Child welfare long a passion for Gregoire

By Jonathan Martin
Seattle Times staff reporter

KEN LAMBERT / THE SEATTLE TIMES Gubernatorial hopeful Christine Gregoire knew domestic violence as a child and has championed child-welfare reforms.

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In her first job out of law school, Christine Gregoire went to the grim front lines of child-abuse investigation, representing social workers across Eastern Washington.

She pursued the job with such a passion that Gregoire remains a near legend among her former state co-workers from Spokane, Republican and Democrat alike.

"I've been in child welfare for 30 years, and I have never seen another attorney have anything like the influence she had on the agency at the time," said Dee Wilson, a rookie investigator then, a senior child-welfare official now.

Gregoire was promoted to management within four years, but she never fully left the work behind.

As attorney general the past 12 years, she has championed reforms, and spoken the lingo of social work during her annual sessions with child advocates.

Nevertheless, child-welfare cases have given her some of her most vexing moments in state government, and some activists say they've expected more leadership than she's shown.

As a candidate for governor, Gregoire lists reforming the troubled child-welfare system as a top priority. It is rare for candidates to mention the issue, but it is Gregoire's pet project.

"I consider it malpractice in an abuse case not to ask the parent, 'Were you abused as a child?' " she said. "Chances are, 99.9 percent of the time, the answer is yes. They learned their parenting skills. My goal, my job, my whole life is: How do you break that cycle?"

Election 2004 One of a series of articles exploring the lives and careers of the candidates for governor.

Preventing child abuse is not typically the kind of issue political campaigns make into slogans. "When you ask people the things that a governor should be talking about, child welfare will be far down the list," said Stuart Elway, an independent pollster.

But Gregoire's interest may be as much personal as political. When Gregoire was a child, her mother got a restraining order against her father and fled, only to get into another abusive relationship. "I've had my exposure to domestic violence," she recently told The Associated Press.

Difficult cases

As attorney general, defending state agencies and employees in abuse cases has been among her most difficult and controversial work.

In 1998, her office was slapped with a $417,500 fine, then the state's biggest ever, for withholding documents in the O.K. Boys Ranch case.

Her staff sometimes has clashed with her friends in child advocacy.

Some faulted her for not publicly calling for reform after the case of Rafael Gomez, an Ephrata toddler who died last year after being returned to his mother by state workers.

"I've been dismayed in the lack of leadership," said Bill Grimm, an attorney who recently settled a class-action lawsuit against the state's foster-care system. "(Gregoire) could have stepped out and talked about Rafael Gomez. There was a lost opportunity. Will children fare better under her than past administrations? The jury is still out."

From caseworker to lawyer

Gregoire considered careers in teaching and juvenile probation before being hired in 1969 by the state's Department of Public Assistance to do, among other things, child-abuse investigations in Everett.

One her co-workers, Mike Gregoire, had recently served a tour in Vietnam and thought his future wife's idealism was a bit naive. "This was a young woman fresh out of college; she'd never left the state," he said. "Then I saw she was for real, she'd left the farm, she'd left campus." They married in 1975.

After she graduated from Gonzaga Law School in 1977, Gregoire got a job with the state Attorney General's Office in Spokane, based partly on her social-work experience.

The timing was fortuitous: The Legislature had just created the modern child-welfare system that year, defining abuse and giving the attorney general power to get court orders to take children from abusive parents.

The agency with those responsibilities, Child Protective Services (CPS), today is torn between competing purposes: ensuring children's safety and repairing troubled families. There was no such balancing in the late 1970s, said Pete Bezek, who worked for Gregoire in Spokane. "The pendulum was decidedly in favor of the child's safety," he said. "Chris wanted to make sure the pendulum hadn't swung too far that we ignored parents' rights."

He still vividly remembers a case of an infant being burned with an iron and cigarettes. "It was some of the hardest work I've done, because it was so emotional," said Bezek, now an attorney in Santa Barbara, Calif. "Seeing what some of the kids went through, you have a visceral reaction. (Gregoire) said she had the same response, but she controlled it."

A "protective" taskmaster

CPS investigators quickly learned to respect their attorney's intensity. During training sessions on the new law, Gregoire would talk "like a machine gun," so fast that staff members struggled to keep up, said Wilson. "You got into a fight with her at your own risk."

She also drew respect from lawyers she supervised. Jerry Hertel recalls asking Gregoire's permission to leave early to write a Christmas-party skit. "She said, 'You can leave the office, you can go to a bar, but you can't have a beer until after 5 p.m.,' " said Hertel. "It was like, 'Yes, Mom.' She was very maternal and protective, but also a taskmaster."

Gregoire had her first child, Courtney, in 1979. A second daughter, Laura, died at birth two years later, and two years after that her youngest child, Michelle, was born.

Parenthood changed her perspective. "I was willing to try to understand that under the right circumstances, if I didn't have enough money, if I lost my job and got angry, how I could strike a child," she said. "After we had our first child, I couldn't understand that. I was best suited to not do those cases anymore."

In 1981, the Spokane office chief, John Lamp, was appointed by President Reagan to be U.S. attorney. He picked Gregoire to succeed him, the first in a quick string of promotions. "She had an almost homespun, down-to-earth, very practical quality about her," said Lamp, now retired. "Everything she handled, she did well."

Withheld documents

Gregoire's interest in child welfare was tested three years after her 1992 election as attorney general. A scandal exploded at the O.K. Boys Ranch, a group home for troubled boys in Olympia that was licensed by the state Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS), and state workers were accused of covering up a decade's worth of complaints.

The state would eventually pay more than $22 million to 51 former residents of the facility, as compensation for failing to stop rampant sexual and physical abuse.

Amid allegations that one employee had stifled an investigation, Gregoire commissioned an internal probe. That 1995 review found no misconduct.

But lawyers for the boys-ranch residents later found key documents — licensing reports that would have helped their case — had been wrongfully withheld. An arbiter slapped Gregoire's office with the then-record $417,500 fine.

"It was the holy trinity of attorney misconduct — destruction of records, alteration of records and withholding of records," said David Paul, a Portland attorney who represented 30 of the plaintiffs. It was never clear to him whether Gregoire's staff lawyers or DSHS administrators were at fault.

A reform plan

Gregoire apologized and accepted the fine. The episode did not diminish her standing among child advocates.

"It didn't give me pause, because I know her and I understand her personal commitment," said Sharon Osborne, CEO of the Children's Home Society of Washington for two decades. "One of the challenges we always have is getting people who are in the decision-making roles who truly understand children and families. She does."

The $450 million-a-year child-welfare system consumes just 6 percent of DSHS' budget, but it would get outsized attention in a Gregoire administration.

She called it an embarrassment that federal auditors recently rated Washington's foster-care and child-abuse investigation unit among the bottom third nationally. "This was a wake-up call," she said.

She would like to see the DSHS child-welfare division become its own department, but concedes that may be too expensive. Instead, she said, she might make the division's head reportable directly to the governor rather than to the DSHS secretary.

"I would hold them constantly accountable for the changes I want made," she said. "I know there's going to be human error, and unfortunately there may be a child's life lost, but by gosh, we need to improve. We need to be the model in the country, not at the bottom."

Jonathan Martin: 206-464-2605 or jmartin@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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