other. That means that the communications center and sheriff’s office get involved and call our on-call people. That means that the resources of those entities are being used as well,” said Doss.
Sharp said that these calls strain an already stressed system.
“You are using huge amounts of staff resources and time on a case, knowing that the outcome is going to be custodial in nature,” Sharp said.
“They have fabricated some type of story, but you have to interview the children, go to the home, look into the background of everything. You can spend several hours on a case where there is absolutely no merit to it.”
Sharp said that the system has to work that way because all calls have to be treated as serious until proven otherwise.
“We don’t go home until everything is looked at. We have investigators that spend considerable time in the morning or evening trying to resolve cases. The whole idea is to cover whatever has come in on a given day,” Sharp said.
When asked how he answers accusations from people who don’t feel that the system works fast enough, Sharp said “We know that we do everything we can. We have to show that a child is at risk before we can act. We have to have evidence. There are times where we are working on a case and it moves slowly because it takes time to put everything together.”
Sharp also said that the participation and trust of the public is vital for the system to work.
“In order to protect children, you have to have the backing of the community. And the community needs to feel that you are going to do whatever is necessary to protect the child,” he said.
“We are dependent on the community to provide information to us that a child is at risk. Even if they know only 10 or 20 percent of a situation, we are still going to take that 10 or 20 percent and look into the case to ensure that the child is safe.”
The telephone number of Brown County Job and Family Services is (937) 378-6104. Calls after hours can be made to the Brown County Sheriff’s Office at (937) 378-4435.