Jackie Wright used to love her job. 

In more than 33 years working in various roles for D.C.’s youth probation agency, formally known as the Family Court Social Services Division, she formed bonds with many of the kids in her care. Wright remembers telling them: “Don’t let these glasses and pearls fool you.” She was born and raised in Anacostia. She knew what it was like to grow up in Southeast, as so many of the children involved in D.C.’s juvenile justice system have. She valued the chance to show them that it was possible to go to college and get a good job like hers.

“Those babies are our kids,” says Wright, who rose through the ranks to become the agency’s associate deputy director before retiring at the end of last year. “They’re my kids. I’m born and raised in D.C. Those are my children.”

But Wright has become disgusted with her former employer over the past few years, and she is not alone. 

At its best, the agency could be a place to catch kids before they’re sucked into the city’s criminal justice vortex: CSSD, as it’s commonly known, is housed within the District’s family court and largely works with children who have been accused of crimes but not yet convicted. If a teen gets charged with some sort of offense, from a shoplifting to a shooting, they’ll work with a CSSD probation officer to make sure they’re staying out of trouble as their case gets resolved, or maybe they’ll find a diversion program to avoid incarceration entirely. Circumstances get a lot more serious when they’re convicted and handed over to D.C.’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services, which oversees kids held in secure facilities such as the Youth Services Center in Northeast.

Yet current and former employees, attorneys representing children, and other advocates throughout the District’s legal system tell City Paper that CSSD has been trapped in a downward spiral for years. At a time when youth violence is spiking, the agency is failing at its basic mission. Many probation officers aren’t effectively keeping track of kids under their supervision. The agency’s programs for mentoring and tutoring kids to keep them out of trouble aren’t working. And all too often, the kids under CSSD’s management are arrested for new crimes; a handful have been killed.

“We’re not helping these kids,” says a current CSSD probation officer, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal from their employer. “We say we’re helping these kids and people expect these kids to be helped. But we’re part of the problem.”

The agency’s staff attributes some of these problems to CSSD management, chiefly Director Terri Odom. In 2021, a majority of CSSD’s 138 employees penned a scathing 15-page “letter of no confidence” to Odom’s superiors outlining many of these problems. The letter, which was initially reported by a local blogger, describes rampant staff turnover amid what the employees say is ineffective, often retaliatory management by Odom.

Several ex-staffers, including Wright, have filed employment lawsuits making similar claims over the past few years. In one instance, a former CSSD employee claimed staff raised concerns about an outside contractor acting inappropriately with a 14-year-old girl, only to be ignored. They claimed they were then retaliated against after the man was charged with sexually abusing the girl and prosecutors began seeking CSSD’s cooperation on the case. Another former employee claims Odom also helped scuttle the staff’s attempts to unionize. 

Employees’ complaints date back as far as 2009, according to correspondence forwarded to City Paper, a few years after Odom was tapped by court management to lead the agency.

“We always compared it to a Donald Trump-like situation, where there’s a lot of chaos, but nothing is getting done,” says a former CSSD probation officer, who worked for the agency for more than two decades and requested anonymity to protect their future job prospects. “How can you be providing quality work when all your focus is on writing up staff, suspending staff, firing staff?”

Yet some observers caution that there are more systemic factors undermining CSSD. D.C. has no control over its local court system after handing those responsibilities to the federal government three decades ago. It’s up to a disinterested Congress to oversee the agency. The courts release precious little data about what becomes of the kids CSSD supervises or how its programs are working, but it’s not as if the District could even use that information to implement any changes. As all of the city’s officials and leaders have been trying to work together to tackle troubling crime trends among kids, CSSD remains a black box. “Our director does not play well with anyone,” Wright says.

But the agency doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Lawyers and other experts studying D.C.’s juvenile justice system believe the District government deserves plenty of blame as well for the rise in youth crime. If the city can’t manage to keep kids in school or offer them mental health resources, for instance, CSSD can only do so much to help.

“The struggles we are seeing in our city right now are not just at that implementation level, but really at the systemic level,” says Eduardo Ferrer, policy director of Georgetown University’s Juvenile Justice Initiative and an attorney who works with kids in D.C. courts. “It’s the lack of planning, the lack of coordination, and the lack of cohesion.”

A D.C. courts spokesperson would not make Odom available for an interview, and would not answer detailed questions provided by City Paper. But most people working on this issue who spoke with City Paper agree: CSSD is not the only reason kids are committing more crimes (or falling victim to them), but the agency certainly isn’t making things better.

