Child welfare agency leader accused of falsely ending cases
HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania (AP) – The head of a county child welfare agency in northeastern Pennsylvania was charged Tuesday with ordering workers to falsely shut down files on allegations of child abuse and neglect in response to public reports of a significant backlog of cases.
The attorney general’s office accused Joanne G. Van Saun, 58, of Dallas, Pennsylvania, of endangering and disabling children for stopping investigations to clear the backlog at Lucerne County Child and Youth Welfare Services. On Friday, she resigned from her position as agency manager.
Van Saun’s attorney Patrick A. Casey declined to comment.
In court documents, investigators said Van Saun set up a team led by three senior aides to clear a backlog of nearly 1,400 cases reported by The Citizens’ Voice of Wilkes-Barre in 2017.
“Van Saun told the three leaders that she wanted to clear the backlog immediately and that she did not care how they did it,” read the likely affidavit with which she was charged. Investigators said people who worked under Van Saun described them as a tyrant and a tyrant.
Authorities claim that in May 2017, more than 200 state-run ChildLine hotline transfers were improperly terminated by employees on their instructions, including reports of a child who went to school hungry, a child who burned his face as his mother threw a cigarette out of a car window, an adult telling children to kill themselves and a forty-five pound child who is still wearing a diaper.
One case was a kid who walked up to someone at a high school football game and said, “Please kidnap me, I don’t want to go home,” and grabbed the person by the waist.
These and other ChildLine recommendations were cut short by secretaries of the Lucerne Child and Youth Service – the agency used the term “hidden” – who falsely stated that they “alleged no abuse or neglect,” the prosecutor wrote.
“By ordering the summary deletion on screen from these transfers, Van Saun put the well-being of the children in direct danger,” the affidavit says.
Van Saun was charged Tuesday by a Harrisburg district judge with $ 100,000 on unsecured bail. A trial date was set on September 9th.
According to the public prosecutor’s office, three other former employees of the Lucerne Child and Youth Service who were involved in the deletion of the cases have agreed not to take on a position in which they are obliged to report alleged child abuse until at least 2025. You have not been charged.
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