PUEBLO - The deaths of two children within the Pueblo County Department of Social Services over the past week have launched an internal investigation. It is standard for the DSS in the event of a child's death but this week has been far from standard.
Nine-month-old Iyana Perez was killed last Friday. Police have her 22-year-old cousin Kevin Buehler in custody charged with child abuse resulting in death. On Tuesday, 13-year-old Derek Gonzales was accidentally shot in the face allegedly by his brother. The 14-year-old is in custody. The link between both cases is that both victims were in the care of family members after being removed from their homes by DSS.
Foster care leaders in Pueblo say though it's easy to blame the system in circumstances like these it is not broken. Placing youth with family members, or kinship care, almost always takes top priority over foster care because it's an environment the kids are more familiar with.
"When something does happen we all get very concerned of course but I think the best efforts are being implemented," said Shannon Richter of Journeys, Inc. "We're a lot better than we used to be."
Journeys has been in Pueblo for five years. Before starting her own foster placement agency, Richter was the director of the Child Advocacy Center. She says the need for foster and kinship care has remained a constant over that time with between 400 and 500 kids moving through the system in Pueblo every year. She says some have bad attitudes but you have to understand the situations that prompt the need for temporary care.
"These kids have been hurt and this is their defense mechanism," said Richter.
She says to become a foster parent you have to go through a background check and be trained up to state standards. Richter wouldn't say if there are different standards for kinship care but says she is encouraged by a new task force in development at the state level to oversee child protective services.
"I think things need to be looked at a lot more carefully by the state and overseeing other individuals," said Richter.
Criticism has come from outside of Colorado's borders. In a 2003 report by the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform the director blasted the state's system for taking kids out of their homes.
Richard Wexler, Executive Director of the NCCPR, notes that Colorado is too quick to pull at risk youth from their homes. The figures he cites from six years ago puts Colorado in the top ten in terms of states rushing to act. He writes: Often, a family's poverty is confused with "neglect."
Richter says in her experience the system does more good than harm. She says more exposure to the issue of child abuse has kept the need for child protective services strong in Colorado.
"Everybody thinks child abuse is growing but I think there are more people reporting it," said Richter. She believes there are less cases of families just sweeping abuse under the rug or hiding a problem to protect relatives.
She also says it's hard to group the entire state together in terms of evaluation. Her argument is that every county is different in it's standards for removing a child from it's home. In her mind, today's focus should be on providing enough quality homes for kids in need.
"We're always looking for good people to help these kids," said Richter. Of foster parents she says, "they're planting a seed and we've had some kids come back to foster parents and say this is what I learned while I was staying here."