“The longer this goes on, you’re going to continue to lose kids,” Wright says. “Parents are going to be burying their kids.”

“They are just failing kids and families.”

Data from the city’s Criminal Justice Coordinating Council shows that 19 percent of all kids under pretrial supervision last year were arrested again while CSSD was tracking them; by comparison, just 8 percent of adults who are monitored by a different agency were arrested before trial in 2023. Nearly half of the kids re-arrested were apprehended multiple times, the CJCC found. 

There is virtually no data detailing how many children overseen by CSSD (either pretrial or on probation) are subsequently convicted and committed to DYRS facilities, but most observers believe CSSD is simply funneling these kids into the city’s carceral facilities instead of actually making a difference in their lives. Between Jan. 1, 2015, and May 31, 2024, 44 percent of all kids arrested and supervised by CSSD were subsequently arrested again, according to data provided by the court. 

“They are just failing kids and families,” says Penelope Spain, co-founder and CEO of Open City Advocates, a nonprofit representing young people involved in the justice system. “They are really missing an opportunity for early intervention with these kids.”

When a kid is arrested and charged with something like carjacking (an occurrence that has become increasingly common in D.C. over the past year-and-a-half), Court Social Services’ work begins.

First, the agency has to evaluate how much of a risk the teen represents to public safety if they’re sent to await trial at home. If the alleged offense is especially egregious or if the kid has been arrested before, CSSD can ask that they be held in the Youth Services Center, essentially D.C.’s jail for kids, until their case is resolved. It’s up to a judge to agree to hold them, as one did in the case of the 12-year-old boy accused of trying to carjack an off-duty U.S. Marshal last October.

But if the teen is allowed to return home, CSSD’s probation officers are in charge of making sure they stay out of trouble. Depending on what a judge orders, “POs” are responsible for ensuring kids are home in time for curfew, attending school, and showing up for all their court dates. For instance, Vernard Toney Jr., the 13-year-old killed during that same attempted carjacking of the Marshal, was supposed to abide by an 8 p.m. curfew in connection with prior carjacking and robbery charges. The off-duty Marshal, who worked as a court security officer, shot and killed Toney around 10 p.m.

Judges also often order that kids wear electronic monitors to ensure they’re staying away from places where they’ve gotten into trouble in the past, and CSSD is responsible for watching their movements. In some cases, the court could also recommend a teen attend CSSD-run after-school programs while their case plays out, normally located at the agency’s six “Balanced and Restorative Justice Centers.”

After a few months, a teen facing charges could work out a deal with the Office of the Attorney General to avoid a criminal conviction in exchange for doing community service or counseling via a diversion program. Or if the teen is convicted, they might be sentenced to probation if it’s their first offense. In both cases, CSSD is responsible for monitoring the juvenile and making sure they comply with the conditions laid out by the court and the OAG.

Last year, the family court wrote in its annual report to Congress that CSSD supervised a total of 1,196 kids (with an average of 550 to 575 under its management each day). This amounts to roughly three-quarters of all kids involved in the juvenile justice system—by contrast, DYRS oversaw an average of about 150 juveniles each day in 2023.

“I loved my job. I just hated who I worked for.”

People inside and outside the agency say CSSD is having problems with nearly every element of its aforementioned responsibilities. Yet current and former CSSD employees feel pessimistic that anyone with the power to force changes will actually do so, after they say their complaints about Odom have gone unaddressed for years. 

“Morale is terrible within the division,” says the current probation officer. 

Staff wrote an anonymous email raising many of these issues with the chief judge of the D.C. Superior Court back in 2009, according to correspondence reviewed by City Paper. A group of parole officers also wrote another anonymous email to family court judges and other support staff in 2015 claiming that “Court Social Services currently endorses a model that is highly discouraged by criminal justice professionals,” among other complaints. And the 2021 letter of no confidence was addressed to the Clerk of the Superior Court Zabrina Dempson, Odom’s direct superior, and circulated widely among judges and the legal community. In each instance, Wright says, the court’s management has pledged action, but little has changed.

“Why has she been allowed to get away with this for so long?” Wright says of Odom. “I loved my job. I just hated who I worked for.”

Several CSSD staffers have escalated these complaints into employment lawsuits in recent years, including two employees—Denise Tennant and Monica Mapp—who won settlements. Wright’s case, which she first filed back in 2016, is still ongoing.

