Child welfare up close

Racial disparities in Washington state's child-welfare system run deep. The officials who run this system have pledged to address this but to do so they need to get out of Olympia and see the problems firsthand.

King County would make a good first stop.African-American children in this county make up 7 percent of the general population but are more than 30 percent of the kids in long-term foster care. Black children wait twice as long to be adopted as white children. Among emergency-room visits where child abuse or neglect is suspected, white mothers are reported to child-welfare officials less often than black mothers despite similarities in their cases. Similar disparities exist among Native American families.

Credit the state Legislature, led by Rep. Eric Pettigrew, D-Seattle, for making Washington only the fourth state to mandate attention and improvements. A similar mandate in Michigan reduced the overall number of children in foster care.

Robin Arnold-Williams, secretary of the Department of Social and Health Services, and Cheryl Stephani, head of DSHS' child-welfare agency, must become more proactive on this. Case in point: When the federal office on civil rights — in an odd moment of irony — challenged DSHS' creation of an Office of African-American Children's Services, the result should have been a call to action.

The office should have been revamped to reflect improved management and resources. Caseloads were unacceptably high and so was staff turnover. Isolation from other child-welfare departments that were uncomfortable with the emphasis on race should have been dealt with.

Instead, broadening the mission to a benign directive to do better by all children merely tosses an essential baby out with the bathwater. Children of color are being harmed by the system; focusing on those children is the way to understand and resolve this.

Child welfare is a complex system. So many decisions and missteps, some with racial consequences, can occur as hundreds of caseworkers in 44 field offices around the state make life-changing decisions about families. These complexities are best viewed up close by those with the responsibility to make changes.