This approach, called family preservation, has come under intense scrutiny since July, when a Madison mother was charged with killing her infant daughter. A county social worker had allowed the bruised infant to return home following a hospital visit about two weeks earlier.

A state review of the county's actions, expected any day, likely will push the case back into the headlines.

The case raised questions as to whether the county is doing enough to protect vulnerable children. Yet county officials say their confidence in their approach has not been shaken, and others say it would be unwise to read too much into one case, even a terribly tragic one.

"Fatalities are a lousy way to judge the performance of child welfare agencies," said Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform in Alexandria, Va. Deaths are rare enough that, for all but the largest jurisdictions, the number can rise and fall due to random chance, he said.

By the most common federal measure, Dane County removes children from their homes at rates lower than state and national averages. County officials say this speaks well of their approach — they are spending money on programs to keep families together, not tear them apart, they say.

But others say there is nothing inherently good or bad about removal rates and that the county's comparatively low removal rate isn't necessarily something to tout. It is better to err on the side of child safety, these people say, even if it means some families will be dismantled that could have been salvaged.

"This is a field where you have to decide which mistake you can live with," said Richard Gelles, dean of the University of Pennsylvania's school of social work. He thinks children too often are left in dangerous homes in this country.

A horrid aberration

Dane County officials say they know of no other county cases in at least 35 years in which a child died due to abuse or neglect during a child welfare investigation. They consider the July case — in which Ee Lee was charged with first-degree intentional homicide for allegedly killing her infant daughter, Anastasia — a horrid aberration.

"We do not jeopardize safety over family preservation," said Lynn Green, director of the Dane County Department of Human Services.

The county's own review of the July case concluded that its social worker followed all state statutes and had a safety plan in place that should have protected the child.

Ami Orlin, who oversees the county's child protective services (CPS) social workers, said there was a time decades ago when children were removed from their parents for reasons unrelated to safety. As the CPS field became more professional and standards tightened in the 1980s and 1990s, Dane County moved strongly toward trying to keep families together, she said.

"There's a real downside to removing a child from a home, and we will do everything we can to avoid that," Orlin said.

The family preservation philosophy dominates nationally, experts say, in no small part because the U.S. Constitution grants parents the right to raise their children without undue government interference.

"We will always leave some children in homes that are dangerous because of this, and there are always going to be some tragedies," Gelles said.

Federal law requires social workers to start planning for family reunification from the minute they remove a child. The federal government defines "removal" as any time a child is placed in foster care for more than 24 hours.

By this measure, Dane County removed 3.87 children per 1,000 children in the county in 2006. The state average was 4.28 and the national average 4.1.

County 'yanks kids'?

Wexler, whose organization promotes family preservation, does an additional calculation that compares removal rates based on the number of impoverished children. Because poverty is the single biggest contributor to child maltreatment, this is the only comparison that really comes close to calculating a county's propensity to remove children, Wexler argues.

By this measure, Dane County removes a lot more children than many other jurisdictions — 43 children per 1,000 impoverished children. The state average in 2006 was 27.9 and the national average 23.5.

Wexler contends this reflects poorly on Dane County and that it cannot legitimately claim a family preservation approach.

"It's a take-the-child-and-run county," he said.

Not suprisingly, this sentiment finds credence among some attorneys who represent parents in child welfare cases.

Ruth Westmont, a Madison lawyer who also has a social worker license, said the July fatality is sadly ironic because she thinks social workers here are often too quick to remove children.

"Dane County is known for yanking kids," she said.

Another Madison defense attorney, Yolanda Lehner, said the county "tends to be a little bit quick" to remove children, "but more than that, we don't return them when we should."

Others see the terrain much differently.

"I have never felt the county is quick to remove children from families," said Phyllis Schwahn, a Madison attorney who has represented the interests of children for almost 20 years as a court-appointed guardian ad litem. "I just don't think we remove children without cause."

Marc Herstand, executive director of the Wisconsin chapter of the National Association of Social Workers, said Dane County's human services department has a reputation for professionalism. "I have tremendous respect for them. They have excellent management and staff."

Dane County officials contend they remove children only when they can't control for safety. Even if some calculations show the county as having a high removal rate, the figures aren't at odds with a family preservation approach, they say.