The specifics vary for each suit, but many of the complaints about CSSD management are the same. Tennant claimed in her 2019 lawsuit, for instance, that Odom “harbors a deep-seated animus toward CSSD employees that exercise their rights” under various federal civil rights laws, allegations echoed by Mapp and Wright. (The D.C. government, which represents the courts in such cases even as it does not control their operations, denied wrongdoing in legal filings.)

“Many employees have incurred mental and physical health conditions as a result of working in a toxic and hostile environment,” the employees wrote in the 2021 no-confidence letter. “This division has been big on bullying and intimidation while fostering a culture of fear of retaliation.”

Tennant’s case, which she settled in February, had the added dimension of describing Odom’s handling of the 2018 sex abuse charges against Anthony Brooks, a tutor at one of the Balanced and Restorative Justice Centers, known as BARJs.

Then a probation officer, Tennant claims in the suit that she and a colleague first reported concerns about Brooks’ behavior with his pupils in 2016, but were roundly ignored. Her colleague was even demoted, Tennant alleges. 

By 2017, prosecutors claimed that Brooks, then 28 years old, began exchanging sexually explicit messages with a 14-year-old girl he met through the BARJ program. He later secured permission from the girl’s father to tutor her on his own time, repeatedly driving her to his home in Maryland to have sex with her, according to the United States Attorney’s Office for D.C.

Police arrested Brooks not long after the girl’s father discovered the explicit messages in September 2017. Yet “after Brooks was charged, Ms. Odom directed Plaintiff and other CSSD employees not to voluntarily cooperate with the Assistant United States Attorneys” working on the case, Tennant wrote in her suit. Federal prosecutors ended up subpoenaing Tennant and her colleagues to compel their cooperation, yet “Odom angrily told [Tennant] that she did not like how [Tennant] had handled the situation and directed her to report to the court’s general counsel’s office the next day to provide a full accounting of the information that she had provided,” according to the suit. (Brooks ultimately pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.)

Tennant’s lawsuit claimed that these disputes, in addition to several others related to her assorted medical conditions, contributed to her improper firing in 2018. Another factor not raised in the suit, but proffered by the former probation officer who spoke with City Paper: Tennant was one of the leaders behind efforts to unionize the agency. The court’s unusual quasi-federal status made the union drive difficult for other reasons, the PO says, but management’s response to this push certainly didn’t help matters.

Tennant’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment; a federal judge denied the District’s attempts to get some of her allegations tossed out of court in August 2023, and she settled just as the case neared a trial.

The 2021 no-confidence letter described the agency’s turnover rate as “its highest in over 30 years” due to these sorts of disputes, noting that Odom has had six deputy directors in the past 12 years. Wright says two of her other former colleagues left in the past few months alone. 

That’s not to say it is impossible to do good work at the agency. Ferrer says some probation officers working at CSSD go above and beyond their narrow duties to make sure kids are connected to other city services if they appear to be struggling. But many others don’t have that same commitment, and the system isn’t set up to incentivize that behavior.

Wright chalks some of this up to Odom’s relaxation of hiring standards over the years as the agency has faced the same sort of staffing crunch confronting other public safety agencies. “We are the only child servicing agency in D.C. that does not require case managers to be licensed social workers,” she says, noting that the agency only requires a bachelor’s degree for these roles. The current and former probation officers who spoke with City Paper agree, pointing out that CSSD used to require much more experience working with kids when they were first hired two decades ago.

“You could have a bachelor’s in basket weaving, but as long as you have a bachelor’s degree, you can get a job,” Wright says. “And if you know somebody, you can definitely get a job.”

The ex-employees believe this erosion in standards has had serious consequences. Not only are POs less skilled in working with troubled kids or resolving conflicts among them, but they are increasingly failing at the very basic parts of the job. For instance, staff who sent the 2021 no-confidence letter wrote that “it is rare to have more than fifty to sixty percent of the youth present” when officers conduct curfew checks at their homes. Nevertheless, kids rarely face consequences when they aren’t at home, current and former employees say. Essentially, the agency doesn’t know where many of its charges have gone at any given time. 

There’s some dispute among staff about whether these home visits are really effective (or could more easily be achieved via video conferencing). But Odom seems determined to keep sending POs out to do these checks anyway, even though many have complained that they feel unsafe conducting unannounced visits late at night. “It just became this whole cookie-cutter approach” when Odom took over, says the former parole officer. “It was like, what’s good for one kid is good for all of them.”

