The agency's social workers are the only ones explicitly charged with keeping kids safe. But they visit only twice a year, or less.

Xi, the inspector who wrote the Lake Grove report, did not return phone calls seeking comment. His supervisors defended his work, saying Xi had been trying to point out only that inspectors can't be held responsible if they haven't been properly trained.

Connecticut pulled its clients from Lake Grove by September, but state regulators did not revoke the facility's license. Today, the center remains open.

John Claude Bahrenburg, chief executive officer of the school's parent company, Windwood Meadow, said the facility provided good care.

Top Family Court Judge Kevin Dougherty said he could no longer rely on DHS to do a good job of evaluating out-of-state facilities.

Instead, he has sent his probation officers to check on centers, and just last week hired his own inspector.

Until Leach's death, Dougherty said, DHS for months had failed to send him inspection reports. DHS said the judge had been as getting the reports.

'Isolation rooms'

Even when inspectors do flag issues at the facilities, documents show, DHS often fails to follow up.

During reviews from 2004 through 2006 of the Colorado Boys Ranch, a therapeutic program in La Junta, Colo., DHS workers repeatedly noted allegations that staff kept emotionally disturbed children in isolation rooms.

"There was a lot of documentation of physical restraint," the 2004 report said.

The same reports said the facility routinely controlled the most volatile children by strapping them into a restraint chair with belts that fasten across the chest, legs and arms.

Philadelphia's inspectors did not take a more critical look at the use of the chair or the isolation rooms until 2006, when they said a city youth with emotional problems had been locked in a room for three months.

They found residents were confined to those rooms at all times, though staff would "allow them out for air" if their behavior improved, the reviewer wrote in 2006.

Despite inspectors' concerns, DHS rated the institution "average," records show.

Boys Ranch director Chuck Thompson denied those findings. The Boys Ranch does not keep children in isolation, he said in a recent interview, but has two seclusion rooms where distraught children can go to quiet down. He said children stayed in the rooms for only a few hours.

The chair is still on the premises but no longer in use, Thompson said. "It's a chair used to safely transport a child," he said.

"There are some kids who want and like to stay in that room," he said. "This is a caring entity that operates at highly professional standards."

He also said that no one from DHS had asked the staff about the allegations.