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The sad saga unfolding at Luzerne County Children and Youth, though still under extensive investigation, troubles greatly. And while the biggest concern rightly is how the local agency came to allegedly ignore hundreds of reports of child abuse and cover it all up with false reports, investigators must not fail to see the proverbial forest for the trees.

To put it bluntly, if all the allegations are true, there seems to be a broader systemic failure stretching beyond the county agency.

To recap:

Then-Luzerne County Children and Youth director Joanne Van Saun resigned July 1 and was arraigned five days later in Harrisburg on charges of endangering the welfare of children and obstruction in child abuse cases. The charges were brought by the state Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s office, giving them considerable heft from the start.

And the charges are grim. Shapiro accused Saun of directing employees to falsely terminate reports of child abuse and neglect. Specifically, he contends that in May of 2017 she directed employees to terminate at least 217 reports of child abuse and neglect received through the state ChildLine System, a mandated statewide program that receives reports at the state level and transmits them to appropriate agencies for investigations.

“Under pressure from the reports of huge numbers of ChildLine reports in backlog status, Van Saun came up with a plan to eliminate the backlog without doing any investigation into whether any of the reports required further action to protect the children,” Shapiro said.

To quote staff writer Jennifer Learn Andes’ report on the arraignment, “Instead of taking the proper time to evaluate or investigate each referral, (Saun) directed her employees to eradicate the backlog, known as a ‘screen out,’ (Shapiro) said. County Children and Youth secretaries submitted 217 screen outs on May 2017, even though these workers did not have legal authority or proper training to make that decision, he said.”

If true, that’s a stunning amount of willful neglect of duty from an agency that investigates neglect of children.

Response so far has been swift and seems appropriate. Along with charges against Saun, three former LCCY staff members agreed not to serve in any position where they would be a mandated reporter of potential abuse or neglect until at least 2025. The State Department of Human Services, which licenses such county agencies, promptly launched an investigation and promised appropriate corrective action.

And the county’s Acting Manager, Romilda Crocamo, hired a Philadelphia-based law firm with a solid record dealing with similar issues to conduct an internal review.

All good steps, but there is one more we think should be taken: Figure out why it took four years from commission of the alleged misconduct to the filing of charges and related actions. The sheer number of reports involved in such a short time span seems like it should have sent up a red flag as soon as it happened.

While it’s important to find out what happened at the county level and how to prevent a recurrence in the future, it may prove equally important to look into the entire state method of tracking county level performance and detecting failures and shortcomings quickly. In dealing with reports of abused or neglected children, the one thing the youngsters do not have is time.

— Times Leader