Locked into locking up

Without much individualized thinking, attorneys who work with kids accused of crimes say the agency is increasingly recommending in court that they be held in detention ahead of trial. Judges have the final say, but CSSD’s recommendations are increasingly resulting in more kids packed into the youth jail.

Data from YSC’s independent oversight agency shows a steady climb in the number of kids held in secure detention since it began tracking the statistic in August 2021. Back then, only a dozen or so juveniles were held at the YSC before trial each day. The agency reported a high of 57 kids in secure detention in October 2023. There’s been a slight decline in the months since, but the number has hovered around 45 kids each day so far this year, equivalent to roughly half of the YSC’s total capacity.

“There should be a balance between kids who need high-level intense supervision and kids who are generally doing well but just happened to get caught up in something,” says Julie Swaney, an attorney who often works in D.C.’s juvenile justice system. “I don’t think that Court Social Services is making that distinction right now. I think they’re sort of painting with a broad brush, because, frankly, they’re afraid of being in the paper.”

Wright remembers Odom expressing exactly that concern with some frequency. “‘Cover your ass,’ was basically her motto,” Wright says. “She wanted to make sure that it passed the Washington Post test, that something didn’t end up in the paper.”

Mayor Muriel Bowser has not been shy about slamming the courts for what she views as an overly lenient approach—like when she blamed a judge last year for releasing a girl charged with several robberies who would go on to be accused of another carjacking. But many observers also believe this preference for detention is baked into the algorithmic risk assessment tool that the agency uses to determine each child’s likelihood of committing another crime or failing to show up to court. (CSSD appears to have its own questions about this algorithm. The agency says in its annual report that it hired a nonprofit to run a three-year review to “determine if the assessment should be changed or replaced.”)

But a bias toward detention has all sorts of downstream consequences.

For one thing, more kids held ahead of trial increases the workload on the city’s already overcrowded secure facilities. (The judge in the case that so incensed Bowser only released the teen because the District didn’t have room to hold her before trial.) DYRS leaders and the union representing its correctional officers have frequently complained about a lack of staff to manage increased workloads, which many advocates believe leads to more violence at the facility. 

And then there’s the impact on the kids themselves to consider. The teens held at YSC are not only kept away from their families, but they’re also increasingly confined to their cells and unable to receive the services that could result in meaningful changes in their lives. Nate Balis, the director of the juvenile justice strategy group at the Annie E. Casey Foundation and a veteran of DYRS, notes that the data is clear on the effects of detention: “Kids are more likely, not less likely, to be arrested when they get out.”

“We should never be casual with our use of detention,” Balis says. “And if young people are detained, we should be working every day to figure out how we can get them out.”

Who monitors the monitors?

Circumstances aren’t much better at CSSD when kids are allowed home before trial. The agency’s use of electronic GPS monitoring, in particular, has frequently attracted complaints. 

An ankle monitor can make sense for some kids, ex-CSSD staffers say, but the agency has increasingly been asking the court to use the monitors for a large majority of teens under its supervision. The data bears this trend out, as the court reported a 34 percent increase in the use of electronic monitoring last year. 

But the tactic is hardly a silver bullet for keeping kids away from neighborhoods where they could lapse back into bad behavior, largely due to CSSD’s own failings. For one thing, the division of the agency that tracks the location of kids wearing the devices doesn’t work around the clock. 

Former employees say active ankle monitors generally aren’t tracked overnight or on weekends, even though those are the times kids are most likely to leave the house and get in trouble. For instance, in the high-profile shooting of Commanders running back Brian Robinson, investigators found that a 16-year-old involved in the incident was previously sentenced to wear an ankle monitor, but cut it off several months earlier; no one noticed until he was arrested again on different charges.

“The most that will happen is they’ll email the PO that an alert has gone off,” Wright says. “But if it’s the weekend, the probation officer, nine times out of 10, is not going to look at their email, and nothing’s going to be done.”

The Washington Post found that five children wearing the monitors were killed during a six-week period last year. It’s possible that more have been killed, injured, or involved in additional crimes, but the entities that maintain this data would not release it. D.C.’s deputy mayor for public safety and justice didn’t respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for the city’s Criminal Justice Coordinating Council said it could only share this information with permission from the court, and the court spokesperson did not provide it to City Paper.

But there’s no point in tracking the location of these monitors if they aren’t actually working, and that’s another problem for CSSD. The kids wearing the devices are responsible for charging them, and sometimes they simply don’t. “These kids know this. They’re savvy enough to know how it works and what they can and can’t get away with,” Wright says. 

