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Sgt. Bill Leonard of the Craig Police Department is pleased with the progress of a working group charged with determining who is responsible for what when children are found in a "high-drug environment."

The drug-endangered children task force, which is meeting for the third time Feb. 27, has participation from the Craig Police Department, the Moffat County Sheriff's Office, Hayden Police, Social Services, the school district, the Visiting Nurse Association and mental health and medical staff. Routt County officials, having heard of the group, expressed interest in attending meetings to learn more about the protocols for dealing with children removed from clandestine drug labs or homes where large amounts of drugs are found.

When the group establishes its protocols, all the agencies will have a checklist of responsibilities for determining the health and mental well-being of drug-endangered children, decontaminating them and placing them in custody of social services. Even before a bust is made, everyone involved in the case will know their roles, Leonard said.

In the past, each agency has had to sort through the issues each time a bust was made. There haven't been any drug labs uncovered in Moffat County recently, but police have had three or four instances in the past year where children were removed from homes with a lot of drugs, Leonard said.

In such clear-cut cases of child endangerment or abuse, removing a child from a home is easily justified. Researchers and child advocates have long understood that children in such situations are susceptible not only to neglect, but toxins in the home.

But it's not always so black and white.

Nobody disputes that using drugs (or drinking too much, for that matter) can affect a parent's judgment. And methamphetamine can lead to especially erratic behavior. Experts cite instances in which children are neglected while their parents sleep for long periods after they "crash" from a meth binge. The drug can cause paranoia and irritability, which can lead to physical abuse.

That's why, nationwide, advocacy groups for drug-endangered children are springing up as fast as the drug spreads from community to community.

But to the chagrin of law enforcement personnel and many members of the community, Social Services won't always remove a child from a home where parents are using drugs -- even meth. Our county Social Services Department operates with a mission of keeping families together whenever possible, so as long as a child looks cared-for, is getting enough to eat and lives in a clean-enough home, they won't intervene.

The protocols that the drug-endangered child committee adopts likely won't change that, but the process does serve a useful purpose of advancing a dialogue between the police and social workers.

Hopefully, the process gets them on the same page and prevents children from falling through the cracks.

It seems counter-intuitive to let parents who are caught using drugs keep custody of their children, but we can't blame Social Services entirely.

As Leonard pointed out in a story we printed last year, other states are passing laws that make it a crime for children to come into contact with meth. Until Colorado lawmakers get serious about cracking down on meth, Social Services simply is doing the best it can.

The state is already in a fiscal crisis that has seen funding for Health and Human Services slashed to the bone. Legislators must sort through their financial issues and give Social Services departments the resources and the laws they need to be more aggressive about protecting children from meth.

If using drugs were the minimum standard for removing children, the system would be overwhelmed with children needing care. Where would they go? Some kinds of financial resources must be built into the system to account for a zero-tolerance stance against meth.

Cracking down on meth takes a team of professionals. Determining what to do with children from a home infested with drugs is only part of a complicated solution. Removing children isn't a simple solution, either, when Social Services has to weigh the options -- are children better off in a strange foster environment? If children are placed with relatives, does that guarantee that there aren't drugs in that home, too?

The reality is that there are multiple dynamics to each of the multiple facets that make up every home environment. Social Services can only act based on the facts of any one situation.

If organized properly, the drug-endangered children task force could be a key agency in developing the policies and guidelines by which we expect our social-service agencies to operate.