For Haleigh, answers owed

Maybe the Massachusetts Legislature can succeed where others have faltered in recent days.

Perhaps it can figure out how things could have gone so wrong in the case of Haleigh Poutre.

Lawmakers said over the weekend that some of them hope to force Department of Social Services officials to explain the agency's treatment of the 11-year-old girl who has spent the past four months on life support.

The poor girl's life has descended into an utter tragedy. Her stepfather and adoptive mother were accused of administering the abuse that threatens her life. The Supreme Judicial Court ruled last week that her stepfather had no right to determine whether she could be taken off life support. Then, in a bewildering turn of events, DSS announced that Haleigh, while comatose, might not be in a persistent vegetative state after all.

No question, DSS has many questions to answer. The department had oversight over Haleigh's case from 2004 -- oversight that obviously failed. The girl showed clear signs of abuse, and wasn't going to school. DSS appears to have missed all of this. Even some of those eager to question DSS Commissioner Harry Spence acknowledge that he has been a concerned and caring official. Unlike many of his predecessors, he has never been one to duck questions when DSS is in the spotlight. When I spoke to him last week, he admitted that many people had erred, with tragic results.

''She was seeing clinical and medical professionals weekly, and we were essentially working with those clinical and medical professionals as part of monitoring her condition," Spence said. ''Clearly, in retrospect, everyone involved in this case -- and there were a lot of people -- clearly misread the evidence and the circumstances."

We spoke after the SJC ruling, but before the news that Haleigh's condition and long-range prognosis were unclear.

''I myself can't judge what they should have done otherwise," he said of the people involved in the case. He spoke softly, in obvious agony over the whole affair.

It's refreshing to see the Legislature attempt to take on a difficult issue. But I hope their questions won't evoke simply tired litany of the challenges DSS faces -- how huge its caseload is, how underfunded it is, and how overworked its employees are. I hope it doesn't become a budget hearing, as these things tend to.

DSS is underfunded, yes. But repeating common knowledge about the agency -- speaking in generalities -- isn't going to get lawmakers or the public any closer to understanding how things went so wrong with Haleigh. We need to know what happened in this case, not what's wrong with DSS in general. Much is already known about that. Some people will want to point fingers, and play a game of find-the-scapegoat. I think that thoughtful people such as Representative Marie Parente, the Milford Democrat who has been so active on children's issues, will avoid that trap. As she said Saturday, the real question isn't whether DSS dropped the ball, but why it did.

Her thoughtfulness is the opposite of the approach taken by the Whitman-based Yellow Ribbon Kids Club, which has called for Spence's resignation in a letter containing the ludicrous claim that ''Commissioner Spence has demonstrated that his concern is not for the children of the Commonwealth, but his support is of those responsible for the tragic fate of these children." That is nonsense. I haven't agreed with every decision made under Spence's stewardship, but he can never be accused of not caring. That doesn't matter to some people, apparently, who would never let facts stand between them and a fax machine or TV camera.

Anyway, this is not about Harry Spence. It's about Haleigh Poutre, a little girl let down, perhaps fatally, by those who should have been caring for her. We know how, but not why. Other than the all-important question of whether she lives or dies, that is the only question that really matters.

Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com.