CPS emergency worker and foster mom fired for numerous abuses

Child Protective Services investigator fired because she abused children in her foster home, used a county car to commute to work each day and counted the commutes on her time card, records show.

As The Bee reported earlier this year, the county hired Blancho Brumfield as an emergency response investigator in 2004, when she was under scrutiny by the California Department of Social Services for abuse reports at her Vallejo foster home.

In January of this year, one of Brumfield’s former foster children called the county to say she shouldn’t be working with children. The county placed Brumfield on administrative leave and launched an investigation.

The investigation raises a number of questions about the county’s hiring of Brumfield and how it responded to the news about her background. The Bee obtained a copy of the investigation through a California Public Records Act request.

Brumfield was fired July 31. In its letter to Brumfield explaining the decision, the county cited an investigation by the Department of Social Services that was completed in 2005.

The department interviewed five of Brumfield’s former foster children, and upheld allegations that she and her husband locked children in a garage without food or water for long periods, encouraged the children to fight and ridiculed them by saying things such as they were foster children because no one loved them, records state.

In its dismissal letter, the county cited its own investigation, which found that Blancho Brumfield stole public funds by using a county car to get to and from her CPS job each day and by including the commutes on her timecard. Her actions, both violations of county policy, cost the county about $35,000 in the two years reviewed, records state.

Brumfield did not return messages from The Bee. According to county records, she admitted using county vehicles to get to and from work and marking commutes as work time.

She denied at least some of the abuse allegations and tried to submit an old psychological exam of a former foster child to try to discredit his story. The county said she violated privacy law and ethical standards by doing so, and noted that she didn’t dispute the state’s findings when she lost her foster care license.

Brumfield is “not taking responsibility for her actions and continues to blame the child,” a hearing officer wrote in a review of the case, adding that a request by her union representative to consider a child’s state of mind was “outrageous.”

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/12/09/5041293/sacramento-county-fires-child.html#storylink=cpy