"When we say we promote family integrity and do our best to keep children in their homes, that doesn't mean children won't be removed for the briefest of times," said Bob Lee, administrator of the county's Children, Youth and Families Division. "Once the kids are out, it becomes our objective to get them back with their families. I don't think those are contradictory concepts."

The county said it does not have readily available statistics as to the percentage of removals that end in reunification, but Lee said reunification occurs in "the overwhelming majority" of cases.

When the county removes a child, it must make its case before a court commissioner within 72 hours and a juvenile court judge within a month or so. If the county's removal numbers were out of whack, court officials would have told them by now, and that hasn't happened, Lee said.

Strong parental pull

Jenni Martin was 4 when she was removed from her mother's Madison home after police arrested her mother following a fight at the family's apartment. Now 21, Martin never returned home.

For several months, the county worked toward trying to reunite her with either her mother or father. Martin wanted this outcome, too, even though her mother had extensive legal problems and her father would later be charged with physically abusing her.

"Children still want to be with their parents no matter what, even if it's not the best thing for them," said Martin, a special education assistant in the Mount Horeb School District.

This concept is sometimes difficult for lay people to grasp but critical for understanding the family preservation philosophy, supporters say.

"These little kids bonded with someone early in their lives, and if you sever that relationship, you've severed something irrevocably," said Barbara Wiechers, a retired Dane County social worker who spent more than 30 years handling abuse and neglect cases. "If the relationship is salvageable, you want to protect it for the child's sake, not the parents' sake."

Nationally, advocates of family preservation say there's another strong reason to use this approach: it is often the safer choice due to rates of physical and sexual abuse in foster and group homes.

Dane County officials don't make this argument — they say foster care and adoptions are generally of high quality here — but they agree that out-of-home placements create problems. Children may have to change schools. Siblings are separated. Parent visits become complicated.

Family preservation is the humane choice, they say.

"We know kids will return to the worst of homes as adults," said Green, the human services director. "They have an incredible attachment to their families, just like we all do."

There are exceptions, of course. Jon Antes was 8 when Dane County social workers removed him from his mother's Madison home. His father was out of the picture, his mother was working a third-shift factory job, and he was too wild for his mother to handle, said Antes, now 32 and CEO of Great Lakes Financial in Madison.

He thinks social workers probably should have removed him even earlier, and he says he sabotaged the county's attempts to reunite him with his mother by getting into police trouble so that he'd be sent back to his foster family.

"I think there are a lot of rules that push social workers toward reunification, even though it's not the best for everyone," Antes said.

Philosophy questioned

Dr. Eli Newberger, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, is among those who would like to see less of an emphasis on family preservation.

If there were adequately funded social programs in place to help parents, family preservation would be the preferred approach, he said, but this simply isn't the case nationally. Compounding the problem are social workers who lack expertise in medicine and child development, said Newberger, who has testified for the prosecution in numerous criminal cases where parents have injured or killed their children.

"Child protection workers tend to be underpaid and overworked, and there's a tremendous turnover in these agencies," Newberger said. "Often you have inexperienced people making hard judgments on soft data with very little expert supervision."

Dane County officials say social workers here are better qualified and trained than in most jurisdictions, and they say the county spends considerable money to keep families together. For instance, last year, the county's Children, Youth and Families Division spent about $1.2 million on mental health counseling services, most of it in-home, and about the same amount on drug and alcohol counseling.

Lee, the county administrator, said the money available to help parents is not as high as the department would like but remains more than satisfactory and is "the envy of other counties across the state."

David Knoll, a Madison attorney who often represents people in danger of losing their parental rights, doesn't argue that point — Dane County's array of services is no doubt multiple times better than in Milwaukee County or many rural northern counties, he said. But that's a sad reflection on the entire system, he said.

Dane County has "a frayed and tattered" resource base that has been dramatically diminished of late, Knoll said. He remembers a time when he could walk someone out of jail and into an inpatient drug treatment program. The last few years, he's had people die while on waiting lists.

"There's a complete lack of willingness on the part of taxpayers to accept that we have a real tragedy here and we're really not doing anything that could help these families get out of the quagmire," Knoll said.

ABOUT THE SERIES

Life and death decisions: Looking  at Dane County's child welfare system

Today: The philosophy
Despite a death, Dane County remains committed to keeping families together.

Monday: The front lines
The work is tough, the decisions life-altering for child welfare social workers.