On April 24, 2017, after months of fighting to prevent officials at the DC Child and Family Services Agency (CFSA) from violating the city’s Foster Youth Amendment Act of 2012 and pushing them to publish the mandatory report about complaints and investigations, Christian Greene was fired by the newly appointed director, Brenda Donald. Greene, CFSA’s ombudsman, filed a lawsuit in response. She described the termination as retaliatory and a violation of the DC Whistleblower Protection Act.
For the next nearly eight years, Greene has battled the city’s mammoth law firm known as the Office of the Attorney General, which is representing CFSA. In court documents, OAG characterized her firing as, among other things, a reasonable response to an employee unsatisfied with the contours of her prescribed duties and responsibilities; it also said she had been insubordinate, refusing to follow directions and mandates of her supervisor — that alone was justification for her firing, according to OAG.
“I was really focused on child safety, and I was not going to sacrifice child safety for adults’ feelings. In the District, we often put how the adult feels over child safety; that became a huge issue in my case,” Greene told me earlier this week during a virtual interview with her and her lawyer, F. Douglas Hartnett of Elitok and Hartnett at Law PLLC.
While Greene had worked for CFSA since 2009, first as a child protective services investigator, she wasn’t appointed as ombudsman until March...
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