Suffer the Children

The intern disclosed the conflict to her supervisor, Astrowsky says. But the supervisor decided it wasn't a problem.

In its response to the lawsuit from Patrick's mother, CPS defended its actions as appropriate. Monroy's criminal case is still pending.

But even today, despite a few hundred new positions added to CPS's roster, workers who monitor kids like Patrick hardly have time to do their jobs.

The agency codified its caseload standards in 2005: Investigators, who make the initial determination whether children need to be in foster care, should take no more than 10 new cases a month. "Out of home" case managers, like those supervising Patrick Traufler Jr., are supposed to handle no more than 16.

Even those numbers seem high, but the reality is much, much higher. In June 2006, the most recent month available, the average "out of home" manager handled 25 cases.

And that's actually lower than many months in the recent past. In October 2005, for example, monthly "out of home" caseloads averaged 32.5 cases — double the agency's standard.

"Unless you gave up most of your personal life and worked continuously, you could not keep up," says Alissa Scott, who left the agency after almost four years in 2004. "I was a single parent, dropping my daughter off at a day care at 6:30 a.m., and they'd be waiting at the door when I showed up at night because they were closing."

Workers, too, are plagued by the stress of making life-altering decisions. They're damned in the newspapers if they don't remove kids — but reviled by parents when they do.

"The job is a 24-hour-a-day job, whether people want to acknowledge that or not," Scott says.

As a result of heavy workloads, some foster homes get little scrutiny. The law requires caseworkers to visit kids in foster care once a month. But throughout Napolitano's tenure, that's happened, on average, for just 64 percent of foster kids.

That's 5 percent below the agency's average in 2001 and 2002, according to records.

Foster parents like Angela Monroy are an anomaly. According to statistics Arizona reports to the federal government, fewer than 1 percent of kids in foster care here have suffered abuse. And while death gets the headlines, it's not what most CPS workers deal with on a daily basis.

But a far more systemic problem dogged CPS during the Napolitano-era foster care boom: dumping kids in shelters or group homes for months on end.

Marsha Porter, herself a former CPS worker, is the longtime executive director of nonprofit Crisis Nursery in central Phoenix. A slender woman with a stylish blond shag, she's happy to give a tour of the Crisis Nursery campus on Roosevelt Street, and it's easy to see why: It's like a college dorm for kids, with bedrooms, common areas for play, and a sunny backyard strewn with toys.

But the place wasn't initially designed for foster care, as Porter readily attests. Crisis Nursery began as a place where parents could voluntarily drop off kids if they felt overwhelmed. As long as the parents didn't disappear, Porter says, the agency didn't alert authorities, and mom got a break.

Only later did the nursery, and others like it, start accepting contracts to house kids while foster homes could be found.

From that point, it became only too easy for CPS to leave kids there for months on end. CPS workers preoccupied with new, urgent cases didn't always have the time to return to children they'd placed in shelters. After all, places like Crisis Nursery are nothing if not safe — and in the short term, that can seem like enough.

But then the short term turned into the long term. And suddenly kids were staying in shelters for months, or even a year.

Bonnie Cohn is a former CPS worker who started a five-bed shelter, Marcus House, in 1995. Like Porter, she felt she was providing a valuable service to her young charges — but was sometimes surprised at how long kids stayed before CPS found them placements.

"We had a sibling pair here for a full year," she says. "Then they were moved to foster parents who wouldn't take them — so they came back for another two months. And after that, CPS put them with a relative who hadn't seen them in six months!"

The Youth Law Center in San Francisco had long been critical of shelters, particularly when kids are extremely young. In 2004, the Center turned its attention to Arizona.

"It is not safe to put an infant in a group home for a long period of time," says Carole Shauffer, the director. "It may be physically safe, but it is not — and I can say with 100 percent certainty — not psychologically safe or developmentally safe."