Robert L. Matthews stepped down from his post as the director of the Child and Family Services Agency last month. Matthews led the child welfare agency with a checkered history for the past three years. His chief of staff, Tanya Torres Trice, will take over as the interim director as the search for a permanent leader is underway.
“CFSA, thank you for an incredible 11 years,” Matthews says in a video announcing his departure. “I thank you more that I’m able to leave on my own terms, and that I’m able to leave feeling happy and blessed to have served as your director.”
Matthews says he will be the inaugural chief program officer at Think of Us, a nonprofit that focuses on foster care.
Matthews took over CFSA in 2021, after the agency settled a lawsuit that spanned 30 years and six mayoral administrations. During the case, CFSA was under court-appointed monitoring, and, for a time, under receivership.
In 1989, civil rights attorneys filed LaShawn v. Marion Barry (the case name was updated with each administration) over allegations of mismanagement, a lack of mental health services for kids, and neglect in D.C.’s foster care system. A judge said the system was in “shambles” and ordered a complete overhaul. As the case lingered in the court system for decades, and the District failed to make improvements, a judge took the drastic step of appointing a receiver.
Receivership ended in 2001 when the District agreed to implement several reforms, including designating CFSA as an cabinet-level agency that reports directly to the mayor.
But in 2008, investigations revealed that alerts of abuse and neglect to the CFSA went uninvestigated in several instances before children were found dead—including the four kids killed in the Banita Jacks tragedy after CFSA employees did not respond properly to warnings.
CFSA finally settled the class action LaShawn lawsuit under former Director Brenda Donald, though, as City Paper previously reported, several employees believe the agency cut corners in order to get out from under court supervision.
Matthews officially took over as director of CFSA in 2021 after serving as a deputy director. As director, Matthews prioritized kinship care, where children and youths go to live with relatives when their home environment is unsafe, rather than entering the formal foster system. In his exit video, Matthews said he led the agency to a kin-first model.
The agency decreased its reliance on the foster care system from 1,024 youths in 2013 to 427 in 2022. Part of the decline is due to CFSA’s increased referrals to other agencies substantiating fewer investigations.
According to the CFSA public dashboard, from 2022 to 2023, the agency received 30,000 calls, 30 percent of which were screened out, meaning callers were referred to another agency or CFSA took no further action. Total hotline calls increased by nearly 4,000 in 2023, but the number of substantiated claims of abuse or neglect and investigations decreased. In 2023, 70 percent of referrals from other agencies were screened out as well, and hotline staff substantiated fewer referrals despite receiving approximately 4,000 more referral calls than the previous year.
The raw numbers, however, do not show whether a case was closed too early or if a call should have been substantiated when it was not. A court monitor and the agency’s ombudsman have revealed that CFSA manipulated caseload data to make the agency appear that it was making progress toward exiting the class action lawsuit.
DC KinCare Alliance Director Marla Spindel says the way CFSA has conducted its kinship care model is problematic. Although kinship parents meet all the licensing requirements to become foster parents, CFSA has told relatives that if they don’t take care of a child informally, the child would go to foster care with a stranger. This practice is known as “hidden foster care,” and it allows agencies to skirt their obligations by not providing financial assistance to these caregivers. Spindel says kin caregivers are at risk of homelessness because of it.
“It doesn’t ensure the safety of the child,” Spindel says. “They’re just, in our view, trying to shirk their responsibility to make sure these children are safe. When they’re sending them to live with other people other than their parents, they [should] make sure that that’s a successful arrangement.”
DC KinCare Alliance filed eight federal lawsuits—including two in July alone—against the agency. The cases argue that instead of removing children from neglectful or abusive households and placing them in foster care, the agency placed them with relative caregivers without giving them the option to become licensed foster parents.
Spindel feels that the agency hasn’t improved under Matthews’ leadership.
“We find he uses a lot of rhetoric about doing right by families, but in our experience dealing with him, we haven’t found them to be keeping families together or providing the support services needed to keep families together,” she says.