“There are so many kids getting hurt”
Report says sexual abuse, neglect ignored in rural region
The night before Thanksgiving 2017, Kristen Ritter burst into her son’s room and found him playing a “game” with another boy.
That game was oral sex, and her son was 5. She learned that it had happened eight or nine times.
Ritter’s son’s school, her pastor and her husband, Justin, all reported the sexual activity on separate occasions. But police never came to speak with the Ritters, they said. When Justin Ritter walked into the Montezuma County Department of Social Services to report the abuse, he sat down with a receptionist who didn’t take notes.
“There are so many kids getting hurt here,” Kristen Ritter said. “It feels pretty helpless to live in Montezuma County.”
The Ritters’ experience mirrors that of others in the rural county in southwest Colorado over the past five years. A nine-month investigation released Friday by the state’s independent child protection monitor found that the county violated dozens of state regulations and laws, including delayed responses to reports of abuse and neglect, inadequate supervision of child welfare cases and gaps in reporting child safety issues to law enforcement. The ombudsman found that Montezuma County leadership repeatedly allowed errors to go unnoticed.
The 88-page report did not contain any names, but several families such as the Ritters detailed to The Denver Post their experiences with their county department.
The state has agreed to conduct an audit of the department’s child welfare practices, while Montezuma County acknowledged it has made some mistakes but blamed former leadership and one caseworker for the majority of violations.
Social services experts say it’s harder to recruit caseworkers to rural America, where lower salaries and geographic isolation limit the pool of qualified applicants. The challenge of protecting kids in Montezuma is exacerbated by the fact that the county has some of the state’s highest rates of drug overdose deaths and child poverty rates nearly double the state average.
Residents, however, said that the department is endangering lives, and the ombudsman said her office continues to get calls and concerns about the county’s practices.
Ombudsman finds 67 violations
The ombudsman’s report found that Montezuma County violated state law and regulations 67 times from October 2014 to April 2018, impacting at least a dozen children. The reviewed cases included allegations in which children were sexually abused, hit and neglected.
Of these violations, “the most troubling was the MCDSS’s repeated failure to properly respond to reports of abuse and neglect in a timely fashion,” the report found.
When that call comes in, that initial assessment of whether the child is in danger should happen quickly, Stephanie Villafuerte, the child protection ombudsman, told The Denver Post.
The report details one instance in which Social Services received a call that a 12-year-old may have been sexually abused by a caregiver.
The child wasn’t interviewed by a caseworker for nearly three months.
The cases highlight another of the report’s major findings: inconsistent reporting to law enforcement.
Montezuma County Social Services told investigators that it decided which information is shared with law enforcement and that it does so on a “more personal level and not a formal level,” according to the report. As of October 2018, the sheriff’s office and police department were not receiving all reports of child abuse and neglect as is mandated by law, the ombudsman found.
“There is a law for a reason,” Villafuerte said about reporting abuse to police. “Unless there is a robust method of communication and transferring information, some ball is going to get dropped.”
Ultimately, the report concluded, “without significant intervention and guidance from the Colorado Department of Human Services (CDHS) … the issues identified … and the correlating violations are likely to continue.”
The state department, in its response to the report, agreed with all nine of the state law violations identified in the report and 50 of the 58 regulation violations. The state also agreed to review the county’s referrals, assessments and cases for the first half of 2019.
“The Department will work with the MCDSS to develop improvement plans deemed necessary to address the MCDSS’s child welfare practices,” the state wrote.
The ombudsman noted that Montezuma lacked complete and accurate paperwork in the state child welfare database, making it difficult to know if a violation had occurred or the department had simply failed to document certain details.
Community members who have dealt with the department say it seems to skip steps, ignore procedure and make up its own rules.
“There’s typically a lot of checks and balances in that type of system,” Justin Ritter said. “But it doesn’t seem like there’s any kind of accountability for that department because they didn’t really seem to have a standardized process about how they approach specific cases.”