But attorneys caution that even well-intentioned kids can get tripped up by these devices. They can’t take them off, even to charge them, so that means sitting by an outlet for a couple hours to make sure the monitors have enough juice. A difficult home life or inconsistent access to electricity can add layers of difficulty. Some officers aren’t sympathetic if a kid has an after-school job that keeps them from charging the monitor and will report these instances as violations to the court.

“I have three kids myself, so I know: Kids break things all the time,” says Will Mount, an attorney who works with juvenile clients. “They’re just playing basketball or some other sport, and it breaks. And, in my experience, [CSSD] has been very slow to replace these monitors. Sometimes they don’t even have enough monitors, but the court has ordered they have to wear one, so it’s a sort of de facto violation.”

Baffling BARJ

Another CSSD tactic to keep track of kids under its supervision—required attendance to its after-school programs—is highly ineffective, staffers and other observers say.

These programs are largely held at the agency’s Balanced and Restorative Justice Centers—which first opened at six locations around the city in 2007, not long after Odom’s hiring as CSSD director—are staffed by a mix of probation officers and private contractors offering tutoring and mentoring services. Most look indistinguishable from any other retail storefront. They’re generally stocked with a few TVs and a kitchen to keep kids occupied.

But, in practice, ex-employees and attorneys alike describe the BARJs as glorified day care centers that kids frequently don’t bother to attend. “Each BARJ unit averages approximately five youth nightly, however the director purports that we serve hundreds of clients weekly,” the staffers wrote in the no-confidence letter, arguing the court is essentially wasting the roughly $2.3 million it spends to run the BARJs each year. Indeed, the court reported that only 519 children attended the BARJs in all of 2023—an increase from the year before. Wright, who spent years working at BARJs in Southeast and Southwest, estimated that she would work with only one or two kids a night in her tenure.

“While the District of Columbia finds itself in the midst of ever-increasing violence, specifically gun violence and armed carjackings, and the Mayor and MPD Chief have challenged CSSD’s responsibility, the focus of CSSD leadership remains increasing BARJ participant numbers,” the 2021 letter continued. The attorneys working with juveniles who spoke with City Paper agree they’ve seen a substantial increase in the number of clients ordered to attend the BARJs in recent years. 

“If a kid doesn’t have anything going on after school, I’m not saying BARJ is a bad program,” Mount says. “But all my kids have after-school athletics, or they have employment, they have different opportunities going on. So, it seems to me like this program should only be used when it’s truly needed.

The former probation officer says they saw many other good reasons why kids don’t show up to these centers. The BARJs often draw in kids from rival neighborhoods, prompting frequent fights at the centers, and the vendors and staff are often unprepared to handle the conflicts. (Tennant argued in her 2019 lawsuit that “there were no written policies, procedures, regulations, guidelines or protocols directing or defining how POs should handle situations involving aggressive and non-compliant juveniles” at the BARJs.) 

Plus, the former PO says many of the BARJs were often unsanitary and infested with various rodents and bugs. “These facilities are not upkept properly, the hot water temperature is insufficient for cleaning dishes appropriately,” the letter of no confidence adds. “The seasonings are expired and are still being used. The sponges and dish towels are filthy and there are no methods of properly sanitizing dishes and cleaning towels. The water is non-potable in the facilities.”

And for the kids who do attend, despite the conditions, there just isn’t much for them to do. The former PO recalls teens playing video games and eating snacks at the BARJs, rather than actually working on homework or with mentors to repair the harm they may have done in the community. Spain, the Open City Advocates head, called the centers “basically baby-sitting sites.”

“I don’t see any restorative justice happening there, there’s not even any real tutoring,” she says. “They warm a seat and get frustrated about being there, and then that escalates.”

Balis, who spent several years working at DYRS under then-Mayor Tony Williams, says the city offers a variety of well-regarded programs that involve families and incorporate restorative justice principles. But the kids supervised by DYRS are ones who have pleaded guilty or have been convicted of a crime, ensuring that they are now firmly ensconced in the criminal punishment system. If D.C. had control of CSSD, it could run those same programs with kids much earlier in the process and perhaps intervene in their lives sooner.

“All these programs are run in the city’s commitment agency, the one that is for kids who the court has decided can’t be on probation and need to be in detention, which is an extreme step in general,” Balis says. “Why would all these services be funded and operated by the agency that only works with the deepest end kids?”

Upstream changes?

Ferrer, the Georgetown professor, appreciates the arguments that CSSD could be doing more to help kids. He believes that children accused of crimes deserve resources, but he notes that there’s a litany of city services set up to help them before they ever encounter the court system. 

