Courtesy Second Look Commission

Tennessee’s child protection agency is struggling to keep up with child abuse investigations, and caseworkers have been challenged by a growing number of children entering foster care.

Now a new report from a watchdog group finds that an abnormally high number of vulnerable children died after their families had come to the attention of the Department of Children’s Services.

Those incidents — when abuse happens within a home where problems had already been documented — draw special attention from the Second Look Commission. State lawmakers created the group in 2011 to closely scrutinize decision-making by DCS and other child protection agencies.

The commission’s latest report finds that in the most recent fiscal year, from mid 2021 to mid 2022, seven Tennessee children died after DCS had documented prior abuse. That’s the most in any year since 2014.

“We knew something happened. And we intervened, and it still happened again. And so that really becomes our responsibility to fix that challenge,” says Kylie Graves, the commission’s director. “One of the greatest responsibilities that we have as a state is to protect children.”

Since 2013, 37 Tennessee children have died after investigators became involved with a family.

The commission does not disclose many specifics about incidents, but does pinpoint concerns. In one fatality, DCS and police failed to grasp the severity of a child’s medical condition. In another, a family wasn’t following court orders but was allowed to keep custody, leading to a child’s death.

The commission also examines non-fatal cases in which children experienced severe abuse more than once. There were 569 children in that situation in the latest year.

The group had been seeing an “encouraging” decline in those incidents before the coronavirus pandemic, Graves says.

“We really saw that uptick and increase,” she says.

Second Look is also flagging concerns about district attorneys, many of whom haven’t been filing statistics about child abuse that are mandated by state law. The commission wants to see data compliance improve, and the group recommends that every county dedicate one specially trained prosecutor to child abuse. They’ll be asking state lawmakers to fund research into the needs of district attorneys.