STAUNTON, Va. (AP) - An Augusta County-area Child Protective Services office ignored dozens of calls to a child abuse hotline and deleted more than 200 messages after the backlog was discovered, according to a published report.
An investigation by The News Leader (https://bit.ly/1K7Uiot) in Staunton found that a voice mail system used to collect the calls wasn’t checked by workers for six months. More than 200 messages were discovered last October, and most were not reviewed before a supervisor ordered their deletion, the newspaper said.
“It was a mistake to delete the messages without first reviewing all of them, and the department acknowledges it as such,” Shenandoah Valley Social Services director Elizabeth Middleton told the newspaper. “No wrongdoing was intended.”
Middleton said she was not told of the messages deletion until weeks later.
“The CPS supervisor stated that given the age and content of the initial messages that staff heard . clearing the inbox would allow new messages to be addressed with greatest speed,” she said.
Middleton said the messages that were reviewed were not from citizens.
“Given the prevalence of this pattern . the CPS supervisor indicated that she thought it unlikely that a person making a CPS complaint would just leave a message and not call back if the message was not quickly returned,” she said.
Workers were re-assigned to check the voice mail system’s mailbox after the caseworker who monitored the messages left in April 2014. But the messages were not checked because of a communication failure, she said.
The office serves Augusta County, Staunton and Waynesboro as a joint bureau under the Virginia Department of Social Services. It has fewer than a dozen workers who are paid and managed by Augusta County through a joint agreement.
Each caseworker averages about 40 cases at a time, Middleton said. According to the state, the average caseload in Virginia is 17 cases per worker.
The county discovered the messages’ deletion, and a decision by the office to cover it up, after a physician complained that the office’s phone system sent all callers into an endless loop, said Augusta County Administrator Pat Coffield, who at the time headed the cross-jurisdictional board that oversees social services.
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Information from: The News Leader, https://www.newsleader.com
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