“The way that we can get better at addressing the root causes of delinquency system involvement is looking more upstream,” Ferrer says. “Why do we have a court doing human services functions? It just, on a systemic level, doesn’t make sense to me.”

He points to D.C.’s Department of Behavioral Health as a prime place for reformers to focus their attention. The agency operates the city’s inpatient psychiatric hospital at St. Elizabeths, but it also refers kids with mental health or substance abuse challenges to other community providers who might be able to help. Ideally, the agency would be able to work with the school system to offer assistance to troubled kids before they ever get arrested, or at least quickly refer them to doctors if they get a call from their parents looking for help. 

Yet Ferrer notes that the agency has seen a slow decline in its ability to respond quickly since the pandemic struck. Last year, DBH told the D.C. Council that it took an average of 46 days from when a child first had an intake visit with one of the agency’s partners to when they could receive an assessment of their behavioral health issues. In 2022, it took an average of 34 days to navigate that process. In 2021, it took 29 days. (A DBH spokesperson didn’t respond to requests for comment, but the agency wrote in its responses to Council questions that “several providers had staff turnover both on the leadership and clinician level which impacted capacity.”) Judges and parents have also complained about delays in the agency’s ability to complete court-ordered psychiatric evaluations of kids, which has held up many juvenile cases.

The school system has its own resources to bring to bear here, too. Yet D.C. Public Schools have had persistent problems hiring school psychologists and social workers over the past few years, and a 2023 Washington Teachers’ Union survey suggested that 71 percent of its members feel the school system doesn’t have enough counselors or support staff.

Then there’s DCPS’s well-publicized problems keeping kids in school to consider, as truancy has a clear connection to youth crime. Most kids who are frequently missing school aren’t committing crimes, necessarily, but most kids who are arrested also tend to miss school. And Ferrer believes the school system has never been adequately resourced to pull off the early interventions with struggling students that could make a difference—D.C. regulations call for schools to convene meetings with “student support teams” made up of guidance counselors, teachers, and parents when a kid has missed five days of class, but funding has never been set aside to make these meetings happen consistently.

Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen backed a bill this year that would address this problem specifically, requiring that schools hold these meetings and dedicating funding to help them do so. That legislation received a hearing amid consideration of several other bills aimed at reducing truancy, but the bulk of the focus has been on changing the city’s convoluted enforcement regime.

That’s a worthy goal, too, advocates for kids say, and it implicates both city agencies and CSSD. Currently, DCPS refers any high schooler with 15 or more unexcused absences to CSSD, which then evaluates whether to recommend that the attorney general’s office file misdemeanor charges against the teen. Even with more kids missing school, the agency has reported a steady decline in how many truancy cases it has referred to the AG for prosecution over the past decade. 

“Because it is a part of the court, it looks for prosecution-grade evidence which, in my view, is not what these referrals are about,” Council Chair Phil Mendelson said at a news conference in July. “And it’s hard on the school, so they have to document every effort at communication, they have to provide a lot of documentation, basically evidence, before the court will accept the case.”

Ferrer blames some of this on a lack of up-front work by schools to assemble documentation about unexcused absences before sending cases on to CSSD, but he also feels that the current enforcement process is a bit of a “bureaucratic nightmare.” That’s one reason why Bowser’s big truancy bill pulls the Department of Human Services into the process, seeking to get kids referred to the agency after they miss 10 days of school and then get them connected to services. Ferrer has quibbles with the details, but he fundamentally believes DHS is better positioned to address the “root causes” of truancy than the court, and the Council generally agrees. Lawmakers passed a pilot version of this new enforcement program into law earlier this month. 

“Right now, the way that the law is written, Court Social Services plays a simple triage function,” Paul Kihn, Bowser’s deputy mayor for education, told reporters in an April briefing. “They themselves don’t engage in programmatic referrals or doing engagement with families. And as we’re looking to streamline this process, and we’re now going to be referring those older students to DHS, we just don’t see the need for that kind of triage function in the system.”
These fixes to the truancy system might shift some of the burden away from CSSD, or improve processes upstream of its purview. But they fundamentally don’t do anything to address the myriad problems within the agency. Wright wonders if a more disruptive approach is required.

“If this is how we’re going to do it, then let’s just let the whole system go and give it back to D.C.,” she says. “It’s not working. It’s not functioning. And it’s really a disgrace. Someone should have to answer to the parents of those children."