The state agency responsible for keeping Illinois' most vulnerable children safe has failed to produce legally required public reports after examining what went wrong in hundreds of cases of child deaths and thousands of serious injuries, the Illinois Answers Project reports.
More than 1,200 deaths and more than 3,000 other cases of serious injury have met the criteria for incident-specific reports since July 2018, according to data DCFS provided under an open records request. The case-specific reports are required when a child dies by suspected abuse or neglect, or dies or suffers a serious injury when they are in the state's care.
The failure spurred blistering criticism from child welfare advocates and prompted the Cook County public guardian to call for an investigation.
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, who sponsored the legislation requiring the reports in the late 1990s when he was a state lawmaker, called the failure "reckless."
"To know that they aren't even issuing the reports … is stunning, stunning. Just so reckless. So irresponsible," Dart said.
"You know what, we're all busy. So don't give me your story. … I can't conceive of any scenario where this isn't at the front of people's lists, you know, we have a child in our care that died. What happened?"
The reports are required by the state's Abused and Neglected Child Reporting Act, providing the framework for the system of investigating abuse and neglect of children. The portion of the law regarding the reports went into effect in 1997. State lawmakers added language to strengthen the public disclosure of the reports in 2008.
"There shall be a presumption that the best interest of the public will be served by public disclosure of certain information concerning the circumstances of the investigations of the death," according to the law, which later states the agency "shall" release the reports to the public with some permitted redactions.
DCFS said in a statement that other reports that the agency prepares satisfy legal requirements but declined to answer additional questions from Illinois Answers or to comment on the call for investigations.
Heather Tarczan, a spokeswoman for DCFS, declined to answer most questions about the death-and-injury reports. It's not clear when the agency last completed one of the legally required incident-specific reports. An open records request for the agency's most recent report — whenever it was completed — was denied, with DCFS saying no reports exist. The agency fought in instances for months on releasing any records or acknowledging that the reports don't exist.
DCFS says it does conduct reviews when deaths or serious injuries happen. But there's little recourse for the public to learn the results, since state law forbids the release of most child welfare records to protect the privacy of children and families who are investigated or who get help from the state. The reports that DCFS has failed to produce are meant to give public officials insight into what may have gone wrong.
