More than 400 cases involving charges of abuse and neglect of city children have remained open longer than the law allows, The Examiner has learned.

Child protection officials are required to close investigations within 30 days, but the agency has been swamped with cases since the discovery of the bodies of four girls in a Southeast row house.

All told, there are more than 1,200 active abuse and neglect cases in D.C., according to records kept by a federal court-appointed monitor of the city’s failing child welfare system.

Calls to the city’s abuse and neglect hot line have spiked by more than 400 percent since January, when the badly decomposing bodies of Banita Jacks’ daughters were found in a squatter’s home. The Jacks case has embarrassed child-protection officials because the family popped up on the city’s radar numerous times but was never helped.

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The backlog figures obtained by The Examiner come amid new concerns that hot line officials aren’t up to the job. The Examiner reported Tuesday that elementary school Principal Cristina Encinas tried to report a case of sexual abuse only to have a hot line worker question her expertise and tell her to gather more evidence.

Charges were eventually filed because Encinas went back and carefully interviewed the girl, but her story raises the possibility that other children have continued to face abuse because hot line workers are ignoring calls for help.

“The hot line should be a gateway to service, not a barrier,” said District Councilman Tommy Wells, D-Ward 6, a trained social worker and lawyer whose committee oversees the child welfare bureaucracy. “The intake call and the advice to the principal — it should have been handled differently.”

Mayor Adrian Fenty, who had jurisdiction of child welfare when he was a council member, summarily fired six child-welfare bureaucrats and promised to overhaul the city’s safety net in the aftermath of the Jacks case.

bmyers@dcexaminer.com.