Child abuse and intervention

When a child dies, it's tragic. When a child is slain, it's horrific.

It doesn't matter whether such senseless violence happens on the unfathomable scale we saw last week in Connecticut, or whether a single child dies far away from television cameras and national attention, as 7-year-old Las Vegas resident Roderick "RJ" Arrington did last month. There is shock. There is anger. There is grasping for understanding. And there are demands for accountability and action to try to stop it from ever happening again.

RJ's death struck a chord in Southern Nevada because the system in place to protect him failed.

On Nov. 28, according to Las Vegas police, RJ went to school the day after being beaten by his stepfather, 34-year-old Markiece Palmer, for lying about reading a Bible verse. The administration at Roundy Elementary School suspected abuse and called the Department of Family Services hotline. However, the social workers, who handle about 3,000 calls of suspected abuse each month, didn't respond to the call.

So RJ was sent home. Hours later, police said, he was whipped and beaten into a coma by Palmer. He was hospitalized the next morning with severe brain swelling and died Nov. 30.

"I want answers. I don't want to let this die," George Roach, RJ's paternal grandfather, told the Review-Journal last week from his Bloomington, Ill., home. "If a teacher had responded the right way, he would have never gotten killed."

But what exactly represents "the right way" is subject to debate. Yes, teachers and school employees are mandatory reporters, meaning they are required by law to report suspicions of abuse to authorities. And that's precisely what happened. Las Vegas police concluded school officials met their legal obligations in calling the child abuse hotline.

In an April 20 memo, Superintendent Dwight Jones encouraged principals to call district police if child welfare officials aren't responsive to abuse suspicions. "School police officers are more accessible to take these reports," Mr. Jones wrote. The school district and Family Services officials are reviewing their protocols to determine whether more could have been done to save RJ.

Educators are not investigators. And they're not judges. The child welfare system already possesses sweeping powers to revoke custody of children and place them in foster care, and educators face increasing responsibilities and pressures in delivering social services to children. Giving teachers and principals the power to keep children from their families is not a viable option.

It goes without saying that if school officials believed RJ's life was in danger, they would have done whatever they could to protect him. But no one could have predicted RJ would be mortally wounded hours after leaving school that day.

Ultimately, we rely on people in positions of trust to make informed judgments. Tragically, sometimes they're wrong, even when they're right. Tragically, sometimes there are no answers that make sense of it all.