Montezuma County, in its written response to the ombudsman’s report, said approximately a third of the 67 infractions in the report were “technical violations that had no impact on child safety, permanency or children’s wellbeing.”
Villafuerte scoffed at that explanation.
“I don’t ever believe anything related to a child is a technical violation,” she told The Denver Post. “I struggle with anybody who calls the rules and regulations that govern child abuse and neglect ‘technical.’ ”
Montezuma County “acknowledges that it has made mistakes” and does not dispute portions of the report.
“What is clear after reviewing the CPO’s report is that MCDSS has room to improve its practices and enhance its techniques,” the county wrote.
The county pushed back on large sections of the report, however — including what it said was a small sample size of cases and selective interviews with stakeholders. The department said 17 of the 20 assessments identified in the report were assigned to one staff member who was fired before the ombudsman’s investigation began.
Villafuerte, in an interview, said the county’s attempt to pin its errors on one employee is “concerning.”
“These are teams, not single people, handling every single aspect or facet of a case,” she said. “I have to ask myself, how did these cases get neglected for so long if those supervisory mechanisms had been in place?”
The ombudsman’s report highlighted department leadership “which repeatedly allowed errors to go unnoticed.”
Community distrust
During the nine-month investigation, many community members expressed to the ombudsman’s office a severe lack of trust in Montezuma County’s social services department. The report detailed four systematic issues:
• Lack of responsiveness to children’s and families’ needs.
• Lack of objectivity in the assessment of child abuse and neglect cases.
• Lack of transparency surrounding MCDSS case practices.
• Lack of trauma-informed practices.
While acknowledging that the sentiment did not represent every member of the community, the number of statements critical of the department were “significant and specific enough that they merit discussion in the report,” Villafuerte wrote.
And many of their claims, the report noted, “paralleled the … violations of law and regulations identified by the ombudsman.”
In one example outlined in the report, an 8-year-old child reported to his school that his caregiver had beaten him with a belt. Staff members had noticed bruises on the boy, who said the caregiver would beat him after drinking. The child started missing school after the abuse.
The caseworker who came to interview “asked the child if he knew what a hypochondriac was.”
Other residents said department leaders lack objectivity and decide cases on a personal basis.
Elise Schuster has seen 49 foster children come through her home in the Montezuma Valley. For 26 years, she and her husband, Ropati, have been taking kids from the system to live at what they affectionately call “Schuster Hill,” a one-story house outside Cortez with 360-degree views of mountains and mesas.
After two and half decades fostering children with meth addictions and children who were sexually abused, the Schusters were told abruptly last year that they could no longer be certified to foster in Montezuma County. Three of their foster children, whom they were trying to adopt, were sent to another family.
The department never came by for monthly visits like it was supposed to, Schuster said. It never told the couple about a citizen review panel, which is mandated for every county in the state to review child welfare cases — but which did not exist in Montezuma County for years, the ombudsman found. Department leadership instructed caseworkers to fail the family on its home inspection, Schuster said.
“To be told you’re not fit to be a foster parent by people that have never been to my home, it’s just pitiful,” she said. “It’s vindictive, it’s spiteful, it’s corrupt.”
Laura Switzer said she called social services about how her exhusband was caring for their daughter. And when she called a second time, it was “screened out,” she said — the case never investigated.
“These are children with lives at stake,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes. “And there’s nothing that you do, nothing that you say that seems to make a difference.”
The ombudsman recommended that the county department use an independent mediator to improve its relationship with citizens and stakeholders. Montezuma County said it would consider the mediator and is planning a meeting this fall for the community to discuss ways to improve services and communication with social services.
For a department that has the ability to take children away from parents, faith in the system is paramount, Villafuerte told The Denver Post.
“Trust is everything in this business,” she said. “Parents have to be convinced that you’re only going to knock on their door if there’s a real reason to do that. Kids need to be able to trust that you’re going to respond when you say you’re going to help them.”