Isiah Garcia, 6 months. Brittany Jacks, 16. Tatianna Jacks, 11. N’Kiah Fogle, 6. Aja Fogle, 5. Unidentified boy, 5 months. These children died in the District — although reports of their neglect had been filed at the city’s Child and Family Services Agency and social workers were supposed to have investigated the allegations. There may be others. Residents only learned of the 5-month-old boy on Monday at a hearing before the D.C. Council’s Committee on Human Services.

Ironically, committee Chairman Tommy Wells had called the meeting to probe the death of young Isiah. Then, he learned another child had fallen victim to ill care by an adult and bureaucratic stagnation.

Both cases were part of 2,000 that the CFSA has called a “backlog,” as if children are pieces of paper that have not been filed. Mindy Good, a CFSA spokeswoman, did not return telephone calls to her office.

For years, the CFSA has been under court supervision. Judith Meltzer, a court monitor who is also with the Center for the Study of Social Policy, warned that the CFSA has major problems. It appears to be returning to those days when some children were just case numbers in social workers’ files.

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When the death of the four girls occurred, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty fired eight government employees, claiming they had not properly handled multiple hot line calls from a school counselor who warned that the children were in trouble. His reaction to Isiah’s death was to once again fire the social worker and put her supervisor on administrative leave. Not surprisingly, that social worker decried the action as unfair, citing the volume of cases she was forced to carry.

She gets no sympathy from the mayor — or from most residents and me. Jobs in the human services industry are extremely demanding and sensitive. They require individuals willing to make sacrifices of their personal time, doing whatever it takes to save a child.

But the mayor can’t continue to fire lower-level workers without looking at the management of the agency. A bureaucracy is only as good as its leadership. Considering the “backlog,” the uneven distribution of cases and the deaths of so many children in the past year, it’s clear management changes must be made at the top.

Sharlynn Bobo, the CFSA’s executive director, came up through the ranks. That history may make her an equal part of the problem.

Charles Allen, spokesman for Wells, says the Ward 6 lawmaker is “very concerned,” and that “if the mayor chooses to stand by Bobo, he needs to put a leadership team around her to help her make management improvements.”

The mayor shouldn’t stand by Bobo if accountability, as he has suggested, is his administration’s watchword. That standard, to be taken seriously, must be applied across the board and at every layer. Bobo can’t be the exception, especially when children are dying all around her.