Just when you think the last shoe has dropped in the sordid case of Wanda Larson, the former lead child-protection supervisor for the Union County, North Carolina Department of Social Services, another one just came down. It turns out that two years before Larson was arrested for abusing five children under her care and forcing them to live under ghastly conditions, state officials had found problems with Union County DSS in a routine review--but didn't tell any local officials about it.
In one, it took the agency six days to act on a serious child abuse complaint – twice as long as required by law. In another, the agency removed a child from a home but then didn’t check “on her safety and well-being” for 10 months.
After that report, which was dated February 2011, the state asked Union County DSS to create a plan to address the deficiencies. The county DSS created the plan but didn’t finish carrying it out. Nearly three years after the state review, Union County DSS is still struggling to make improvements.
Union County commissioner Jonathan Thomas said if he had known about the state review he would have pushed DSS to take action. “We would have called for an immediate action plan that was very tight on a timeframe and, if they failed to do that, I would personally as a commissioner be calling for some personnel changes,” Thomas said.
The state reviews each county's social services department every three years. The 2011 report found that Union County DSS was "not in substantial conformity" with state requirements in any of the seven criteria that were reviewed. Besides taking too long to act on a complaint, the state found that Union County had erred in not investigating a complaint of sexual abuse and inappropriate discipline forwarded from another county. While Union County DSS felt no further investigation was needed since the allegations had already been investigated, the state found that Union County had overlooked some other serious allegations.
Although state officials have the power to order a county DSS to make changes, state officials can't recall an instance where they ever had to do so. To put it mildly, this is an outrage. When an agency takes too long to act on a complaint, that alone is reason enough to order changes. This report takes on a particularly ghastly dimension since Larson was the lead child-protection supervisor.
To my mind, this reveals a case of systemic dysfunction in North Carolina's child welfare system. It would seem that the bare minimum remedy for something like this would be to put the state social services division, and hence all 100 county social services agencies, under court supervision.