A review of the way Chautauqua County’s Child Protective Services unit works should be undertaken.

But we’re not sure the review that should be undertaken is the one that is being proposed by legislator Susan Parker, D-Fredonia. During the June Human Services Committee meeting, Parker referenced specifically complaints made by CPS employees. Often times, the workers say they don’t feel safe when going into some of the homes of children they’re trying to help. They have asked for more hours each week and they have said case backlogs are too high.

Those are important issues, but we’re not sure it necessarily requires a special committee. We wonder if the legislature needs to be involved at all, while also wondering if the executive branch and department heads should be able to deal with such management-related issues.

What’s more,. the workers’ complaints are worth talking about, but to us that’s something the legislature’s existing Human Services Committee can deal with. After all, the special committee includes three-fifths of the Human Services Committee – it’s not as if we’re bringing in legislators from other committees with an interest in the issue to serve.

More importantly, we question the proposed special committee’s scope. We’ve all heard the criticisms of Child Protective Services. We’ve heard questions about the cases that are taken and the cases that are turned away. We’ve heard the questions about children that haven’t been removed from situations that many of us find shocking. We’ve heard the stories of children removed from homes that don’t seem nearly as bad as others. There are, frankly, a lot of questions people have about the process that are worth examining with an eye toward helping children and the community at large.

If Chautauqua County legislators want to dabble in Child Protective Services, our advice is to dive in to the deep end of the pool rather than paddle around in the shallows. A study aimed at helping children is far preferable to dealing solely with worker complaints.

We have knowledge of very specific situations, from people of accountability, that have been involved in situations where CPS has said there is nothing they can do. Often these are the very situations where their help seems to be needed the most. We also know of other situations where it seems they overreact in what can seem an attempt to pump up case and response numbers.

There seems, at times, to be a serious communication gap and lack of consistency in judgment. It needs to be fixed.